Non-Fiction

New Zealand’s Covid-19 Experience

By David Lu age 17, Auckland, New Zealand

Did you know that New Zealand has beaten coronavirus, not once, but twice?

Since everyone knows about the traditional quarantine experiences of online learning, interviews through zoom, etc. I won’t focus on these. Instead, I’ll cover some of the more interesting aspects of the New Zealand lockdown experience.

I distinctly remember the day that community transmissions had been confirmed: it was a bright, sunny afternoon and the sound of tense chatter was ubiquitous throughout the air of our physics class. Everyone was crowding around laptop screens, waiting for our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern (or Aunty Cindy as we like to call her informally) to make the call as to whether New Zealand would enter lockdown.

Suddenly, it was announced.

Community transmission? Confirmed. Lockdown? Starting midnight. School? Cancelled. Thus began the odyssey of our social hiatus.

As we unfortunately witnessed the number of cases slowly climbing higher and higher every day, we also watched one of our health ministers, David Clark, break the rules of quarantine repeatedly, not only by driving his family twenty-kilometres to a beach, but also embarking on a dangerous mountain-biking expedition and moving his family from one house to another. As expected, he resigned shortly after —to the delight of many New Zealanders.

However, on a healthier and more personal note, even under the strict conditions of quarantine, we were allowed daily jogs or walks in order not to completely devoid us from the crisp autumn air. To make the dull life of lockdown more interesting for children, a new social trend emerged which saw my mum (yes it’s spelled with a ‘u’ instead of an ‘o’ here in New Zealand) digging all my stuffed childhood animal friends and setting them carefully on the windowsill facing the streets and muttering a spell to make them sit upright. The idea was that children walking with their parents would notice and experience a bit more colour in their day as they could wave hello to all the plushies who were waiting all day and all night for them to walk past.

After 1504 cases, a very unfortunate twenty-two deaths, and seventy-five days in isolation, New Zealand became coronavirus-free.

We had shown the world that this horrific virus was beatable when strict measures throughout the country were followed. Although we were aided by the fact that we lived in a bubble away from neighbouring countries and both our population and population density are relatively low, the sense of national pride was in every New Zealander when on June 8th, it was announced that the last person had fully recovered from the virus.

For the next two months, life was as we knew it pre-COVID. The sense of normality after such a long period of being in isolation almost felt alien to us, and this was aided by the fact that almost every other country in the world was still dealing with this horrible virus.

Then, this deadly disease struck us once again in August and I found myself once again waking up five minutes before my online classes and lazily attending all of them in my pyjamas.

Thankfully, around a month and a bit later, we found ourselves hugging our friends at school again. New Zealand had beaten the coronavirus, not once, but twice, making headlines once again. Up until today, four months after the last outbreak, there have been no community transmissions and everyone is now hoping for a sunny COVID-free Christmas (the southern hemisphere experiences a sunny Christmas as opposed to a snowy one).

I sincerely hope the best for everyone and everyone’s families out there still currently in quarantine. Please keep yourself safe by socially distancing, wearing a mask, and following the advice of medical experts. New Zealand has shown it is possible to beat coronavirus if everyone plays their part in keeping each other safe, and I believe this is possible in other countries too.

Graduating

By Abigail Murphy age 18, Arlington, Virginia

In May, I sat on my elementary school field, masked and distanced from three friends. I’d slowly grown to know these people over four years of high school, in classrooms, hallways, blue library chairs, cross country courses. On that day, I saw them for four hours. I spent much longer than four hours on calls with them, but those calls were small in my mental quarantine timeline. Those calls were separated by boxes on our screens: screens many roads and a river apart. Sitting there, sharing words through masks and transferring glances through real, moving eyes, made more sense than any Zoom lesson I’d attended.

It was a month before my “drive-thru graduation,” but that small moment on the field was a culmination of every year of school I’d experienced. These friends I’d known for four years blurred with the pasts I’d lived on that elementary school field—seven-year-old me building a kingdom out of stray bamboo shoots, nine-year-old me running after a soccer ball and pretending to be Abby Wambach in a sea of boys, ten-year-old me helping my best friend memorize definitions of big, big words for a vocabulary test.

