| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| SHENZHEN, China — The signs of a looming lockdown in Shenzhen, China, had been building for a while. The city had been logging a few coronavirus infections for days. Daily Covid tests were required to go pretty much anywhere. Individual buildings had been sealed off. | 中国深圳——中国深圳即将封城的迹象已经有一段时间了。这座城市几天来一直都有新冠病毒新增病例。几乎去任何地方都需要每天的核酸检测结果。个别建筑物已经被封锁。 |
| So when a hotel employee woke me up a little after 7 a.m. to explain that we were not allowed to step outside for four days, my initial disorientation quickly turned to resignation. | 所以，当一名酒店员工在早上7点刚过时将我叫醒，解释说我们四天不准出门时，我最初的迷茫很快变成了无奈。 |
| Of course this happened. I live in China. | 发生这种事是必然。我住在中国。 |
| As the rest of the world sheds more restrictions by the day, China’s rules are becoming more entrenched, along with the patterns of pandemic life under a government insistent on eliminating cases. People schedule lunch breaks around completing mandatory tests. They restructure commutes to minimize the number of health checkpoints along the way. | 世界其他地区日益放开，中国的抗疫规定却愈加不容更改，由于政府坚持将病例清零，疫情下的生活模式亦随之变得更加根深蒂固。人们依照完成强制性核酸检测的时间来计划自己的午休。他们重新制定通勤路线，以尽量减少路上被查健康码的次数。 |
| A sense of possible disaster always lurks, driven by the experiences of Shanghai and other cities, where sudden lockdowns have left residents without food or medicine. A friend bought a second freezer so she could stock up on groceries. | 上海和其他城市曾突遭封城，导致民众缺食少药，这些城市的经历总让人有一种灾难可能随时发生的感觉。一个朋友给家里买了第二台冰箱，方便囤积食物。 |
| Yet the policies have been in place for so long, and with so little sign of easing, that navigating them feels — if not normal — at least routine. I know which testing site near my home returns results the quickest, and which grocer doesn’t check whether you’ve logged your visit for future contact tracing. | 但这些政策实施了这么久，而且几乎没有放松的迹象，以至于应对起来即使没到习以为常的程度，也至少给人例行公事的感觉。我知道我家附近哪个核酸检测点出结果最快，我还知道哪家超市在你进店时不检查你是否扫了场所码。 |
| The disruptive becomes typical; the once-unimaginable, reality. The pandemic has imposed new rituals around the world, but in China, the extremes make that process more unsettling. | 扰动变得日常；曾经难以想象的事情成为现实。疫情给世界各地强加新的日常习惯，但中国的极端做法使这一过程更加令人不安。 |
| The most obviously jarring aspects, for me, were technological. China under “zero Covid” is a web of digital codes. At the entrance to every public space — restaurants, apartment complexes, even public restrooms — is a printed-out QR code that people must scan with their phones to log their visit. Everyone also has a personal health code, which uses test results and location history to assign a color. Green is good. Yellow or red, and you may be sent to quarantine. | 对我来说，最突兀的莫过于技术方面的。“清零”政策下的中国是一个以数字代码组成的蛛网。在每个公共空间的入口处——餐厅、公寓大楼，甚至公共厕所——都有一个打印出来的二维码，人们必须用手机扫描二维码打卡。每个人还有一个健康码，依据核酸检测结果和行程历史显示颜色。绿码没事。黄码或红码就会被送去隔离。 |
| What actually determines the color of your code, though, is nebulous. When a banking scandal prompted protests in Henan Province this year, officials manipulated protesters’ health codes to block them from gathering. The morning in August that a colleague and I were scheduled to fly from the southern city of Guangzhou to Shanghai, her code suddenly, without explanation, turned yellow, meaning she could not board the plane. A health worker said the code would revert if she took another Covid test (never mind that we’d been taking daily tests for two weeks). It did — barely an hour before takeoff. | 然而，决定健康码颜色的因素模糊不清。今年，当一场银行丑闻在河南省引发抗议后，官员们改动了抗议者的健康码，以阻止他们聚集。8月的一个早上，我和一个同事原定从南方城市广州飞往上海，她的健康码突然毫无理由地变成了黄色，意味着她无法登机。一名防疫人员说，如果再做一次核酸检测，就能恢复绿码（即使我们已经连续两周每天都做了核酸）。确实恢复了——在起飞前不到一个小时的时候。 |
