Across Cultures and Crisis: A Memoir of China Before and During Covid-19

An intimate, expository, and important account of an American living in China leading up to and during the Covid-19 outbreak, Thomas Ridgedell's observations gently rebuke the Western media narrative that China is a place where people live in absolute oppression and fear of their government.

Ridgedell, a Ph.D., and a former American university instructor, taught History at a high school while living in Wuxi, a city outside of Shanghai, from 2018 to 2022. Across Cultures and Crisis is his thorough and accessible overview of the political and religious ideologies, social structures, and economic considerations, of one of the world's fastest developing countries and home to over a billion people.

While he was on a trip to Japan in the winter of 2019-2020, unsettling news began emerging that a virus in China was spiraling out of control. For the time, Ridgedell chose to remain in Japan, until finally the Chinese border was suddenly sealed. In February 2020 a small travel window presented itself to return to Wuxi. Ridgedell entered an immediate mandatory 14-day quarantine in a Wuxi hotel. When the isolation period was over, he experienced a very different China than the one he had known before.

Leaving Wuxi was prohibited, mask-wearing and temperature checks became ubiquitous, and an app on his phone would show if he was a level green and permitted to enter public spaces. Ridgedell then resumed teaching his students remotely. The people of China followed the restrictions without argument, and due to that China was able to lower restrictions and reopen many more schools than the United States from 2020 to 2021.

In 2022, when Covid-19 regulations began to tighten again, Ridgedell made the decision to go back home to the United States, along with a significant exodus of other foreigners.

From temples to grottoes, meandering canals to mountains, hot pots, ancient history, and clamorous cities under construction, Ridgedell deftly weaves personal experience with cultural context, and reveals a very different China than the one we read about in the news – one where the people are ambitious, lively, and patriotic.