Some memories from 2020.
When the year began I was in Hong Kong.
I got to see the tail end of the latest round of pro-democracy and pro-freedom protests, which had started several months earlier in response to a proposed new extradition law. The proposal ignited protests because many people saw the point of the law as allowing the PRC to bring trumped-up charges against pro-democracy Hong Kongers, and then request their extradition, thus avoiding the extrajudicial kidnappings that had been the primary way of bringing dissidents to the mainland. (In June 2020, the PRC sidestepped the issue by throwing away whatever was left of the handover agreements, and passing its own anti-sedition law and imposing it on Hong Kong, making it possible to jail dissenters directly in Hong Kong.)
On January 1, I went to one of the big demonstrations, in Victoria Park, and saw Joshua Wong, the pro-democracy leader who is currently serving a jail term on the basis of the June 2020 laws.
In the video below. the audio is not clear, but people are chanting “five demands, not one less” and “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong”. The five demands were to drop the extradition law, institute universal suffrage in elections, and the other three demands related to investigating and punishing police abuses against protesters.
In those days, I was reading English-language Hong-Kong press to keep up to date on protests that could cause the subway to shut down, and I noticed some reporting on a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. Since the time of SARS, Hong Kongers have been quite paranoid about new respiratory diseases coming from the mainland, but the reports were that no human-to-human transmission had been confirmed. (Speaking of Hong Kong press, the publisher of the Apple Daily newspaper is now in jail on the basis of the June 2020 legislation, because of his pro-democracy position.)
The reason I remember this is that on January 2 I came down with a fever and a cough. On my flight back, several days later, I coughed for the whole flight, without a face mask. Those being more innocent times, nobody seemed to mind.
Between January 31 and February 3 I was in London for an event organized by Bocconi. The evening of January 31 happened to be the moment Brexit went into effect, after the negotiations had blown past several deadlines, and after being pushed back several times. As it happened, negotiations continued for the rest of the year, and were not resolved until a few days ago. Although Brexit was on everyone’s mind, there was concern about the novel Coronavirus that had been isolated in Wuhan, which had proved to transmit person-to-person, and that had led to a health emergency and a severe lockdown of the city of Wuhan.
(Photo taken in London, Feb 2, 2020)
Back in Milan, I was looking forward to a Spring semester in which I was not teaching, and to the plans to take several trips and to host a number of academic guests.
Meanwhile, the Italian government had established a protocol according to which Covid19 testing was restricted to people who had had contact with a person known to suffer from Covid19 or who had recently traveled to China. Since nobody in Italy was known to suffer from Covid19, there was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem going on, even as the virus (as became clear in retrospect) was spreading widely in Northern Italy.
Eventually, a person with Covid19 symptoms reported to have had dinner with a friend who had been to China. That person was tested, and, while he was already in intensive care, he became the first confirmed case of local transmission, on February 21. It then became clear that the friend who had been to China had never been infected, and that there must have already been a number of local infections. This was in the middle of Milan Fashion Week, which had already been scaled down due to concern about international travel. It was going to be the last major public event to take place in Milan for a while.
The following week, the Italian government settled on its response strategy: take some measures, back down after concern for the economic consequences, then double down when the situation gets worse. On March 1 I traveled to Rome in a mostly empty train. While a measure of panic was starting to gather in Milan (where it had become impossible to buy face masks and there were some shortages of other supplies in supermarkets), Romans were still mostly in denial. Tourism, however, had died down completely, and the city center was empty as I had never seen it.
(Piazza di Spagna and Via dei Condotti seen from Trinità dei Monti on March 1, 2020. I had never seen Piazza di Spagna empty of people ever before).
The following week (see above on government strategy), the initial measures that had closed bars and restaurants in Milan were relaxed, and bars could open but could only do table service.
(A bar in the Navigli district of Milan on March 7, 2020. The counter area was roped-off, and they only provided table service.)
On the night of March 7, as I was having my sit-down drink with a friend, I started receiving text messages saying that the prime minister was about to speak on TV and that there were rumors that the government would lock down Northern Italy. As people literally ran to the train station to catch the last train out of Milan, the press conference was delayed until late at night, and he did announce a lockdown of Northern Italy, which would be extended to the whole country a few days later.
After that, time is a blur. I read a very interesting article on this topic (but I cannot find it again now), whose point was that when nothing interesting happens, time seems to stretch, and the days feel long and empty. But because nothing interesting happens, we do not form new long-term memory, so later it feels like that time went by very quickly. This warped perception is part of the sense of dislocation that some of us felt during the lockdown.
I looked at my pictures from those months for a clue as to what happened, and it’s basically pictures of things that I cooked and of the unfortunate results of cutting my hair with a beard trimmer. The lockdown was extremely strict until May, banning even taking a walk outside alone. In May we could again walk outside, but the city felt eery and empty.
(The Italian stock exchange in Piazza Affari, Milan, on May 10, 2020. Maurizio Cattelan‘s iconic sculpture is visible in the foreground.)
During the summer, Covid19 cases, and especially Covid19 deaths, dropped considerably, and most business were allowed to reopen. Movie theaters, concert halls, stadiums, conference centers, and other venues where large numbers of people congregate remained closed. Dance clubs, however, reopened, and schools reopened in September.
By mid-October, numbers were about half the thresholds that were considered alarming. There were more than a thousand Covid19 patients in intensive care, for example, and two thousand was considered the threshold at which there would be a shortage of ICU beds for other patients. Furthermore, the numbers were doubling roughly every ten days, and any new measures would take about two weeks to have any effect. I wasn’t teaching until the second week of November. I did the math and I moved to Rome.
By the end of October, Bocconi had moved almost all teaching online, and the government had instituted new measures, this time on a regional basis. Milan was in a “red” region, and got a lockdown almost as bad as the one in the Spring. Rome was in a “yellow” region and there was a bit more freedom: retail was open, and indoor dining was possible for lunch.
I went back to Milan just before Christmas, when there have been further restrictions to avoid the large gatherings that are common during the Christmas holidays. They might have actually overshot a bit with the restrictions.
(This is Piazza Duomo in Milan, in the early evening of December 26, 2020. The emptiness and the tinny Christmas music made it feel like the setting of a horror movie.)
The day after I shot the above video, the European vaccine campaign got started. In July 2020, I was supposed to travel to Taipei. While all the other international events I had planned to attend in 2020 were canceled, the even in Taipei was moved to July 2021. I am looking ahead at what surely be another difficult Winter and Spring, but I am holding out hope to be in Taiwan in July and in Berkeley in November.
Best wishes to all readers, and may 2021 be a much less interesting year than the current one.
in theory 