| Testing sites are ample, at least, since the government has ordered they be within a 15-minute walk in cities. And they are easily identified even from afar. They usually have a line, which can grow to be blocks long during lunchtime or after work. Many also have their own soundtrack: a prerecorded voice, ordering people to stand one meter apart, blaring through a megaphone on loop. | 至少检测点足够多，这是因为政府下令要求城市建立步行15分钟核酸采样圈。而且这些检测点老远就能看见。通常排着队，在午休时间或下班后，队伍可能有一个街区那么长。许多检测点还有自制的背景音：扩音器里循环播放着预先录制的语音，命令人们间隔一米。 |
| On hot days, people wait sometimes for 30 minutes, face masks plastered to their skin by sweat. In the city of Chongqing this summer, residents lined up while wildfires raged nearby. The night I landed in Shanghai, officials had raised a typhoon warning, and ordered the skyline, including the iconic Pearl Tower, darkened in case of a power outage. I huddled with dozens of people in a testing line under umbrellas. | 在炎热的天气里，人们有时会等上30分钟，汗水将口罩粘在皮肤上。今年夏天，重庆市的居民们排起了长队，而附近的山火正在肆虐。我在上海降落的那天晚上，官员们发布了台风警告，并下令暂停开放景观照明以防停电，包括标志性的东方明珠电视塔。我和几十个人打着伞，挤在一个检测点的队伍里。 |
| Some features of Covid-era China are testaments to human creativity. The Guangzhou Library offers book sterilizing machines, which look like high-tech refrigerators. Manufacturers of personal protective equipment have devised individual air conditioning units, which inflate medical workers’ hazmat suits with cool air while they conduct hours of mass testing. | 在新冠时代的中国，一些特有的事物证明了人类的创造力。广州图书馆提供书籍消毒机，它们看上去像一个高科技冰箱。个人防护设备制造商设计了空气压缩制冷防护服，在医务人员进行长时间大规模检测时，可以为他们的防护服充入冷气。 |
| My favorite invention is the “temporary quarantine area,” where anyone deemed a potential health risk while in public can be deposited until medical care arrives. Many of these areas seem more pro forma than designed to halt transmission. Some are tents in building lobbies. Some are corners with folding chairs. Near Beijing’s biggest park, one is a roped-off section of open air. | 我最中意的发明是“临时隔离区”，任何在公共场所被认为存在潜在健康风险的人都可以暂时留在那里，直到医护人员到达。许多这样的隔离区似乎不是为了阻止传播，而是为了形式上的存在。有的是在建筑物大厅撑起帐篷。有的是在角落里放几把折叠椅。在北京最大的公园附近，有一个用绳索圈出来的户外区域。 |
| It is possible to avoid the endless testing — by simply not going anywhere. In a part of Guangzhou dominated by warrens of small-scale textile factories, one worker told me he hadn’t noticed the city’s testing requirement to go outside the district. He and his friends rarely left it anyway, sleeping in dormitories close to the factories and lounging at a nearby lemon tea shop on their days off. Factory owners were supposed to check for up-to-date test results when hiring, but few did, he said. | 想避开没完没了的核酸检测是有可能的——只要不去任何地方。在广州一片以小型纺织厂为主的地区，一名工人告诉我，他不知道城市对跨区出行的核酸检测要求。反正他和朋友们很少离开这里，他们睡在工厂附近的宿舍里，休息日则在附近的柠檬茶店闲坐。他说，工厂老板本该在招聘时查看最新的核酸结果，但很少有人这样做。 |
| The economic effects of the restrictions have been harder to ignore. He had been caught in several lockdowns, leaving him unable to work for weeks. Jobs were scarcer anyway, as fewer people were buying clothing. Lately, he’d been spending more time at the lemon tea shop. | 限制措施的经济影响更难以忽视。他曾数次困于封锁，导致数周无法工作。毕竟工作机会越来越少，因为买衣服的人越来越少。最近，他待在柠檬茶店的时间越来越多。 |
| Signs of the slowdown are everywhere. Taxi drivers offer unprompted assessments of how thin traffic is. In the food court near my office in Beijing, many of the stalls have gone dark, leaving diners at the surviving shops to eat in a spooky half-glow. | 到处都是经济衰退的迹象。出租车司机会主动感叹车流有多稀疏。在我北京办公室附近的美食广场，许多摊位都已关门，在幸存的店铺中，食客只能在阴森晦暗的环境中用餐。 |
| And the costs of zero Covid are not limited to lost jobs. When my hotel in Shenzhen locked down, the staff said we would have to pay for our extended stays ourselves. | 新冠清零的代价不仅限于失业。当我在深圳住的酒店被封，工作人员说我们必须自付续住的费用。 |
