Last month, at the end of the October National Week holiday, having experienced a whirlwind week of museums, social pleasures and live music, I posted a piece about how life was returning to “normal” in Shanghai. Despite my obvious use of scare quotes, the post, or at least the title, was met with a great deal of skepticism and snickering by my online friends. It even got a comment by a reader (at least he read the title) that I was “making of fool” of myself with such posts. This is because the city was once again showing signs of lockdowns and restrictions, and the global media, ever eager to see the bad side of China, was publishing articles about it. Far from me, a long-term resident of Shanghai for over 20 years, to contradict anything that the global media publishes about Shanghai or China. Yet, I think these news reports were exaggerating the case. Despite some sporadic and highly localized lockdowns, and plenty of restrictions, Shanghai continues to move on a vector towards opening and relaxing its grip on city life in the face of the pandemic.

What happened, as far as I can tell, was that the travels encouraged by the holiday week had sparked some cases of the virus, and the government was once again on a cleanup mission as mandated by the State. There were more lockdowns, but they were limited to neighborhoods and establishments, mostly on the outskirts of the city. With the regimen of near daily testing in place, and the efforts by officers of the government to follow up on all cases and quarantine those who were close to active cases, the spread was mitigated, and we did not experience another mass lockdown as we did in spring.

I travel back and forth regularly between Kunshan and Shanghai. For much of October I had to remain in Kunshan, since our university had a very strict policy about traveling, even to Shanghai, and the situation was uncertain. I wasn’t forced to stay in Kunshan, but I wanted to be on campus to teach in a live classroom, not remotely on Zoom, so I stuck around and camped out in my lake house. By the end of October, the situation was more under control (Kunshan and Suzhou had also experienced limited cases), and I could travel more easily between Shanghai and Kunshan.

As I wrote previously, one of my barometers for gauging levels of openness and freedom in the city life is the live music scene. To be sure, live music in Shanghai has been impacted greatly by the lockdowns and anti-COVID policies of 2022. Many clubs in the city are struggling to survive, as are musicians. Things seemed to be on a vector towards openness but after the October holiday, live music venues once again were forced to shut their doors for a while, and musicians were out of work. This was true especially of the city’s jazz community, which I’ve been following for many years. It was also true of other live venues as well. I know that places like the Pearl, a variety restaurant, bar, and music hall, were really suffering.

Since the beginning of November, the live scene has once again been stirring. Last weekend, JZ Club was able to hold a performance for the first time in a while. Other venues have been posting shows as well. On Friday night at the crowded House of Blues and Jazz, I saw a performance by our dear old friend Zhou Chao, a guitarist from Shanghai who has been living in Yunnan for many years now. He and some friends gave a performance of acoustic and electric pieces that reminded me at times of Pat Metheny, but also had some Central Asian resonances. At one point in the concert a young woman joined him on Yang Qin, and the two musicians harmonized, though it was hard for this comparatively delicate instrument to compete with Zhou Chao’s electric guitar. Zhou Chao is ever a unique musician who forges his own sonic pathways. Some of the other luminaries of Shanghai’s live scene were there to witness this performance, including Greg Smith and Jasmine Chen.

Meanwhile, I continued to find places to jam with my sole remaining bandmate Jud and with other musicians on open mic nights and jam sessions. After Zhou Chao’s concert at HBJ, we cycled over to Magpie for a late-night jam session and ended up hanging out and playing with one of Shanghai’s great jazz drummers, Charlie Foldesh, who joined us for the “guilty pleasure” of performing REM’s song “Losing My Religion”. On Sunday night, we joined an international group of musicians including our singer friend Tammy for an acoustic jam session at I Love Shanghai, and I ended up playing a few songs with the extraordinary Kimchi, who free-styles song lyrics.

I can’t say that anything is truly “normal”, and perhaps we’ve forgotten what normal means anymore. But the social and cultural life of the city is picking up once again, and that’s a good sign. Moreover, the government seems to be taking a more targeted and refined approach to containing the virus, and that is highly preferable to the sawed-off shotgun approach of spring, which everyone still remembers all too well.