Seventeen-year-old me sat on a blanket facing three friends, masked, each twelve feet away, cautious. We brought our own watercolors and painted—each other, sea creatures, abstract scenes, colors lacking much thought but equipped with hidden feelings. We listened to music, and sometimes we sang along quietly.

And we talked. We talked in this place where our words could float in the air around us—because our words came from a mouth and not a screen.

Since that May day, I’ve had a few more of those small in-person moments, relearning how to understand a person far from a computer screen. In June, my high school principal handed me a diploma in the front seat of my car, and I officially graduated high school. My parents and sister were in the car with me, and we drove past cheering and waving high school teachers and staff. I hoped my eyes could show my huge smile through my mask.

If I had graduated in 2019, I would have been surrounded by friends and classmates throughout the whole ceremony. Afterwards, I could have cried in my friends’ arms and said goodbye to my teachers in person, taking photos next to them—with our entire faces and smiles showing.

But my informal, lonely graduation isn’t what haunts me. Graduation was only a small event amid months of loss and fear, months of learning how to become an adult in a broken world.

I went 25 weeks without hugging a friend before moving in with two of them in September.

Now it’s been eight weeks since I’ve hugged my family.

Back on March 13—my last day of in-person school—I drove to school like I had every morning for the last few months.

I crossed Chain Bridge, trying to sneak a glance at the beautiful, raging Potomac River as I went by.

I drove down DC’s Nebraska Avenue, the site of so many exhausting track practices, with my friends beside me. There, I tried to learn all of my school’s secrets from a senior. We created a fake reality TV show. I stopped running just to laugh a little harder at a joke. I tried to teach all of my school’s secrets to an underclassman.

I passed all those memories and thought about the future runs that I had assumed I still had time for. My eyes teared up as I kept my foot hovering between the gas and brake pedals. It’s ironic we waited so long for 2020, my senior year. This awful, terrifying, insulting year.

Back then, I was mourning the end of my high school experience and focused on what I’d lost while holding onto gratitude for what I had. I still feel all that loss, all that gratitude, but, now, the uncertainty of my future is what plagues me.

My future. It’s all so confusing now. The future became hard to imagine when I started measuring time in how long it’s been since I’ve hugged a friend.

I am a recent high school graduate grappling with a lack of goodbyes, but I’m also waiting to reenter a world radically changed by months of isolation, fear and death. I’m teetering on the edge of adulthood, and, frankly, I don’t know what that means because I may not receive the adulthood I always expected.

I’m going to college at some point in time—not this year, like I’d always envisioned.

Instead, I went from being student to graduate to staff member at my high school within a matter of months, spending a gap year doing environmental sustainability work.

Fighting climate change is what first taught me to deal with something like coronavirus. Pollution and disease both float in the air around us, largely unseen, and their full effects can only be understood through extensive studying—a studying where high schoolers have never had much control. Both present us with an inevitable, hard-to-understand doom.

My grade was born in the wake of 9/11. We’ve grown up facing constant reminders of a broken world: news notifications that there’s another active shooter somewhere, viral videos of the murder of another Black American, scorching hot summer days and winters without snow days, a stock market rapidly dropping. So, a nationwide lockdown because of a global pandemic doesn’t seem too shocking.

Before coronavirus, prom and graduation were two constants we had amid chaos. Losing those events definitely stung.

But a bigger constant we had was a future of possibility. When you’re locked down at home and the world a few feet away is changing in indeterminable ways, dreaming of possibility makes less sense.

Thinking about the future becomes nearly impossible.

Fear and gratitude bounce back and forth within me. They teach me how to move on in a world frozen in place.

Foreign Exchange

By Justin Li

He walked a few steps ahead of me on the Bund. In one gust, the air smelled of the briny Huangpu salt water. In the next, it smelled of dead pigs and chemicals.

