My current dilemma is whether to stay here in Vietnam or go back to China. To be fair, that has been my dilemma since... well, for a while now.
I've been living in China for the past 5 years until the start of the pandemic. I left for Cambodia thinking that the pandemic wasn't even a pandemic. Then, supposing that the disease would be contained and the whole thing would be wrapped up in maybe 6 weeks, I came to SE Asia to ride the whole thing out. I've never been so wrong about anything before, and I've been wrong quite a bit. By the end of March, I found myself in southern Vietnam waiting for the go-ahead to come back into China, but that was about the time that China closed its borders to the rest of the world. So I was stuck. I hate to use the word stuck, but I couldn't leave, so I was stuck in Vietnam for the next 6 months. I've enjoyed my time here, and I love Vietnam. Still, I am in a situation where I can't go back to where I was living, where I left pretty much everything I own, so I'm going to stick with stuck.
In any case, around September, I had a bike accident here in Hanoi. I was laid up recuperating (the accident wasn't bad, but it took a couple of weeks to get back on my feet). China announced that those with residence permits could re-enter the country as long as they got paperwork from their employers. Being in a suboptimal state and since my employer didn't seem interested in sending me the paperwork, I let that opportunity pass, hoping I could return later.
That's how things have remained for the past few months, but I'm in talks with another school in China that may want to rehire me so that I can go back into the country. Now I'm faced with the dilemma of whether to go back or stay here.
On the one hand, as I said, everything I own is is still in China. Most of my friends are still in China. It would take a while to build up a social network here. On the other hand, there are 3 weeks of quarantine when you go back into China. Furthermore, there's a reason that the virus is still quite active in China compared to Western Nations. China has done an excellent job of keeping the virus under control, but that doesn't mean it's gone. Vietnam has done a fantastic job throughout the entire year of keeping the virus under control. When there are a dozen new cases, it makes the news here. We just finished a lockdown of about 3 weeks, although it was a soft lockdown. 3 weeks and it was only a few hundred cases. Of course, Vietnam's a smaller country than China, but it's not a tiny country. There are nearly 100 million people here, and when there are a dozen new cases of covid, it is taken seriously. The whole country has to go on high alert.
Before deciding that that must be destroying the economy, you should consider that we went on a severe 3-week lockdown last March at the very beginning of the virus. The country closed its borders, everyone locked down, everyone had to stay inside for 3 weeks. Every town and every city looked like a ghost town. A few times, you got to peek out your door. The streets were empty. It was really spooky. Still, the result is after those three weeks is that there was no covid here everyone got to go out. The country has been operating at full steam right up until just a few weeks ago.
Everything just opened back up. Schools are back in session.
Restaurants and cafes accept patrons again. The country is up and running. So yes, it's an economic hit to be closed for a few weeks, or severely reduced operations, during the latest lockdown. Restaurants were allowed to be open, though no on-site seating. It was all take away, so yeah, that's an economic hit. Still, the payoff is that now everything is back up and running, there are no new covid cases. We got, as a reward, full operations the entire rest of the year. It was precisely the right choice. There are just no doubts that reduced operations for the whole year would have been a disaster for the economy, as most of the world now knows.
So as for whether I will return to China in the long term: I certainly hope that I will. But immediately, I think I'm going to keep where I'm at because we're still in the middle of all this. The virus has not passed. The vaccines have not been distributed to much of the world's population. I don't think it's a good idea for people to be traveling right now if they have any choice. I think it's still a no-brainer for people to stay put. To remain in place for the foreseeable future, at least for the rest of this year. When vaccination rates get up high enough that the virus is no longer spreading, we can start thinking about when to open up and when to travel if that's what we want to do. Still, right now, the responsible thing is to just stay where you're at if at all possible. You have to be able to make sensible personal decisions about the best thing for everyone right now. To say "it's allowed, so I'll go do it" is backward thinking. Even in the best-case scenario, what's allowed is what the government and the authorities are saying is possible, not what everyone ought to be doing. Secondly, many countries and many rules around the world are allowing people to travel because there are economic pressures on them. They can't say "Stay your ass at home" because there are industries that rely on travel there's pressure to let people travel even though that may not be the best thing for stopping the spread of the disease. If this were a perfect world, I would agree that you should be able to look at what the government says is okay and say, "All right. That's okay for me to do." But you should know that we don't live in a perfect world, and governments are not always able to say what's in the best interest of the citizens. Sometimes they have to bow to industries. I get why industries are desperate to try and get some people in, but that's what is spreading to the disease. All this is just common sense.
One or two years out of 100, you have to hunker down and just make do with what you've got where you're at and forego your yearly vacation. I'm not just talking about westerners. I see western travelers here and think, "did you go through a quarantine just for a vacation? what is wrong with you?" The same thing happened here during Tet, which is the New Year /spring festival for Vietnam. People were traveling across the country while we were in this lockdown, so they're looking at rules that say you're not allowed to go to a cafe or a restaurant. However, they were still traveling cross country to visit relatives.
Anyway, for my part, I think I'm going to stay put.
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