Listen to Black American Ginny share about living and working in Shanghai, China during the Covid-19 pandemic. She identifies as Black, African American, and Caribbean American. Her mother’s family is from Jamaica, which is how we’re related. We’re cousins and we met when I was living in Shanghai in 2014. Her father’s side is from North Carolina and Virginia, which is her namesake.
“Well, it's an interesting time that we're talking, Sonja, because of the way China has approached and treated the pandemic for the citizens and the people living in this country and I feel like I'm going through a reset.. In 2020 when Covid was first recognized in Wuhan, China there was a lot of panic, of course, because people didn’t understand much about the virus…”
“…So from June of 2020 until…this a month of April and until February, I guess, of 2022… mainland China pretty much operated normally, like we wore masks often and sometimes we did have some closures, like pocket closures, like shut down schools or businesses, because you heard of outbreaks in one community or another… So, I had been living relatively normally between that time, but a lot had changed for other types of expats in Shanghai. I don’t know if you heard… but there was a CNN report around 2020… I forget what month it was, maybe it was February of 2020… But there was an African — Black people — who are accosted and basically taken out of their apartment complexes… in Guangzhou, China, which has the majority of African people in China there — most of them are in southern China because it's probably easier to get there, but there's a lot of trade and a lot of business in that region. So, there is a lot of discrimination and people were targeted — racism — and people were targeted severely at that time and it wasn't until, like, actual videos showed the incidents that things started to change.
So that was how some people had been affected and as a as a result of that some people left… So there is a big, I guess you could say, exiting of non-mainland Chinese people in 2020 and now you're seeing something similar happening in 2022.”
“Sonja: I'm curious. I was teaching online and in the States they don't require students to keep their cameras on because they're big on privacy. Is it similar where you are with students required to keep the cameras on or off?
Ginny: Actually, I don't know… That's a good question. So with our school we don't have a requirement, but children put on their cameras because they wanna see each other. They're social beings. So if they're not able to physically see each other, the second best is to visually see each other. So they don't turn off their cameras. Originally we did not have a requirement either for or against, but they're eager and they light up when they see their friends on screen.”
