Beijing Bunker: "My Life Is Louder and More Hectic"

As the quarantine period continues, the stories of how people have been dealing with the coronavirus outbreak – by staying, leaving, or watching on from afar – are many and varied. In Beijing Bunker, we quiz Beijingers on what approach they've been taking to stay safe and sane through the ordeal.

Startup entrepreneur Stephenie Lee has been in Taiwan since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, as her planned Chinese New Year visit to her parents has been extended into a prolonged quarantine. Lee, whose startup ZhiFei focuses on helping young Chinese professionals navigate their careers with career coaching services, talks to us about the challenges of juggling a remote workforce, managing familiar expectations and quality time, and the unexpected upsides to it all. 

Can you first tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
I am in Taiwan right now, but I have been living in Beijing since 2017. I was originally working in the US. I came to China to be closer to my parents, who are based in Taiwan, and to work in education technology after years of working in offline education services. When I came to Beijing, I worked at VIPKID, and I left about half a year ago to start my own company with a few of my colleagues from VIPKID. Our startup is based on renowned programs like Stanford’s Design Thinking for your Life, but localized for the Chinese workforce.

Would you consider yourself safe, sane, safe and sane, or other? Why?
Hahahaha, I think I am safe and sane, but given my 10.30pm vocal warm-up session I did with my brother at the top of our lungs last night, we might not be.

While Taiwan is not as strict as far as quarantining, knowing the situation in China, my brother and I try to increase everyone’s awareness that the coronavirus is very infectious. That does mean spending more time in the apartment that is usually only occupied by my mom and dad. I’m not sure our family has spent so much time together since I was in high school, but maybe even before that. And, I certainly haven’t slept on mats on the floor, and my brother hasn’t slept in his twin-sized bed in a very long time.

Has the virus disrupted your travel plans or those of your loved ones?
My brother’s girlfriend is Polish and because of the type of Chinese visa she had, she had not originally planned to leave Beijing. As the coronavirus outbreak intensified, she and my brother had nightly discussions about whether or not it made sense to leave Beijing to come to Taiwan, too. Eventually, after days of discussions, she showed up at our doorstep! She surprised my brother and he felt an immense sense of relief. She came to Taiwan the day before Taiwan stopped receiving passengers from China. In the meantime, her visa issue has not completely been resolved. Many options to get temporary visas secured have been discussed, including going to Korea, working with a travel agency in Japan, going back to Poland, or to wait for Hong Kong offices to resume business.

My mom and dad had planned a trip to India with a Buddhist group leaving on Feb 2. As the situation worsened and it became clear that my brother and I would be staying in Taiwan for longer, we started to urge them not to go to India, concerned that if there were an outbreak in India, it may not be contained very effectively with the density of populations there (and having just watched Netflix’s Pandemic and learning more about medical services in India). Despite our urging, my mom in true, frugal fashion, decided that because they’d already paid for the trip, and there were a few doctors going on the trip as well, they would go.

A part of the trip involved crossing the border to go to Nepal and coming back through India before flying back to Taiwan. While entering India was not a problem on the 2nd, but when they wanted to come back through India on the 12th, the Indian authorities would not let them through. The whole group was stranded in Nepal, awaiting new routes to get back to Taiwan. Thankfully, flights were rerouted and they were able to come back with only a 12-hour delay. 

How have you been spending your time since the outbreak? How has your life changed or not changed on account of the situation?
I have been working, for the most part. I am also a part-time MBA student, and online classes are now beginning, which have been met with a lot of resistance as we all really value the exchanges that occur in the class when they are held in person. Other than that, my life is louder and more hectic, it feels like I have no privacy, and MOST of all, I miss my puppy who was at a friend’s place for the holidays and I fear will love being with my friend more than life with me.

Going to the doctor is interesting. My brother had the norovirus (basically, the stomach flu) but because we came from China, was immediately routed to an official hospital where he had to wait over five hours before the hospital was ready to see him. They held him in a quarantine section outdoors, on the outskirts of the hospital (pictured above), and as the day got colder, they gave him more and more blankets. Someone in our building in Taiwan just came back from Zhejiang so I now climb stairs more than I have ever in the past to avoid using the elevator. 

