Comic relief and cat videos help expats cope

Foreign nationals are employing many measures to maintain normal lives in troubled times. Christine Low reports.

As Pre-K teacher Katie Hamons had already gone home to the United States during Christmas, she decided not to go anywhere during the Spring Festival holiday. Moreover, she had begun fostering puppies and did not think that it would be fair to leave them soon after getting them.

Then, news of the novel coronavirus outbreak broke, prompting many anxious foreigners to leave China. However, Hamons felt "surprisingly calm" about the situation, despite describing herself as an anxious person.

"I am a naturally anxious person, but I am staying informed and not letting rumors and other media influence me," said the English language teacher during an interview on WeChat. "I have also decided to take this time and use it to be productive."

With the Spring Festival holiday extended and many people still working from home after the holidays have ended, locals and foreigners like Hamons found themselves having more free time to spare. For Hamons, she used it to start on her blog and film vlogs－something which she had wanted to do for a long time, but could not find the time to do so till now.

In her first blog and vlog entries, Hamons documented snippets of her life in Beijing and wrote about how she had been coping amid several disruptions to normal daily life, offering her readers suggestions on what they could do during this rare free time. She said that writing has helped her in a therapeutic sense, as it helped put her thoughts into words so that she could deal with them. She also hopes that her vlogs will help her viewers understand what it is like in Beijing during the crisis.

Noticing that other foreigners were also trying to cope with the unexpected situation, Hamons reached out to them in one support group on WeChat, asking them if they would like to join her in making a collaborative video by sending her short video clips of themselves focusing on why they have chosen to stay in China and how they are dealing with it.

For those who are far away from home, support groups like these have provided much needed comfort and reassurance to those in similar situations. The support group, called Staying Put Support, of which Hamons is a member, was created to give all foreign women deciding to stay on in China for various reasons a space to connect, share information, thoughts and ideas, and to support each other during this uncertain time.

Kellie Henry, another member of the support group, is a homemaker who lives in Shanghai with her husband and teenage daughter. As the United States native and her family have been living in the Chinese city for almost 11 years, they consider it their home. Hence, as they had already planned for a quiet Spring Festival holiday at home, Henry felt that the sudden turn of events was not really that different for her family, except that they did not go out a lot to eat, as they would have liked to, and did not go to see the lanterns at Yu Garden at night.

"Maybe my husband and I are unusual, but we haven't really been too worried about this situation," Henry said. "I mean, obviously it is very bad in Wuhan or Hubei and if we were there, I'm sure we'd feel differently.

"However, I don't feel like we are at any great risk staying put here in Shanghai, and where are we going to go? This is our home, we feel safe here. Our dog is here, our lives are here."