On the twenty-seventh day of the coronavirus lockdown in Chengdu, in southwestern China, five masked men appeared in the lobby of my apartment building in order to deliver a hundred-inch TCL Xclusive television. It was late morning, and I was taking my nine-year-old twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha, outside to get some air. The three of us also were wearing surgical masks, and we stopped to watch the deliverymen. I had never seen such an enormous TV; it arrived in an eight-foot-long box that weighed more than three hundred pounds. Two of the deliverymen stood inside an elevator with a tape measure, trying to figure out whether the box would fit. Otherwise, it was going to be a long haul up the stairs to the twenty-eighth floor.

By that point, the country was deep into the most ambitious quarantine in history, with at least seven hundred and sixty million people confined largely to their homes. The legal groundwork had been established on January 20th, when the National Health Commission designated the highest level of treatment and control to fight the new coronavirus, which eventually became known as COVID-19. After that, provinces and municipalities issued their own regulations, and the Chengdu government passed its first measures on January 24th. They were tightened seven days later, when it became clear that the epidemic had reached a point of crisis: during that week, the number of reported deaths in China had increased more than sixfold. By the end of January, there were a total of 11,791 confirmed cases, with two hundred and fifty-nine deaths.

My family rents an apartment in a nine-building complex not far from the center of Chengdu, where I teach writing at a local university. We chose the place, last September, primarily for its location: the apartment blocks are situated beside a pleasant, tree-lined stretch of the Fu River, and there’s a subway stop outside one of the side gates. But, after the quarantine began, the subway was deserted and both side entrances were chained shut. Anybody who arrived at the main gate was greeted by an infrared temperature gun to the forehead. The gun was wielded by a government-assigned volunteer in a white hazmat suit, and, behind him, a turnstile led to a thick plastic mat soaked with a bleach solution. A sign read “Shoe Sole Disinfecting Area,” and there was always a trail of wet prints leading away from the mat, like a footbath at a public swimming pool.

Compared with other places, our compound’s restrictions were relatively light. We could leave and return as often as we pleased, provided that we carried passes that had been issued by the neighborhood committee, the most local level of the Communist Party. The majority of my friends in other parts of China were restricted to one individual per household going out every two days, and often that person had to tell the authorities where she was headed. Even at our complex, which has few foreign residents, it was rare for people to go outside. All restaurants, government offices, and most shops had been closed, and, after the Lunar New Year holiday ended, in February, all schools would be suspended indefinitely. One of the new Chengdu measures even banned “every sort of group dinner party.”

Most of my neighbors ordered things on Taobao, one of the world’s biggest e-commerce sites, and they got their food delivered from Fresh Hema, a nationwide grocery chain that has a branch nearby. (Both Taobao and Hema are owned by the Alibaba Group, a Chinese technology company.) All day, motorcycle deliverymen handed off items to the security guards, who trundled through the compound’s grounds with dollies and shopping carts, dropping off boxes and bags. In my lobby, the most packages I counted at any time was a hundred and twenty-five, all of them marked with apartment numbers in black ink. Sometimes it was possible to see what was inside. On the morning that the Xclusive TV was delivered, the contents of other packages reinforced the impression that people had settled in for the long haul: two electric power strips for Apartment 1101, three bottles of Omo laundry detergent for 3003, a huge box of fresh ginger for 3704.

I tried to strike up a conversation with one of the TV deliverymen. He was standing near the elevator door, and he wore his surgical mask in the position that I call “the holster.” This is when a man keeps the straps around his ears but pulls the mask down beneath his chin, usually so that he can spit or smoke a cigarette. Another Chengdu measure demanded that citizens stop spitting, but I still occasionally saw people holstering their masks and hawking loogies. I asked the deliveryman what he would do if the TV wouldn’t fit inside the elevator.

“It’ll fit,” he said. “No problem.”

He pulled the mask back over his face. People were much warier of strangers than usual, and sometimes if I got in the elevator with another resident he turned his back to me. Most people were aware that our compound was, at least by local standards, a hot spot. On the various apps that mapped the government-issued statistics for coronavirus cases, our compound lit up bright red. There had been a positive test for a resident somewhere in the complex—the only one in our neighborhood.

The deliverymen weren’t making fast progress with the TV, and Ariel and Natasha were eager to leave, so we went out the gate. Next to the river, a long row of ride-share bikes had hardly been touched for weeks, and I used my phone to unlock one. The twins liked the challenge of riding the adult-size bikes—they took turns wobbling along the empty riverside path. After that, we visited the zombie subway station. It was still operating, but the place was silent except for a public-service message, played on an endless loop, that warned nonexistent passengers to watch their step. Ariel and Natasha ran up and down all the escalators in the wrong direction, laughing. This was our usual morning routine during the lockdown. They hadn’t seen another child their age for nearly a month.

After we returned to the compound, and had the infrared gun pointed at our foreheads, and crossed the bleach footbath, the deliverymen were returning with the empty box on a dolly. The man wearing the holster explained that once they’d removed the top half of the box and stood the TV on its end they’d been able to fit it in the elevator. He still didn’t seem very eager to talk.

Last September, my wife, Leslie, and I enrolled the girls in the third grade at a local public school, in part so they would learn Chinese. Like the other students, they also took English, and Unit 2 in their textbook was titled “My Body.” All anatomical vocabulary was taught in the context of injuries, illnesses, or mishaps. There were cartoons of children lying in hospital beds, with labels that identified the patient, the age, and the symptom: “Bill—8 years old—foot hurts”; “Ben—10 years old—leg hurts”; “Lily—9 years old—ear hurts.” One lesson read: