Hi Everyone,
Welcome back to my Astronomer in Beijing blog. I hope this post finds you all safe and healthy and that 2023 is off to a good start for everyone. I hope that whatever holiday you were celebrating in December, that it was fun and you were able to spend it surrounded by friends and loved ones.
Before I dive into my month, I want to thank everyone who reached out to me either via e-mail/text or through my parents to make sure that I’m doing ok. It definitely hasn’t been fun to be living in what appears to be the COVID capital of the world, but generally, I’m doing ok. As the title of this post suggest, December was not the most event-filled month for me. I spent much of my time working from home (thankfully I had a lot to work on and Goldie to keep me company) and the changes in COVID policies put everything in flux. As I mentioned in my last post, China officially dismantled their COVID Zero policy (including international quarantines, which end today, January 8th) in the beginning of December, but because COVID was already rampant in Beijing, this led to an immediate surge in the number of COVID cases here. While I am at peace with the fact that I will likely get COVID at some point, I’d also prefer not to, so I’ve been very (perhaps overly) cautious as Beijing was dealing with its worse COVID wave since 2020. As I mentioned last time, China very quickly and suddenly ended COVID Zero without setting up an infrastructure for living with COVID. Although I haven’t been too directly impacted because I’ve been able to work from home andstay healthy, an overwhelming majority of my friends at Tsinghua and from Kehillat Beijing posted that they either had definitely tested positive, or were sick and unable to get access to an at home test (I was able to order and get a package of 25 tests). Although no official statistics exist, the safe and sane groups on WeChat did an informal poll of how many people had COVID in December and as of last week found that approximately 72% of responders in Beijing (around 3000 people responded to the survey) had COVID. Although this is an extremely small sample relative to all of Beijing, that number is scary! CNN and many Chinese new outlets had reports of fever clinics and funeral homes being overwhelmed by the number of cases. Despite the government trying to claim that everything was fine and that COVID is nothing to worry about, it’s hard to not feel worried about all of this.
Beyond everyone being sick, there was also a rush of people buying any and all fever or fever-adjacent medicine. I tried to search on Eleme (an app platform for ordering groceries and other things from local stores) and Taobao (the Chinese equivalent of the Amazon marketplace), but it was impossible to track down ibuprofen. While I have some low-dose aspirin, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some ibuprofen if I needed it. Thankfully, Tsinghua stepped up in a big way and was able to secure ibuprofen for everyone who needed it (though it was a bit surreal to get a manilla envelope delivered to me with a little baggie of ibuprofen and instructions on for when to take it). Additionally, the international scholars office was able to secure take home tests for people on campus. Although I wasn’t able to take advantage of this, I was able to coordinate with my fellow Astro-postdocs so that they could help distribute some and get them. Ultimately, I think the closest comparable experience I have had to the last month was early in March 2020 when nobody really knew what COVID would entail or how best to stay healthy and it felt like the world was shutting down. Given the mixed messaging that China has been putting out (during COVID Zero it was the eradication of the virus is absolute, while now it’s that COVID is just a cold and should be changed to a COVID cold), it’s not terribly surprising that the cases have exploded as they did because people didn’t really know how to react. In fact, despite the surge of cases and initial impromptu shut downs in Beijing, daily life seems to have quickly returned to normal in much of Beijing (including large New Years celebrations that I did not partake in, restaurants being open, and schools no longer being forced to be remote) . I think that one of the reasons that there was so much confusion in the early weeks of the end of COVID Zero is that fundamentally a lot of people viewed COVID as an outside-China problem and not something they had to worry about. Thus, a lot of people didn’t really take getting vaccinated or wearing masks as serious as I do. Despite most people recovering within a few days, I think it is generally safer to try to avoid getting sick if you can. Additionally, while the case counts in Beijing appear to have peaked, the same cannot be said for the rest of the country. Most concerning is that with the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, China expects over a billion people to travel, primarily in China to rural areas. While I know a lot of people are excited to more freely travel, there is a lot of concern that this travel will cause an additional surge in these rural communities that lack the hospital infrastructure to handle any kind of COVID surge and could yield added deaths. I’m obviously hoping for people to stay safe and healthy, but I think the next month will be a concerning one from a public health standpoint for all of China (even if Beijing is more normal).
