A hotel room with a view
Quarantine in Singapore proves enlightening for Michelle Jana Chan and her young family
I pressed the key card against the pad by the door and heard the opening click. It was the last time I’d enter or exit this room for two weeks. It was in here that I was about to embark on 14 days of hotel quarantine, my barrier to entering Singapore.
The hotel room was the corporate type, clean and adequate. There were no latches on the windows, no fresh air for a fortnight, but the views were fantastic, with church spires in the foreground, the red-tiled roof of the Singapore Art Museum, then skyscrapers beyond. After dark, it looked very Gotham City, with an oblong patchwork of brightly-lit offices and apartments, and then the quiet moon rising.
As a family with three children (aged eight, six and four), we landed two interlocking rooms, although with the extra rollaway bed, it did feel cramped. We set about making the space feel more like home, putting up posters of a world map and a handmade countdown calendar. It turned out that our first day was day zero, not day one, so we drew a grid of 15 boxes, allowing for a diary entry and a drawing. Predictably, I suppose, it turned out that most days looked the same as the previous ones.
But the kindnesses began almost instantly, courtesy of the androgynous figures dressed in full PPE who brought us bagged food at mealtimes. They quickly realised we were quarantining with small children, no great secret given the sound of a blow-up football repeatedly kicked against the door (and me yelling “Not so hard!” in the background) as well as the manic music of children’s exercise videos we found. It didn’t take long before the staff began to sneak us extra yogurts, sachets of Milo drink and double portions of dessert. There was one man who often loitered to say hello to the kids, offering words of encouragement, making little jokes.
The kindnesses extended further still. Within a day or two, we started to receive deliveries of food from old friends, from cousins I had never met, and then from strangers tipped off by a mutual contact that I was in town and in quarantine. Boxes of freshly made salad arrived, followed by avocados and bananas; then novels, newspapers and jigsaw puzzles; on one of the Saturday nights, a bottle of negroni cocktail mix with oversized ice cubes in sealed bags.
When the ding-dong of the doorbell rang outside of mealtimes, there was a race to the door, to fling it open, to rummage through boxes stuffed with jars of olives, spicy cashew nuts and bars of chocolate. Curiously, it was not so much the gifts that kept me going but the gestures themselves, knowing that there were people on the other side remembering us, caring enough to puncture the monotony of our days.
The last evening I told the children to savour the view; this was to be our final dinner in room 1635. My daughter sighed. “Oh,” she said, melancholically. “I quite like quarantine.” I understood what she meant. With the marked support of friends and strangers, the fortnight had turned out to be a treasured time, drawing us close; our world had become the reflections in each other’s eyes.
On day 15, after we were given our last round of negative PCR results, we zipped up our suitcases, took down the children’s artwork on the walls and rolled up our calendar. As I looked around our dismantled home, I thought how spacious the room felt now, how perceptions can shift. We left, pulling the door shut and following a member of staff down the corridor; I felt giddy, slightly swaying as if I’d spent a long passage at sea.
“This is the road to freedom,” one of the hotel staff said warmly, welcoming us into the lobby. I felt strangely torn though, missing already the confines of the simpler life, wary of the bustle outside. Yet I was conscious of what had sustained me through this time in quarantine. I will not forget the tenderness shown to my family; it reminded me that when on the road, there is so much compassion and camaraderie to be found, and I believe this is why we love to travel and why we will travel again.
Within a day or two we started to get food deliveries from old friends, from cousins I’d never met and from strangers