| I managed to escape the lockdown early. As the afternoon wore on, my colleague and I, who had been traveling together, noticed people slipping out through a staff exit. Under repeated pestering, the reception staff conceded that we could leave, if we found somewhere willing to take us despite our travel history to a lockdown area. Within 20 minutes, we were on our way to the train station. | 我设法提前逃离了封锁。随着下午慢慢过去，我和一起出行的同事发现有人从员工出口溜出去。经过反复纠缠，接待人员同意我们可以离开，只要有地方愿意接收我们，因为我们的行程包含了封控区。不到20分钟，我们就在去火车站的路上了。 |
| That is what’s impossible to get used to: the utter arbitrariness. You’re under lockdown, until someone decides you’re not. | 这是你不可能习以为常的生活：完全任人摆布。在有人决定放行之前，你将一直处于封锁状态。 |
| You can take all the required tests, and be perfectly healthy, but your health code can still turn yellow. | 你大可做完所有必要的检测，而且即使你非常健康，你的健康码依然可能变黄。 |
| For many Chinese, the past few years of the pandemic have stirred the spectrum of emotions from anger to frustration to grief. But the first word many people reach for, when I ask how they feel, is helplessness. | 对于许多中国人来说，从愤怒到沮丧再到悲伤，这几年的疫情引发了各种各样的情绪。但当我问及许多人的感受时，他们想到的第一个词是无助。 |
| “What’s the point in getting myself upset?” a single mother in Shenzhen, who had been locked down several times and worried about affording her son’s tuition fees, said. It wouldn’t change anything. | “让自己生气有什么意义呢？”深圳一位单身母亲说，曾遭遇多次封锁的她担心难以负担儿子的学费。生气改变不了任何事。 |
| Others try to wrest back some sense of control, however small. A woman I met in Shanghai has given a house key to her neighbor, so someone can feed her cat if she gets snagged by a snap quarantine. People flash screenshots of old test results to inattentive security guards. | 还有人则试图夺回一些控制感，不管这种控制有多么微不足道。我在上海遇到的一位女士把房子钥匙放在邻居那里，万一她突然被封控，还有人能帮她喂猫。还有人会把以前的检测结果截图迅速亮给漫不经心的保安。 |
| The Chinese internet is an endless reservoir of dark humor about the Covid rules, especially from people experiencing the harshest conditions. A user in Xinjiang recently posted a video captioned, “They sent us instruments in quarantine,” in which she banged a rock-hard biscuit against a table in time to an electronic beat. When residents in the city of Chengdu emptied grocery stores before a citywide lockdown, social media users made posters joking that officials had announced a Black Friday-type shopping holiday. | 中国互联网上全是关于新冠防疫规定的黑色幽默，经历过最严酷措施的人发布的内容尤其如此。新疆一位用户最近发布了一段视频，标题是“他们给我们送来了隔离乐器”，在视频中，她拿着像石头一样硬的饼干配合电子节拍敲击桌子。当成都市居民在全市封锁前买空超市，社交媒体用户制作了海报，开玩笑说官方宣布了一个类似“黑色星期五”的购物假期。 |
| I’ve been moved, and a little awed, by the ways people have found to plod through the pain. Still, I often think about a warning, or plea, written by a professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, against getting too used to this circumscribed form of life. | 人们在痛苦中艰难前行的样子令我感动，甚至有些敬畏。但我还是总会想到北京名校清华大学的一位教授写下的警告，亦或者说是恳求，她希望人们不要太过习惯于这种受限制的生活方式。 |
| “Do not let the prolonged epidemic and the economic downturn make you give up your dreams or lower your expectations,” the professor, Lao Dongyan, wrote in an essay shared widely on Chinese social media earlier this year before it was censored. “We need to adjust and adapt to the external environment, but not by doing that.” | “不要因为疫情的久拖不决与经济的低迷下滑，就放弃自己的梦想，降低自我的期待，”劳东燕教授写道，今年年初这篇文章在中国社交媒体上广为流传，后来遭到审查。“我们需要做出调整，也需要适应外部环境，但不是通过放弃梦想与降低期待来实现。” |
| This week, when I went to the testing site outside my office for my regular swab, I noticed that the station, which had previously closed at 6:30 p.m., was now 24-hour. I was delighted — until I considered what, exactly, I was celebrating. | 本周，去办公室外的检测点进行常规拭子检测时，我发现之前到下午6点半就关门的站点如今变成了24小时开放。我很高兴——直到我开始思考自己到底在庆祝些什么。 |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们