A lot of detail will be left out here, but in several past entries I had mentioned how I was effectively disowned from my Dad's inheritance along with my siblings.   Even more crazy than that was how I actually accepted the outcome.   To be fair, I don't need anything from the estate since I have my own assets, for example now the sold condo.  But if there's a shot at justice, then why not try?  

My sister had a different attitude all along, she refused to accept the outcome.  She did all the legwork with lawyers to challenge the will and made a very airtight case for a potential court case.  We'll just have to see what happens.

But reading the legal document was self-awareness that I need a reality check:  it is not OK to be a pushover and accept bullshit happening as somehow ok.  

More dots were then connected:  the zero covid policy and travel restrictions over three years meant I was trapped in China during the entire pandemic.  The lockdown was a cage within a bigger cage.  When my Dad passed away in Sept 2022, I couldn't travel to see him in time.  It is very possible that, if international travel had been allowed, we could have all worked something out and prevented the current inheritance debacle from happening.

So in that sense I was double angry, triple angry even with China covid policies.  But in the end I blamed myself for the so-called marvelous planning job of dodging the global pandemic by running back to China.  I bought into their zero covid propaganda hook, line, and lockdown.  

Yet it was good for one thing, and that is bringing clarity on what I want from life that is very short.  My minimalism philosophy and exit plan was essentially birthed from the lockdown so credit is due to Xi where credit is due.  If he wanted to kick the foreigners out of China, his strategy was quite genius actually:  get them to leave willingly and passionately. 

Whatever happens next, it is akin to what my colleague says that I'm fighting fires all over the world.  But before we go on fighting fires, the main project now is to edit and re-edit this journal as well as all the previous covid journals.  From there it will be possible to move forward from this debacle.