“Martin, look. This is the old side of Shanghai.” He spoke out of obligation, like a tour guide, telling me about the history of the older architecture behind the trees and pointing across the river at the Oriental Pearl and the Jin Mao towers. I asked him how people got to the other side and he said that there were ferry boats and a shuttle tunnel with colorful lights and sound effects on the inside.

His voice was vague and apathetic. He wore Harry Potter-esque glasses, Adidas sweatpants with stripes on the side, and a grey hoodie, which he kept covered over his head. In his hand, the plastic grocery bag he carried swung with each stride, and I heard the contents shifting but couldn’t tell what was inside. The wind blew his hood off and he rushed to put it back on, as if he didn’t want me to see the back of his head. Unintentionally, I mimicked his reservedness, pressing my shirt down to stop it from showing the skin on my stomach.

He turned back to me sparingly, only looking to check if he hadn’t lost me in the crowds. When I did see his face, he was not unattractive; his facial features were not disproportionately large or small and his skin was neither perfect nor blemished. He walked cool, like an athlete. I tried to decide whether I had a crush on him or not.

In broken English, he asked me if I’d seen enough of the water, and I gleaned from the boredom in his posture that he was trying to tell me that he had. I told him that we could leave if he wanted to. He led me down the steps to the lower level platform by the street, away from the noisy crowds on the riverside. There, people wandered along a 12-foot wall of flowers. As I passed by, I brushed my fingers through the petals, which mixed into psychedelic waves of green, orange, and purple and stretched around the bend so that I couldn’t see the end.

“This is the Qingren de qiang. It means lover’s wall,” he told me in a mix of both languages as he walked towards a bench in the square. “It’s nothing special.” He sat and opened the plastic bag, revealing colorful packs of Chinese coconut candy and yogurt drinks inside. “My mom packed this for you.”

I reached my hand into the bag and pulled out one of the yogurts. The bottle was still fairly cold and dampened by condensation. The tart liquid rolled on my tongue just as I had remembered from my visits to China as a kid; I thought back on how my mom used to buy packs of the drink from the grocery store beneath our Chengdu apartment so we could have them with steamed buns or pastries for breakfast.

We took a cylindrical glass elevator up the Pearl Tower. Framed between thick cement pillars outside, the sky tried to be blue; the Shanghai smog ensured that it could not. His hoodie was black and he wore a bracelet, a braided one whose blue and white intertwined around his wrist. I caught a glimpse of it before he hid it in his sleeve.

At the top, with her hand gripped firmly around her father’s, a little girl touched one foot onto the glass floor as if the panel might loosen. As I watched tourists point their cameras downward to take photos of their feet floating way above the grass at the base of the structure, I wondered how many of them could stand on the glass until it would start to crack, and how many more you’d have to add for the floor to give way completely and cause them all to fall a thousand feet.

I asked if this was his first time up here and he told me no, that he’d been up here with his friends many times before because they knew that there would always be foreigners. He said that he didn’t get to see foreigners often. I saw some American students with University of Michigan sweaters by the elevator, and I knew I didn’t seem to be as interesting to my host as they were.
Again, he handed me snacks: rice crackers and lychee gummies. The river below circled halfway around us and moving through more city on either side, like the tortuous, wound up sensation of yearning for an attachment, with anything, but failing. Watching the crowd shuffle in front of us in silence, my inadequacy seemed as heavy as the Shanghai sky. I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted his food and the nostalgia that it brought me nonetheless.

Over the next few days, he took me to other touristy landmarks during the day and sequestered himself in his room when we returned home each night. On the night before I left, we visited Jing’an Temple, a single street block of sloping gold roofs and traditional architecture among a hundred blocks of metropolis; the surrounding towers of metal and glass seemed to stare pompously down upon the temple. I wondered whether the attraction was built as another tourist attraction in Shanghai or whether long ago, the city had been carefully built around the temple. I’d like to imagine that it was the latter.

He bought us a pack of incense sticks from a wooden stand in the courtyard. After my great-grandmother died, my mother had taught me that I was to light the yellow end and hold the stick from the red portion on the bottom, bow three times, and place them in the ash. After we’d both finished, we stood in front of the smoke for a while, watching the rows of tips glow.

