write a essay on your family overcome from corona padamic crises
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I spent the first five weeks of the corona virus lock down in india, walking and walking and walking, as if by circumambulating the city I could open it up.
I wasn’t in one of the radically controlled parts of China, where residents became virtual prisoners, able to leave their apartment blocks or villages only with government permission. But friends quickly withdrew to the confines of family life, and their absence eliminated everything that made Beijing home.
I couldn’t keep from walking, and slipped out every day for hours at a time, like a widower mourning the sites of a past love. I regularly walked by the Forbidden City, where I had spent many hours with a friend who researched the immense palace’s geomancy. Usually bustling with tourists, it was now empty and locked tight toward outsiders, as it might have been before imperial China collapsed in 1911.
I entered some of the parks that were still open, such as Beihai. In the past, I had visited it with groups of friends who were believers in folk religion. Every Chinese New Year they would perform martial arts routines here, attracting huge crowds. But on New Year’s Eve this past January, the park was empty and on each visit it seemed sadder and sadder: the banners and flags welcoming the Year of the Rat were still up but the ice on the lake was slowly melting, as if humans had lost control of time.
Each visit was increasingly disorienting. I took pictures but didn’t post them on Chinese social media; it felt as if witnessing the city’s self-induced coma was unseemly.
One day, a friend broke ranks. He lived at the edge of the Western Mountains that mark the end of the basin around Beijing and the start of the Mongolian Foothills. He posted a picture of the old pilgrimage trail that led to Beijing’s holiest site, Miaofengshan—the Mountain of the Miraculous Peak, home to Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, or bixia yuanjun, a Daoist deity who blessed families with children and good health.
The photo was left uncommented upon, but it was clear there was a way to walk the old pilgrimage trail. I immediately booked a rental car and drove over the next day, but the entrance was locked. I turned to go, unsure if I should call my friend, when a guard came out of a hut.
“It’s closed due to the virus.”
“Don’t you remember me?” I said to him. “I made the pilgrimage to Miaofengshan last year by foot. I walked the whole way from the center of the city”—more than forty kilometers away. That part was true, although I didn’t actually recognize this guard.
“My gate is closed,” he said. “You cannot get in this way.”
I caught the hint.
“But other gates…”
“There are three other gates. They are all closed.”
“But a friend was on the trail yesterday.”
“Who can close a mountain?”
I bade him farewell and drove down a side road, stopping at a field before the next village. I could see broken corn husks but it was clear the land hadn’t been planted in years—typical for much of mountainous rural China, which the government was trying to reforest. But toward the back, as in every Chinese field, I still found a trail leading to the next field. It was overgrown but still passable, mainly because it was so rocky.
I ascended along a ridge, through brambles, past another abandoned terraced field, and finally my path joined the main pilgrimage route. An hour later, I was at the peak of this first hill, looking over a valley to Miaofengshan. The temple was tiny under the overcast sky, just a speck on the first of an endless string of ridges that ran to the horizon.
I turned and looked down at Beijing, low, gray, and quiet. Pious people believe that the goddess controls the fate of those down in the city, and maybe that was true. But whether the temple would open and the goddess worshipped—that depended on what went on down below me in China’s cities and towns.