Most concerning to me is that the government has been advocating that sick people should still go to work unless they are experiencing sever symptoms. My one hope from the pandemic was that we as a people, would finally understand the importance of personal health and that people who were sick would be allowed sick days for the betterment of all public health. Unfortunately, that message seems to not have hit home here. As there is little infrastructure with effectively dealing with COVID symptoms in hospitals (and the hospital systems are the primary source of medical care here, doctors offices aren’t really a thing), it does feel like China is behind the eight ball. Given that it’s been apparent that COVID Zero wasn’t working since the outbreaks in Shanghai, the lack of a plan really says a lot about the future planning in regards to COVID. While there is an ongoing campaign to get the elderly and everyone a third or fourth shot (I won’t be eligible until February), it does feel a bit like too little to late. Also, while Pfizer is now available for German citizens in China (due to a political deal to allow Chinese citizens in Germany/the EU to get the Sinopharm vaccine), there has been no movement on getting the Pfizer vaccine here, which is still depressing.
The one shining grace of the dismantling of COVID Zero is the opening of China for air travel. While I currently have no plans to travel abroad, there is a better chance that I could attend a conference this summer and not have to worry about the long and stressful quarantine process. Despite the reopening, there have been no formal announcements for the resumption of new tourist visas to China, so anyone hoping to visit China soon will have to wait a bit longer (sorry Mom & Dad). Also, the major news story here is that China views the restrictions (meaning you need a negative COVID test to get on the plane and in some cases – e.g., Japan, you will be quarantined if you test positive in the country) that other countries, including the US, have put on travelers coming from China as a persecution of Chinese nationals. Given the blatant lack of transparency in reporting COVID cases and variants here in China, I am in favor of these measures (also, given China’s own policies, he who is with sin is clearly casting the first stone). Given the World Health Organization’s pleas with China to give accurate and real data, I think the measures in the EU to test people upon arrival (no quarantines) and analyze septic tanks on planes from China is the smartest thing for the overall public health of the world at the moment.
With the COVID situation out of the way, I’ll update you on the rest of my much quieter December.
Astronomy Update
As I mentioned above, I’ve basically spent the last four weeks working from home and haven’t really done any in person socializing (so there won’t be as many pretty pictures, though I think there should be a bit more next month as I start to venture out a bit). While Tsinghua has officially reopened and now no longer requires us to get tested regularly, given the high number of cases both in Beijing and on campus, I didn’t think it made sense to have to cram into the subway to go to an office where I’d need to where a mask all day. Given that I can work comfortably from home, I figured that made more sense for my own sanity to do so. However, this has been a very productive month for me. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been writing my paper on Project Radio, which focuses on the properties of bent radio AGNs in clusters and outside of clusters and am happy to report that I’ve sent the paper on to my co-authors! I sent the paper out Friday morning, so I’m still waiting for feedback, but I’m hoping the rest of the authors will find the analysis interesting and intriguing. As such, much of this month was spent finalizing that paper. While approximately 80% of the paper was written when I posted my last blog, that last 20% took up a lot of time. Specifically, I was focusing on an analysis of the spectral index of the radio AGNs. Since that’s a lot of science jargon, basically, I’m trying to map the energy levels of the radio emission coming from a super massive black hole. By measuring it at multiple wavelengths, we can get an accurate representation of how recent the emission is and how it might be impacted by the overarching cluster environment. While I had done a preliminary analysis by doing a simple curve fit, I had been talking with my fellow postdoc Richard and he thought we could do a more robust fit using a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) fitting, where we fit for the values over a large range (2500) of potential values to better characterize the error in our fits. With some help from Richard and Jesse, I was able to get this up and running! Although it was incredibly computationally intensive (I was using my laptop and the code was running non-stop for approximately 10 days), the end results are pretty interesting and we see some cool differences between the radio sources in our sample! This is also the first time (to my knowledge) that anyone has studied the spectral index of a large sample of specifically bent radio AGNs, which given that this is my main niche, is a cool little factor for the paper. I’m hoping to submit the paper early in February (barring any major revisions suggested by my collaborators), so hopefully I’ll have some good news to share with you all next month.