That night, his parents cooked me a farewell dinner of red braised pork belly, sweet red bean soup, and other dishes usually reserved for special occasions. Against my host’s mother’s nudges and sighs, his father poured me a small shot glass’s worth of a strong Chinese alcohol and a cup of the same colorless liquid for himself. He encouraged me to drink, which I did. The bitter taste moved from the roof of mouth into my nostrils and burned all the way down my throat, where it remained for the next few minutes. After I’d helped them clean up, my host disappeared into his room as he’d done every other day this week.

Left by myself in their living room, I figured I’d do some homework, anticipating my return to America. I almost looked forward to the emptiness of my suburban neighborhood and the familiar sound of my garage door under the floor of my bedroom, and being alone, still, but at home. I carried my thick, hardcover, history textbook from my suitcase to their kitchen table and opened to pages filled with images of the conquest of the New World. From there, I moved through each line, word by word, feigning reading. I underlined a date or two and circled some names to convince myself that I was really doing anything productive.

I had gotten a quarter of the way through the chapter when I heard my host pad his slippered feet around the table and pull out the chair to my left. I looked up at him for a second and quickly turned my head towards the living room. In the dark window behind the couch, I saw our silhouettes on the same side of the table, a row of vacant chairs across from us. We were close enough that I could smell the fabric softener on his clothes. He had taken out his phone, and the tapping of his fingernails on the screen became background noise. We did not talk or look at each other. In the hallway, a key clicked inside a lock and a door closed; I presumed that the person across the hall had just returned home after a day of work or school. Behind our reflection in the window, the lives of other people played on the illuminated windows of neighboring buildings like programs on television screens. I couldn’t quite make out the characters but I could imagine them inside, wiping down kitchen tables, tucking children in, and getting ready for bed. My host remained at my side until I got through the whole chapter pretending to read and felt weary enough to excuse myself. As I collected my books, he told me goodnight.

The next morning, I left China early on a packed United flight no doubt full of tourists like me, heading home. Halfway, I opened the parting gifts my host’s parents had given me: egg custard tarts and purple sweet potato buns. They were nearly sickeningly sweet but I ate them all.

Justin Li is a rising senior at The Pingry School. He was born in New Jersey and has lived there his entire life. The recognition his writing has received include a regional American Voices Nomination and a national Gold Medal from Scholastics Art and Writing, as well as an Honorable Mention award from YoungArts. In addition, one of his pieces has been published in Issue 6.1 of the Maine Review. He also attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Workshop as a rising sophomore.

Sukriti

By Sukriti Sinha

In Hindi my name means beautiful creation. It means wisdom and grace. Flower petals and olive wood. the number seven, indecisive and unstable, a petal too large. A dark and dusty green, that of a deceased trunk. It’s the jazz on the streets of sleepy Portland, the smell of burnt bacon wafting into the street from a dingy looking pub. It’s rusted and iodized, like the skeleton of a façade.

Along with my house I inherited her name, but not her grandiose or whispering voice. She was the pure meaning of ‘Sukriti’, muted and unfurled like a cherry blossom. symmetrical, with every petal a replica of the next. Open rooms and windows as though calling the overlooked with open arms. a soft breeze whipping the pale curtains, as though she was ruffling her feathers. An air of acceptance to her that I could never understand, let alone recreate.

A towering mother, who protected us from the storms outside, an entity you could feel safe with. A hearth for a nature, but a scythe for a mind. The numerous facets of the diamond of a heart that I could never excavate, my vision blackened by the coal concealing it. The raging winds of the tempest easily whipping me away into an abyss. An abyss of unspoken insults and barking hellhounds. That’s how they did it, the storm clouds of uncertainty.

Soon she got weaker, as even titanium does. An air of acceptance mutating into an air of foreboding. Ceilings falling to the ground, walls caving in and heart flickering from the blow of the outside world until only the grandfather clock remained on the porch standing poker straight, showing how much time had really passed. Along with my house I solely inherited her name, the diseases of her old age and the drug to cure the malady that destroyed her.

