I hadn’t been downstairs for PCR testing much lately, so my supply of observations had thinned out. The last time I still had the mood to go, I saw a family that gave me a note for my ideas book: “The whole family, neatly lined up for testing.” I couldn’t turn it into anything then; families like that are hard to catch in one piece.
Earlier in the year I’d written down something secondhand. I can’t remember whether it made it into a daily post. The gist: a father-in-law who lived with the family was always “out of control.” The mother-in-law was obsessed with the rule that a family must stay neatly together, so she wanted everyone in the same pooled tube when they did PCR tests. The old man didn’t listen. He’d often slip out of the arrangement and go get swabbed first. They fought over it constantly. Her argument was simple: with pooled tubes, if the family isn’t in the same tube and there’s a mixed positive, things get messy.
Seen through the structure of the Chinese Great Mother family, she had a point. Keeping a family in one pooled tube lowers the chance of “losing control.” Everyone’s result comes out at the same time. If something is wrong, the family is neatly together and nobody panics. But then—does the result actually change depending on whether you’re in the same tube as your relative, or whether he goes first and you go later? Obviously not. Still, it wasn’t allowed, because it broke the rule laid down by the Great Mother.
That day downstairs I ran into a family like that.
At the center was the woman running the whole operation—the Great Mother. With her were her parents-in-law, the older son walking at the front and refusing to interact with his younger sister, and the little daughter held tightly in the Great Mother’s hand like a treasure. Five people. Who went first, who went later, who pulled out a phone to show the two old people their QR codes—all of it was arranged by this woman. No one was permitted to alter the rules.
I watched her and predicted she would place herself last. Only that way could she embody the actual status of the Great Mother inside the performance of humility. Once everyone had obeyed her arrangements, she would come forward in her own time and bring the whole production to a close. But after the two old people and the little girl finished, just as it was her turn after the older son, the line was cut. They had to join another pooled tube.
She was visibly unhappy, but she also knew that her family’s “divine authority” meant nothing before the white-suited testing enforcers. So she complained under her breath, and then came the key move: she turned and looked at the people behind her. Already sensing a loss of control, she used that visual inspection to estimate whether anyone queued after her—anyone who would share her pooled tube—might be “positive.” Seeing how nervous she was, I looked straight at her and fake-coughed twice. Her face showed clearly that she had something to say and didn’t dare say it, full of resentment and fear, because I had given her more of the thing she dreaded: a sense of losing control. Maybe I was a positive case. Maybe I’d be in the same tube as her and disrupt the neat rules she had arranged.
If there really was a positive in a pooled tube, it would definitely be hers—that was the logic of her fear. Then her data would be severed from the parents-in-law and little daughter who had obeyed her. To her, a positive pooled result would mean being pulled down from the altar. She’d have no way to defend herself, and she’d probably blame the white-suited worker who had forced the regrouping that morning. If not for him, she wouldn’t be facing a mixed positive.
Chinese family thinking is full of gambler’s logic. PCR testing alone produces several examples: a family’s pooled samples should be in one tube, otherwise the risk of a mixed positive increases; let the old people go first, so that if they are positive, the later pooled tubes have a lower chance of turning positive; the longer someone argues with staff at the scanning table, the more likely they are to be positive.
I grew up in a family ruled by a Great Mother, but by middle school I had cut off her control almost completely. Back then the family’s Great Mother was my grandmother. Her favorite tool was moral kidnapping and emotional blackmail. Around any issue, she would talk about her own feelings, other people’s feelings, and the feelings she was certain other people would have—never about what the thing actually was or what effect it had. Over time I went numb. I let her perform. Once I stopped being an audience, her performances in front of me became fewer—at least she found other people who would still listen.
If PCR testing had happened during that extended family era, I’m sure she would have gathered everyone and made them test together. She would have arranged who went first and who went last. I would have been first, because I was the least controllable; putting me earlier would reduce the chaos I could cause later. She would have been last, because she had to embody her divine authority, to summarize and conclude. But if a tube division happened then, it would still be within her control—because the unimportant ones, the ones likely to lose control, had all been placed at the front. Even if the line split, she could still preside over the second half. Unless the split fell exactly at her, and then she’d worry that her authority might be overturned.
The key question is whether the order of testing actually affects the PCR report. Of course it does! For the Great Mother, that order is the best glimpse she has of controlling the whole situation and making everyone obey.
If we understand PCR testing as another kind of symbol, the plot of “the family must stay neatly together” becomes easier to read. A positive pooled tube means one person is declared “positive,” bears a kind of guilt, is subjected to restrictions on personal freedom and forced detention, and drags along family and close contacts as accomplices. In other words, you can think of that pooled PCR tube as a pre-assigned prison list.
If someone is infected and becomes positive, then in the family’s moral accounting that person has fallen below the bottom line. It gets distributed to all the other family members and becomes original capital for future moral blackmail. Say the mother-in-law gets infected while downstairs chatting with other old women. She becomes the family’s patient zero and drags everyone down with her. For the daughter-in-law—the Great Mother—this gives her absolute moral leverage. She can control the old woman’s every move. And later, the old woman’s act of plunging the family into crisis can become a permanent handle the younger woman holds over her.
That’s why the uncontrollable person must go first, and why she must remain last: the prison list is both a curse and a gamble. She has to make sure she doesn’t become the sinner in this game of chasing positives, allowing someone else to gain leverage over her. So when she saw me cough, she looked terrified. In that moment she wanted to beg the white-suited worker to let her be locked in the same cell as her family, not in a cell with someone like me—someone certain to lose control—and end up the same kind of sinner.
But she never grasped one thing: right now all of us are locked in the same prison. If they say one word, any of us can become the sinner in the cell. And of course, a family can become sinners neatly together too.