A young Chinese woman's diary of displacement under the Zero-COVID policy. When a country becomes a moving prison, escape becomes routine.

In early 2022, fireworks for the Beijing Winter Olympics illuminated a city already darkened by lockdown. When her partner announced his departure rom China, the author, mao, stayed behind. What followed was a year of perpetual transit across the country, navigating a world where a smartphone's "health code" determined all access to public life. Between escapes, she observed daily life with quiet attention: the warmth and loneliness in small moments, the ways people around her coped, resisted, or simply endured.

Lockdowns always arrived without warning. A neighbor's whisper, an urgent message, the sound of metal sheets being welded over apartment doors. She learned to read between the lines: tickets bought in haste, bags packed in minutes, another city left behind before dawn. Policies shifted by the hour, yet certainty never came. When a fatal fire in Xinjiang ignited the "White Paper" protests  across China, mao found herself surrounded by champagne toasts while a nation raged beyond. Only two weeks later, testing booths and health checkpoints vanished overnight. Three years of absurdity ended without explanation, as if none of it had ever happened, leaving her hollowed out.

An illustrator and theatre poster designer, mao adapted her private illustrated diary into Running in Stillness, her first graphic novel, which received the Second Prize of the inaugural Frontline Documentary Comics Fellowship. Her unique, bittersweet humor lets the ridiculous situations speak for themselves, offering a rare first-person account of ordinary lives caught in political absurdity, and a history already slipping into oblivion.

Size: 11.5 x 16 cm

Volumes: 1 (end)

Black & White