Coming Home to China During the Pandemic | iFeng
Yan Cong––iFeng
International travel amid the pandemic is stressful and expensive. And yet since mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens living abroad have returned to China, braving a dwindling number of international flights, expensive flight tickets, and tighter travel and transit restrictions across the globe. Depth of Field’s Yan Cong made one such journey, flying from New York to her home in Beijing in late March. Her original itinerary included a connecting flight in Hong Kong, but had to be changed after Hong Kong’s government banned transit travelers, 48 hours before her flight. She paid $2,600 for a new flight via Seoul. In this firsthand account, she documents her journey from a hotel room in Queens, through an empty JFK airport, to a COVID-19 test upon her arrival in Dalian, and finally to a quarantine hotel in Beijing.
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International travel amid the pandemic is stressful and expensive. And yet since mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens living abroad have returned to China, braving a dwindling number of international flights, expensive flight tickets, and tighter travel and transit restrictions across the globe. Depth of Field’s Yan Cong made one such journey, flying from New York to her home in Beijing in late March. Her original itinerary included a connecting flight in Hong Kong, but had to be changed after Hong Kong’s government banned transit travelers, 48 hours before her flight. She paid $2,600 for a new flight via Seoul. In this firsthand account, she documents her journey from a hotel room in Queens, through an empty JFK airport, to a COVID-19 test upon her arrival in Dalian, and finally to a quarantine hotel in Beijing.