Has the situation affected your work or business? If so, how?
We now work remotely, which is not that hard. In some ways, it’s better, in that we are prioritizing more heavily project management functions and have more granular insight now as to how projects are progressing.

The hardest piece is to maintain our culture and a sense of team cohesiveness and goal-driven tension remotely. We have instituted weekly celebrations to create a channel that helps people understand the value of the work we are doing and feel compelled to move forward together.

As I am in Taiwan, it is hard to imagine how all of the team members are making sense of the experience that they are undergoing at the moment. We do our best to be mindful of news as it is released and to provide a safe space for people to share how they are processing information.

We operate out of an incubator affiliated to Tsinghua University, so we are waiting on universities to announce their start dates to know when we will be able to see each other day in and day out again. We continue to monitor when offices will reopen in hopes that we can be with our team again soon. Zhifei is also in a place had plans to go out and meet people, but as we are unable to do so now, we have to find other ways to get into the “same space” as our clients and have resorted to a lot of grassroots, guerilla techniques, crawling through websites with traffic to look for. We are also resorting to creating lots of content we hope will attract potential users’ attention. Thankfully, our product is delivered online, but in the early phases, we really value offline settings for creating the kind of energy and space to encourage the type of career positioning and introspection for a fulfilling life that we coach people towards. Looking forward to being back in Beijing to be able to connect in person with more users!

As a student, I have borne witness to how Tsinghua and its peer institutions are rapidly shifting their operations online, leveraging a combination of platforms and rapidly replicating the experience online. I am really impressed with how quickly they have responded to the challenge and have had several classes that may even be higher in quality than offline.

Have there been any unexpected “upsides” to this whole situation?
The biggest upside is spending more time with my family and having my routines be challenged. My family is undergoing a number of changes and it is incredible to have the time to support my parents as they figure out what the next five to ten years of their lives might look like. As more of a peer than a child, I am able to help them think through their options, observe ways that their narratives bind them to their current choices, and with this prolonged period of time, coach them towards a more self-realized vision of the next few years.

I am also forced to rethink why I choose to allocate my time and energy the way that I normally do. Many of the aspects of my life that are “flexible” are now anchored to other people’s schedules, like when to eat, making sure that I go on a walk with my dad, picking up groceries, etc. And then realizing the things that I must have, like my coffee run each day! Or things that help me maintain my sanity, like putting on really good music while the whole family around me is busy doing things that they need to do. Or getting back in the routine of blow-drying my hair after I wash it, and taking that break to just watch a short comedy sketch or interview.

Which resources (online or real-life) have proved the most useful to you during this time?
Lots of online tools are critical right now! Dingtalk is awesome (not always perfectly stable on the video conferencing features, but love the cloud drive and the forms that can be template and editing files collectively); WeChat is obviously amazing, keeps everyone connected and amazing for marketing; Zhumu/Zoom for meetings where screen sharing is important; YouTube for constant musical companionship; Quip for our company shared drive and project management; for classes, we are using Rain Classroom (雨课堂); and Tencent Meetings which have really created a strong virtual class experience.

What's one thing that you've done that has saved you a lot of hassle/time/insanity?
I have developed a system for checking in with my mom who is both hyper excited that she has me and my brother at home, but also has her own habits that need to be maintained. Sometimes, she wants to spend quality time together but she won’t say it directly, and we will say we are busy which may hurt her feelings. I’ve gotten much better at just clarifying what her real needs are, and making sure that we are helping her feel valued and appreciated, and meeting her needs, which then prevents awkward tension or longer discussions around our respect and care for the family. Family dynamics, I think, is pretty hard for a lot of people who haven’t spent that much time with their families in tight spaces and now have to under coronavirus circumstances.

What do you most look forward to doing once all of this has blown over?
BEING WITH MY PUPPY! I miss her so much! She may be having a better time with our friends, though, than she does in her normal everyday life.

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READ: "In Times Like This, I Realize Everything Offline Also Has an Online Version"

Images courtesy of Stephenie Lee