Non-Fiction

I tried to hold it in, but a cough escaped my lips. A classmate joked, “Ha-ha, you have the coronavirus!” I rolled my eyes, but laughed along.

Back then, who would have thought there would be a day I wouldn’t be in the classroom, chatting with my friends? Now, I would give anything to be there. A few months ago, when my parents went shopping, I would follow them lazily, reading a book as they walked through aisles. Today, only my dad goes grocery shopping and the rest of us stay home. And people wear face masks and gloves when looking for food, which is sometimes hard to find.

Then and now. The significance hits me like a tidal wave coming toward the shore. If I could go back in time to the day before the lockdown, I’d spend every moment I could with my friends, knowing that soon we’d be chatting mostly on Google Hangouts.

Being quarantined sucks. It’s like buildings, friends, and family have all been locked inside a computer screen, and at first, it was cool, but now, it’s tiring, and I wish things could go back to normal.

The coronavirus used to be a vague, undefined crisis that we never thought would affect us, something that kids would joke about. Now, we have to stay in our houses, and not go out much.

When people are getting sick, and possibly dying, it’s so sad to think about. The pictures of doctors after a long day of work really show how serious and scary the virus is. This is also why I still look back to the past, wondering how we’ve come to this crazy time.

It’s hard not to look to the past and look at all the things we miss or things we are going to miss, like summer camps. But in the hardship the world is dealing with, there is always a peak on the mountain. My brother and I have bonded more because we have more time to play together and talk. Online school has made me more organized and more skilled with technology. I have more time to go for a run or ride my bike.

I even have more time to write. The pandemic has encouraged me to get out my journal and just let my writing flow. Writing is such a great way to express myself, the pen scratching the paper calms my cluttered brain down.

My brain has been more cluttered than ever. Sometimes I feel myself get so upset over the slightest thing. Being quarantined has made me miss school, friends, and just being able to go places even more than I ever thought I would. I’m an optimistic person, but now it’s hard to view the positive moments during such a sad time. During the coronavirus, I’ve learned to live by this quote. “Be strong now because things will get better. It might be stormy now but it can’t rain forever.”

This quote really means something to me because it reminds me to look for the sunshine in the storm, it reminds me to be strong, because it will get better.

The coronavirus is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we have to cower in its presence. Don’t take things for granted. Be brave, because it can’t rain forever.

While we were packing after a one-day notice of dorm evacuation, my roommate, keeping an audio log, asked me, “What do you think the has pandemic given you? What has it taken from you?”

Trying to keep in cheeky character, I responded, “I’ve gained some nice memes! And I’ve lost half my stocks.”

We shared a laugh and continued the impromptu interview. A few hours later, I hugged friends goodbye for the year and drove home to begin my extra week of spring break. Oh, and we also found a dead body on campus earlier on the same day. To my idle disappointment, I felt nothing. In between a friend’s suicide the week before and a global crisis, the world, as far I was concerned, was ending. I… couldn’t care.

I spent my two-week spring break obediently at home. I read the news five times a day. I drafted disgruntled letters to God. I passed by Dad in endless conference calls trying to finagle the supply chain for his hospital. I feared for my parents when they went out for groceries after reading reports of hate crime toward Asian-Americans.

I applied to a scholarship fifteen minutes before the deadline because I needed to feel something. The panic of losing precious time; the frustration I couldn’t type faster; the blistering urge to share a story.

A week later I was notified I was a winning recipient. I don’t remember what I wrote, but it was probably all lies because my “current extracurriculars” definitely do not “demonstrate my passion for energy resources.” (I feel remorse for making fun of petroleum majors I knew when oil prices crashed into the negatives.)

Rehabilitating from emotional necrosis has been challenging. It’s been two months. The remainder of the semester has passed as a monotonous gradient. I’ve lost five pounds. I’ve lost a coveted summer internship. I’ve lost my excitement for the future. This pandemic has taken many things from me. The memes haven’t been that good either.

It’s an elementary concept we share this planet together. Our world was brought to a halt by pathogenic chance and bucked into disarray by the fated fragility of our modernity. We shoulder this story in human history not as a singular narrative, but as it should be during a flashpoint of politics, prayers, and paychecks – a scattering of voices. Frontline nurses, bickering officials, idiotic partiers, struggling workers, confounded scientists, despondent students. We have composed an epitaph for whenever this era ends:

What’s tomorrow going to be like?

We’ve all individually asked this, but never together as a modern world; we share a held breath for the same unknown and uncontrollable. From that, the pandemic has given me something: the certainty of uncertainty. We may be the authors of our own stories, but life is a fickle editor. Embracing the mortality of our plans and prophesies is hard, but pretending we are masters of destiny is fatal. So, I have been given another canvas to illustrate my future. I receive this with shaking, open hands.

