Book chronicles life in China during COVID
Filipino American journalists Rene Pastor and his wife, Cristina DC Pastor, did not expect the heavy knock on the door of their Beijing apartment one night in 2020. It was time for midnight COVID-19 tests.
Their newly-released book “Living in China 2019 to 2023: A COVID Diary” recaptures the panic in their apartment complex during that period. At the same time, their diary entries paint a picture of real-life immersion in daily Chinese culture that tourists and some foreigners may find fascinating. They learn to haggle with their calculators, find the right shoe size for irregular-sized feet, turn into a plantita amid the pandemic, and more.
The book also shares commentary on the Chinese way of life: Why Chinese women are staying away from marriage, how the Chinese people learn to speak English through the “Friends” sitcom, and why videos of cute Chinese toddlers eating sour lemon or long strands of ramen noodles have become an internet craze. These are just some of the unusual facts of Chinese life observed by the authors.
Jaime FlorCruz, Philippine ambassador to China, who wrote the foreword, said: “Like most locals, they lived a life in lockdown, lining up for mass COVID tests, ordering food online, avoiding mass transit, spraying delivery packages with sanitizers, and showing their phones with negative COVID results as they entered public buildings and experienced other instances of strong-handed measures under the State’s Zero-COVID policy.”
Written originally for the “Second Thoughts” column in China Daily, the slim book of 189 pages is published by Berkeley, a boutique publishing house in New York. It has been ranked No. 87 in Amazon.com’s bestselling books in the field of Asian and Asian American biographies.
Rene Pastor served as senior business editor of China Daily following 23 years of being a commodities journalist at Reuters. Cristina is the founding editor of The FilAm, a print and digital magazine serving Filipinos in metro New York.
“Living in China 2019 to 2023: A COVID Diary” is available on Amazon.