As should be evident, I spent most of my time focusing on Project Radio and finishing it up. However, with it now being out to the co-authors, I’m hoping to spend the rest of January working on Project Morphology (and finally running Galapagos to do the analysis of the morphology of these protoclusters) and Project Low-z, my collaboration with Jesse to reanalyze the populations of clusters hosting bent radio AGNs. Beyond these two projects, I’ve also started two new collaborations with other members of Zheng’s group. While both projects are in the early stages, both involve studying high-z clusters and protoclusters and looking at things like a quiescent fraction (how many galaxies are forming stars or not) and the overall evolution of protoclusters into galaxy clusters. Between these projects and a few other potential projects I’ve been trying to cook up, it seems like 2023 could be a big year for astronomy projects (which is a good thing since I’m planning to go on the job market in the fall).
Virtual Vegan Cooking
Although I stayed inside to avoid the worst of the COVID surge in Beijing, I was still able to do a few fun things. In particular, the Vegans of Beijing did a virtual vegan Chinese cooking class this month. While it wasn’t quite the same as the in person classes (and my kitchen is definitely a bit small for trying to juggle prepping a bunch of different dishes at the same time), I really enjoyed getting to do the class and break up the monotony of working from home. Also, since it was online, Jesse was able to join! This month’s class was on Yunnan Cuisine. If your Chinese geography is as terrible as mine, Yunnan is a province in the Southwest portion of China (near Laos and Vietnam). Yunnan cuisine shares many influences from Southeast Asia and is particularly known for both Pu’er Tea, the use of mushrooms in the dishes (Yay mushrooms!), and the use of rice noodles in soups. As with all of the classes with Chef Zhou, we started with the prep work (though I obviously had to get all the ingredients myself) and then cooked the individual dishes. While my knife skills don’t compare to his, I think I did a pretty good job prepping the different dishes.
The first dish we made was su hong dou (fried kidney beans). While the ingredients in this dish are surprisingly simple (beans, corn starch, mint, chilis, and oil), it definitely takes a deft hand to deep fry beans! While mine were not as pretty as Chef Zhou’s (his is the one in the top left on the blue plate, mine is the one on the top right on the white plate), I think they came out only slightly burnt and the ones that weren’t burnt were really tasty!
The second dish we made was probably my favorite. It was la jiao chao jun, a stir fried mushroom and pepper dish. We used a variety of mushrooms (king oyster, white mushrooms, and shiitake), red and green hot peppers, garlic and ginger. I really loved different textures of the mushrooms and especially the versatility of the king oyster mushrooms. I hadn’t really cooked with them before coming to China, but I’ve used them in so many different preparations in so many delicious dishes here! I also loved how simple the dish was. There’s no complex sauce, so the spiciness of the peppers and the earthiness of the mushrooms really come through. I liked it so much that I actually made it a second time the next day! I think I did a really good job recreating Chef Zhou’s work (his is the top left, mine are the other two in the top row).
The third dish was probably the most complicated, but also equally delicious. We made suan cai mi xian, a rice noodle soup with pickled cabbage. One of the cool things about Chinese grocery stores is the vast array of pickles they sell. I’m used to maybe being able to get pickles and hot peppers in the US, but here, you can get pickled cabbage and lots of other pickled greens. Also, the rice noodles for this are a bit different (thicker, more like traditional pasta than rice vermicelli), which added to the body of the soup. We also included smoked tofu to give the soup a little extra hardiness. The chili oil also adds a really nice spicy note to the overall dish! While my soup turned out a bit less brothy than Chef Zhou’s (top left), I thought it was a delicious soup! Since I had extra pickles and noodles, I even made it again last Friday (with some added black fungus mushrooms)! I really love these broth-filled noodle dishes and was pleased how straight forward this one was to make! I’ll definitely be making all of these dishes again and now have even more dishes to add to my repertoire of Chinese cuisine!
Happy Channukkah!
As is probably not too surprising, Channukkah 2022 was a pretty quiet affair here in Beijing. Because Channukkah coincided with the peak of the COVID surge in Beijing, everything Kehillat Beijing did was virtual. Despite not being able to gather in person, it was really nice to share images of our menorahs and homemade latkes. Also, although I was able to get candles and gelt from Kehillat Shanghai’s Channukkah boxes for charities (I also got a lovely pop-up Channukkah card from my Mom), I do want to highlight that the Beijing Chabad offered free candles, menorahs, and gelt to everyone who wanted some. While the Chabad community isn’t always my flavor of Judaism, I do appreciate when they reach out to the larger Jewish community.