Covid brought about devastating consequences. Forced us to look at the bright side and appreciate things we often take for granted like family time. Often we leave it up to chance or reschedule because we don’t get paid at the end of the day for something that is so priceless. Unlike the procrastination of homework and projects, life is too short to reschedule or have a deadline extension.

As a sister, eldest of five children I have realised how much time we waste as a family or siblings doing our own thing only coming together when food is being served. The lockdown taught me that it is important to have intimate family moments building stronger relationships. The lockdown made me renew or rekindle the relationships I have with each family member. With schools out, I had to take the role of a teacher with two of my eldest siblings. They are at the same level at school. Working together to achieve one goal until schools open and even after has reinforced what we all know inside our hearts. We need each other emotionally, mentally, and physically. Through studying together I have realised that everyone is comfortable  voicing out their weaknesses so that we turn them into strengths. There is something about being vulnerable inside a family set up that’s comforting, knowing that family has your back and asking stupid questions is a sign of intelligence. I get to know them better through the jokes and laughter we share, and the feeling we have for one another to succeed is awesome.

While I continue to look at the bright side I’m reminded of a Shona proverb,’’Kushata kwezvimwe ndokunaka kwezvimwe’’ meaning ‘’the bad outcome of one thing is the good outcome of another.” Since the beginning of lockdown we have had uninterrupted power. Before long you would wake up to see it gone and we would be using firewood to cook or heat up bathwater. It’s almost as if the government is bribing us to stay inside. Laugh out loud.

Walking into town is like walking onto the set of ‘’ I am Legend.” You keep thinking zombies are going to pop out of somewhere with streets deserted. Other than that I noticed the streets are cleaner, no litter. The air is even cleaner. Makes ask. Do humans really destroy everything they touch so much that we need a pandemic to reduce all the gases we release into the air, that in turn kill us? We are better than that.

Looking at the bright side I realise that somewhere along the line, it goes dim. The virus robbed us of the chance to say goodbye to our loved ones properly, and undid age old tradition which had become a doctrine in some cultures. Sign that we can adapt through anything if push comes to shove and we do not live and survive on luck.

On my first day of junior year, my mother tells me that this is the year that I become the main character. It’s time for me to prove my worth, to embark on the hero’s journey through Advanced Chemistry Lab and Honors Precalculus and AP U.S. History. And I try—I slog through homework, fall asleep on the subway each morning, cradle plastic cups of iced coffee like precious rubies—but then the setting changes suddenly; I think the showrunner has stepped down and been replaced.

In March of my junior year, I am demoted to a secondary character. I imagine watching my televised self, lost and unaware. My mother, my father, and I glue our eyes to the television screen as death tolls tick higher and higher. Each day we sit on the same couch while cameras sweep the globe. We stare straight ahead, seeing everything and processing nothing. I am beginning to think that we aren’t even secondary characters anymore; we are viewers. Fear takes the center stage.

Prior to becoming a main character and then losing it, I spent the entirety of eighth grade watching Chinese television shows with my mother. At dinnertime, we did not speak, instead watching scenes unfold on television across our dishes of bok choy and chicken. During car chases and commercial breaks, I focused my attention towards my rice. It was so much more than a method to improve my language skills, but I phrased it that way anyway, perhaps because secondary characters are rarely nuanced. It was just a funny quirk, how I watched 如果蜗牛有爱情 instead of Law and Order: SVU.

And so we move into a new season. I download Zoom and frown at myself through my webcam, covertly switching to Gallery View. I learn that I crinkle my eyebrows while talking, that I have a tendency to clasp my hands as though in prayer when I’m trying to think of the right word, that my hair falls in curtains when I’m not looking. I am entranced by myself through the screen, this familiar and foreign girl.

I wait for the plot twist, the revelation of a parallel universe or amnesia or a bad dream, but instead I am left wringing my hands and staring at the screen until my eyes burn, until my lips are raw from biting. I wonder if this is character development, if my unyielding yearning for normalcy says something about me. My laptop screen becomes my second home; each night, I FaceTime my friends and smile at their pixelated faces. Still, I keep reaching for the TV remote, but I can never find it. This channel refuses to change.

Most Chinese dramas are about forty episodes per season. I am an expert in patience; my mother and I have waited for hours just to see our favorite couples finally get together, to see our heroes reach their climactic triumphs. This is how we have survived till now. We have waited, we are waiting, and we will continue to wait. No plot twist is coming but we’ll keep watching anyway. We’ve come this far.