International Travelling in Times of the Pandemic Worth the Retelling?
I. The Airport After taking the longest nonstop commercial flight for 19 hours, I landed in JFK airport on January 23, 2021. I passed through the Customs Counter – which used to be full of snaky queues of foreigners – in about 10 minutes, picked up my luggage and hopped on a taxi to my apartment.
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During the pandemic, empty customs lobbies became a norm at every metropolitan airport. Singapore Changi International Airport was handling very few flights too, when I arrived two weeks ago on January 8. The pandemic also made unusual traveling purposes sound acceptable. When the Singaporean Customs Officer asked me about the purpose of my stay in Singapore, I answered, “I want to enter the US in 14 days.” The Officer nodded silently at my answer, which would sound weird in a pre-pandemic world. Later, I overheard a student-looking young man answering in a similar fashion to another officer. When I told my friends in the United States of my selfimposed refuge in Singapore, it bewildered them. A year ago, President Trump issued a travel ban restricting travelers who had been to mainland China in the last 14 days from entering the United States. To circumvent the restriction and arrive in the US, mainland travelers like myself resorted to staying for 14 days in a third country which not only welcomed travelers from China, but also posed little risk to the US. Excluded from the US restriction, Singapore was a viable option for Chinese travelers. On November 6, 2020, Singapore began to receive Chinese passport holders, after mainland China reported a COVID local incidence rate of 0.00009 per 100,000 people over the past 28 days (Channel News Asia, 2020). In the same month, case numbers in the US were climbing, with 371.08 per 100,000 people, the highest 7-day average
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case rate in November (CDC, 2021). Based on the data, Washington’s insistence on banning Chinese travelers seemed more political than practical. At both JFK and Changi, the experience as a flight passenger was smooth, but there were some differences. After I picked up my bags in Singapore, I followed instructions directing me to a testing center located inside the arrivals hall. Having prepaid before departure, I got tested immediately and was instructed to stay in my booked room at one of the quarantine hotels to await my test result. The hotel workers sent me to a designated floor reserved for quarantine guests and told me that food and deliveries would be dropped at my door. The result came out fast. In 7 hours, I received a negative indication via email and was freed from my quarantine room. If you read about the quarantine experience in Singapore on English news media, the tone may have been less delighted. Travelers flying from European countries and the US are subject to 14 days of mandatory quarantine, regardless of test results at the airport. A Columbia Journalism affiliate who quarantined in a hotel shared that she was given a single-use room key, which was only valid for 20 minutes after check-in (Low, 2020). Breaching quarantine law meant severe punishments, including heavy fines, imprisonment and even losing Permanent Resident status for foreigners. Because I had flown from China, I was able to enjoy the rest of my stay as a true tourist. The mandatory quarantine regulation, which has been strictly enforced in Singapore and China, had been carried out weekly in the US. In New York, quarantine rule breakers were seldom punished and the state depended heavily on the travelers’ integrity for observing quarantine rules (Dorn, 2020). Flying from Singapore, a low risk country determined by New York State, I was neither required to quarantine, nor given a test upon landing.