Beyond lighting my menorah, I also made some pretty tasty vegan latkes and homemade applesauce. I will say that I have never been more thankful for the grater attachment on my food processor as I would not have wanted to individually chop all of the potatoes. The latke recipe was surprisingly simple (potatoes, onion, flour, and salt) but they stuck together really well and tasted great! I got to make my Mom’s apple sauce recipe, which was a really nice taste of home, too!
Goldie!
Because I spent the past month working from home, I got to spend lots of time with Goldie! She’s really loving that I’m there to keep her company during the day and she always likes to sit in her cat bed next to me on the couch, especially when I’m working at my living room table.
She also really likes that if I’m home during the day, she can beg me for treats (and unless it’s almost dinner time, I’ll usually give her some(. Thankfully breakfast-time hasn’t gotten any earlier, though it seems like she’s hard set on 5am (despite the sun still being down).
Goldie also did lots of exploring this month, including jumping on my desk, exploring my bed, staring out the back door, and even rummaging through my closet. She also found lots of new toys (and by that I mean toys she forgot existed) to play with (and enjoyed staring at the menorah, too!).
While she’s usually very quiet, we’ve had a few more cat visitors stop by and Goldie definitely is very interested in meeting them. Every time we hear a thud coming from the roof (which is a lot actually, like multiple times a day), she immediately perks up and looks towards the skylights and then the back door. While I’ve only seen another cat a few times in the past month via the skylight (see below), yesterday, I heard Goldie meowing and discovered another orange cat was sitting at the other side of the glass door. While it ran up the stairs to the roof before I could snap a picture of it staring right at her (I think it was scared of me), you can see Goldie’s reaction and see the other cat peaking down from the roof.
Jewish Life in Beijing
As is probably not a surprise by this point in the blog, there were no Kehillat Beijing in person Shabbats this month. Instead, Jesse and I have been leading joint Kehillat Beijing – Kehillat Shanghai virtual Friday night Shabbat services. While it’s not quite the same as being in person (and we have a much smaller crowd), it’s been a nice way to wrap up the week and see some familiar faces. Beyond Kehillat Beijing Shabbat services, I also attended Temple Sinai’s Friday night service (Saturday morning for me) last week via Zoom. As those of you in Saratoga likely know, Rabbi Linda and Rabbi Jonathan (who I know are both subscribed to this blog), the now Rabbi-emiritus at Temple Sinai, officially retired after leading the congregation for 36 years. While I would have loved to be able to attend in person, it was really nice to get to watch the service online as they’ve been the online rabbis that I’ve ever thought of as “my rabbis” and were instrumental in my Jewish education and the formation of my Jewish identity.
Vegan Food
While I didn’t go to any restaurants this month, I did do a lot of my own vegan cooking. As it’s definitely winter in Beijing, I mostly made soups (a West African peanut stew, a Corn & Potato Chowder – from The Lunch Room’s Recipe (for those of you who’ve been to Ann Arbor, MI) – though with purple sweet potatoes, the broth is much tastier than it looked, a Red Thai Chili soup, and a vegan minestrone). I also made some tofu and tempeh “meat”balls to enjoy for lunch during the week.
I also made a delicious no-bake chocolate oatmeal bar (I only have a round pan, so it looks like a giant Reese’s cup in the photo) and because my New Year’s Eve plans were pretty uneventful (all I did was watch The Glass Onion on Netflix – more on it below), I treated myself to some homemade chocolate f’oreo Fomu ice cream (Fomu is my favorite vegan ice cream shop in Boston and they released a wonderful cook book).
Also, one of the vegan bakers, Small Batch Cookie Co. did a charity fundraiser for Silence Coffee (a coffee shop very close to me that is entirely owned and operated by people who are deaf) to aid one of their baristas in getting officially certified, so I was able to support a good cause (and as someone who has a hearing loss, a cause that is close to my heart) and enjoy some delicious vegan cookies (Jesse was even able to order some, too!). The three cookies are peanut butter, walnut chocolate chip, and double chocolate! Also, when I was getting the cookies delivered, I discovered that the baker lives right around the corner from me in my hutong! Given how few of my neighbors I’ve actually met, it’s nice to know there’s another familiar face nearby.
Also, although not explicitly vegan food, it’s now strawberry season in China (in Beijing they grow them in greenhouses). I wanted to show how they send strawberries because they treat each berry as if it is an individual treasure.
