What we experienced as Asia crawls out of lock-down
Around the world, many are stuck at home, inundating by scary tweets, dreading about the next 12 hours. Meanwhile, here in Asia, after about 8 weeks of lock-down, restaurant queues, traffic jams, and pollution have returned, and demand for network bandwidth (and face masks, toilet papers …) finally calmed down as we started reconvening in real meeting rooms.
During our forced solitude period, many found camaraderie in sharing home-cooking WeChat “Moments” a with fellow #homecooks, and doing “selfie-workouts” with sweaty people sardined in tiny Zoom chat windows felt hip.
Many spent time imagining about how the world might change positively after this pandemic:
Some made prophecies that we would soon have AirPods that could detect asymptomatic viral infections and haptic-tap-alert us. Some believed in a future of touchless-everything, from door handles to high-fives. In some obscure WhatsApp groups, frozen civet cat steaks and snake meatballs were believed to be the ultimate solution to the entire problem.
Regardless of what these discussions were, they almost always succeeded in distracting us with two feelings:A sense of wonderment, and that this too shall pass.