My name has been twisted and turned into grotesque rip-offs more often than not, leaning towards being a block stuck in your throat rather than a whisper of mere air. In Sanskrit it means the trickling of water, the balance of nature, the fluid motion of a running cheetah and a soaring eagle. Sukriti churned down to Shukku. Plain Shukku. Ordinary Shukku. But no matter why the ceiling crumbled or why the grandfather clock stood unswerving on that cloudy day, I will forever remain me, myself and I. Sukriti.

Sukriti Sinha is an eighth grader living in North Texas. In her free time, she loves to read, write and play the violin, but her all-time favorite activity is sleeping. She was born in the drowsy town of Portland in spring and moved to Texas when she was eleven.

(Inspired by Sandra Cisneros)

Equals

By CC Avinger

“Feminism,” Sherry declares at lunchtime.
“Stupid boys,” Maria agrees.
From the other girls, consenting voices float above the table.
Biting my tongue, I pick at the table’s peeling red paint, revealing the rusted metal underneath.
I remain quiet.

My brothers are not stupid.
My father is not stupid.

“Team,” Coach addresses us two minutes after I’ve arrived at cross country practice that afternoon. “Varsity hits the forest today, JV goes to the coast. Girls, free run,” he says.

Chatter fills the room as my fellow runners lace up sneakers,
I tie my laces, too, but
I remain quiet.

My brothers are runners.
My father is a runner.

“Chelsea,” Coach calls, his voice echoing across the room.
“Run with the Varsity boys today.” I sigh. I knew to expect this.
They’re noisy as I approach.
I plaster a smile on my face, but
I remain quiet.

My brothers are brave.
My father is brave.

“So, how’s the chemistry project?” I ask Tucker, the exertion of keeping up with a pack of local champions causing my heart to pound in my ears.
“Hard,” Tucker responds. Most of the time I am scared to say anything at all because I worry that they won’t find my conversation interesting, so at first, I am elated to have spoken.
Then, Noah turns Tucker’s reply into innuendo, and they all laugh.
My face turns red from more than the exercise, and
I remain quiet.

My brothers are funny.
My father is funny.

“Hey, look at this!” Noah calls, and the boys stop running. Coach doesn’t want us taking breaks, but I have no power against the group.
“It’s a condom!” he says, and they gather around him.
Noah pulls it up to his elbow and the guys cheer, but, turning my back,
I remain quiet.

My brothers would know what to say.
My father would know what to say.

What am I supposed to say? I wonder, hugging myself awkwardly.
What’s the cool response for a lone sophomore girl surrounded by junior boys?
I try to think of a witty comment. I want to be cool, but
I remain quiet.

My brothers could help me.
My father could help me.

“Hey, Chelsea.” Tucker comes over, an apologetic look on his face.
“I’m sorry about them,” he says, voice soft. Although I am grateful that Tucker has noticed how uncomfortable this turn of events has made me, he has only reminded the others of my presence. I give him a tight-lipped smile, but I remain quiet.

My brothers care about me.
My father cares about me.

“Hey, Chelsea,” Noah says, his amusement obvious as he stumbles over. The others boys watch. “High five!” He raises his latex-wrapped arm in the air.
I shake my head. “Aww, come on,” he complains.
Although I know a cool girl would have agreed,
I remain quiet.

My brothers are cool.
My father is cool.

The next day, Max spits a glob of phlegm as we run. It lands where my shoe meets the top of my sock. “Max! You spit on my shoe!” I protest. “Blech!”
Oliver grins. “What if it wasn’t spit?” Another raunchy joke.
Max lifts his hand in a solemn oath. “I promise I did not have sexual intercourse with Chelsea’s shoe.” The guys laugh uproariously.
I walked right into that one. I shouldn’t have said anything, I think, shaking my head, but
I remain quiet.

My brothers are the noisiest people I know.
They get it from my father. My three guys are never quiet.