Animals of Beijing
While I didn’t see too many animals outside of Goldie and her new “friends” this month, I did see one of my neighbors cats sitting in their window waiting to be let in and wanted to share the photo with all of you. Hopefully I’ll get to see some more animals this month, but I’m glad I have Goldie to keep me company.
China Drawings
As I spent most of my days finishing writing up Project Radio, I didn’t do too many drawings this month. I hope you do like the two that I did! I tried to go for two very different realms, with the more fantastical and the more joyous! Let me know what you think!
What was I reading/watching?
Because I was working from home, I did have a lot of time to watch tv in the evenings this month. As I mentioned earlier, my New Year’s Celebration consisted of watching The Glass Onion on Netflix. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s the sequel to Knives Out and stars Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc again investigating an outlandish murder mystery. As I don’t want to spoil it, all I’ll say is that I really enjoyed it and thought that the cast all did a fantastic job. I also watched Hustle, the Adam Sandler basketball film on Netflix, earlier in December and really enjoyed it. It’s about Adam Sandler as a down on his luck basketball scout for the Philadelphia 76ers and his recruitment of a new European prospect. Although I think the NBA owner was depicted a bit over the top, it was a cool look into the grind of recruiting a foreign player for the NBA and I thought Juancho Hernangomez (who is an actual NBA player) was surprisingly good. I also watched Black Adam on HBO Max last night. It’s the latest in the current iteration of DC movies and I thought it was a lot of fun. While it stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Black Adam, Pierce Brosnan’s Doctor Fate stole the show. Beyond movies, I also watched season 3, the third and final season, of His Dark Materials on HBOMax. This season is based on the Amber Spyglass and Phillip Pullman certainly amps up the theology, dealing with original sin and the loss of innocence. While I have no idea how easy the series would be to follow if you hadn’t read the books, I thought the series was fantastic. I also think that it worked for the better that it took so long to film because of the pandemic, so both Lyra and Will were a bit older at the end. Beyond His Dark Materials, I watched the first part of the fourth season of Doom Patrol on HBOMax. It’s a super quirky super hero show, but it’s a ton of fun! I also finished the second season of Slow Horses on Apple TV+. I thought they definitely amped up the spy game this season and Gary Oldman was fantastic again! I can’t wait for the third season to see where it goes. Lastly, I watched Criminal: Spain, the third installment in Netflix’s one-room Europe-spanning saga of investigative crime fiction. It’s a bit like a one room play and a really interesting look at interrogations and how you can effectively do a drama without showing anything.
Outside of TV and movies, I started reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods this month and am really enjoying it. It’s rather long, so I’ll probably be reading it a while, but I like it so far! I’d read the comic book adaptation, so I know the general gist, but it’s cool to read the original. I also have been reading my usual amount of US comics and manga to keep me occupied, too!
East Meets West
While not my usual East Meets West segment, I had to let you all know that I received my first piece of mail from the US a few weeks ago. Apparently, when I submitted my absentee ballot request, I must have checked for both a PDF copy (which I printed and gave to the US Embassy in Beijing before October 1) and a physical copy, because it arrived in the mail on December 14. I wouldn’t have even known about it since it was put at the mail slot for the hutong, not my apartment, if one of my neighbors (the one who is a Math professor at Tsinghua) hadn’t messaged me. Given that I assume it must have been sent some time in September, but the earliest stamp in Mandarin is dated a few weeks after the election, I definitely DO NOT recommend sending physical mail to China (for reference, the Channukkah card I got from my Mom was ordered via BaoPals, so it originated in China)! Still, it was cool and very very odd. I’m also amazed it made it to my apartment since it doesn’t include my phone number and that’s generally required to get mail here.
Anime & Comics
Since I didn’t explore Beijing much this month (or really leave my apartment), I only saw one little trace of anime and comics fandom outside of my apartment. Because I love this section of my blog, I thought I’d include some photos of my anime displays (it’s going to be fun packing these up when I return – whenever that is).
For all of you who made it this far, I hope you enjoyed hearing about my experience in Beijing in December 2022. It was definitely a quieter month, but I’m hoping the case counts will continue to drop and I’ll be able to do a few more things in January and see Jesse in the coming months. I hope you all have a lovely start to 2023 (and for those in academia, a good start to the spring semester). If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to comment below or write me directly! Here’s to a great 2023 and for all of you who are celebrating, a lovely Lunar New Year celebration in a couple weeks!
In Peace,
Emmet