But why am I so uncomfortable around these guys?
Is something wrong with me?
Days pass and, as Coach requires, I still run with them. Every day, however,
I remain quiet.

My brothers see me as their equal.
My father sees me as his equal.

These boys didn’t ask for my presence.
Why shouldn’t they be allowed to joke around just because I’m here?
But why does it feel so wrong?
Why should they treat me differently because I’m a girl?
Girls are not better than boys.
Boys are not better than girls.
We are, after all, equals.

CC Avinger is a high school senior. Along with editing her school newspaper, she enjoys exercising outside. A lover of all forms of words, CC Avinger is excited to have published her first historical fiction novel, The Angel Oak. Find it at https://www.amazon.com/Angel-Oak-Caroline-Coen/dp/B08KSMGK9Y/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+angel+oak&qid=1605304978&sr=8-2

Love and Other Irreconcilable Lies

By Natasha Lim

You never thought you’d be here, but the clock hanging askew on the opposite wall reminds you otherwise. Its hands push forward the way you wish you could. This time will be different, you tell yourself in a last-ditch attempt to soothe this building anxiety. This could not have been further from the truth, but then again, what do you know? You’re sixteen, and you left school for this. You could be writing shitty poetry in the back of physics class right now. Instead, you’re writing shitty poetry in the holding room of a courthouse, white walls bordering you in. You wonder if divorce court is intentionally designed to be this bleak, this clean solemnity that signals: We handle this like adults.

So do you feel like an adult now? The severity of the present is jarring enough to catapult you back to playground days, back when setting the table for four wasn’t a blasphemous sin. You’re starting to regret ever wanting to grow up. You cross your arms and hug your backpack tight, hyperaware of the irony present between your falsified maturation and your awkward schoolgirl uniform. You stick out like a sore thumb in the courthouse, your adolescent disposition warning of a naivety these white walls haven’t welcomed in a while. The way the hands of time mock you from across the room forces you to stew in your own rage; you fiddle impatiently with your phone and try to focus on the positive—this means the yelling will finally stop. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?

The judge waves you and your brother in, and this silent calamity triggers your fight or flight response. You’ve never wanted so badly to escape as you do right now, so you settle for dissociating out of your body (for running away like you always do). You feel like you just walked into an active battlefield—smug and frustrated expressions threaten to implode, and all you can do is try to find shelter.

He starts: I know this must be difficult for you.

You hear: I can’t believe your parents brought you to this.

He drops: We’ve reached a separation agreement with both parties.

You hear: This is how love dies.

He pleads: I hope you can understand and support your parents.

You hear: You’re the adults now.

You stare back at the judge, mentally present but emotionally elsewhere. You feel numb numb numb, like your feelings finally decided your wasteland of a heart was too barren, too empty; they packed their bags and you’ve been searching for them since. A prolonged silence hangs between everyone, but you refuse to relieve it. You’ve been expecting a catastrophe, some seismic upturn in the world.

But all you feel is a change in your soul—something shifts ever so subtly, so quietly that only you can hear it move. You dig deep and try to uncover what you’ve lost, but all you find is an emptiness where home should fill. Where no amount of love could ever parch your thirst for safety. Where love doesn’t exist, clearly, because if it did, you wouldn’t be praying for a reprieve. If love existed, it wouldn’t be reduced to tan lines where wedding bands used to be, or the stack of settlement forms laid out in front of you right now.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of trepidation settling in your heart, of bitterness planting its seed in your soil. This unassuming placidity clutches onto you, but it’ll be days before it sinks its teeth into you. You’ll spend the rest of your newfound adulthood wondering if you’ll ever break free from it, if time would ever lend a hand to liberate this fear. If love—the idea of it, the home you so desperately craved for— will ever mean the same again.

You walk out of that courthouse unscathed, but you’re struggling to piece it all together. Is this what love is supposed to look like? You don’t think you ever want to find out.

Natasha Lim is a psychology student from Singapore. She writes poetry and prose, and is an editor for the Interstellar Literary Review. In her spare time, she enjoys drinking copious amounts of coffee and reading books that make her cry.