Non-Fiction

I have only seen one human being in over a week. Only one person that I have interacted with in any significant way since I arrived home from college. I forget I exist, mindlessly floating from one side of my hotel room to the other, with no one to remind me that my words and actions have some tangible impact on the world. Quarantine in Singapore is different. I am to wait out the two week incubation period of COVID-19 in a hotel room before I return to my family, ensuring their safety from the virus I could have invited home from college. It is an all-expenses-paid getaway, courtesy of Singaporean taxpayers, if you will. Except I am not getting away. I am stuck; suffocatingly alone and silent in this too-white hotel room I was ferried to upon touchdown. I try to drown out the static with music and college lectures – they don’t break my torpor, but at least it is not so quiet anymore.

Warm food is left at my door by an invisible man. I hear his light tread approach with the squeak of a cart in tow, the shift in pace as he slows just enough to place the tray in its designated spot and ring my doorbell, and then the disappearing sound of his footsteps and existence. When I open the door to collect my meals, the only signs that anyone has been on the luxurious red carpeting in front of my door just seconds before are the tray of food and the already disappearing impressions of my invisible man’s footsteps on the carpet.

Mornings and evenings are spent on the balcony with my coffee cup for company, listening for the sounds of a world that is utterly unreachable. Some mornings, my neighbor emerges from the glass doors of room 918 and leans against the railings of his balcony as I do- a stout Asian man, likely double my age. A “Hi” struggles to leave my mouth before getting caught behind my downturned lips as we make eye contact, and wordlessly we exchange an acknowledgement of the others’ presence. I look away quickly; it feels uncomfortable to be seen after spending so much time blending into the walls and sheets of my hotel room. We are lovers for two weeks only, sharing and relishing the three seconds of intimacy passed between our eyes in the morning sun. A thick, unspoken gratitude hangs in the air between our balconies, and I will never know his name.

I was perturbed by learning that my country had recorded its first case of Covid19 and a month later, numbers are burgeoning .The question that keeps me up in the dead of night is, what if this is just the beginning?

Quarantine is a fancy word to those with loads of food and peaceful homes, but it isn’t to people like me with abusive fathers and anxiety disorders. It’s hard to stay home when food is found by crossing borders or pushing rubble with bulldozers.
The hours slowly tick by and I feel like a prisoner doing life without parole,
Anybody there hello??
When I go shopping, the women in the markets are gone,
As well as the ladies found by the salon.
Children no longer play in the street; do they have anything to eat?
It’s only me and my silhouette, so I go back inside to live everyday like every day.

People have given up moving around, having fun or traveling as a quid pro quo for staying alive and even though my government is moving up and down, many are tired of the status quo. They call trying to keep people away from the streets police brutality. Is it? I cannot put the blame on anybody as the world is in a helter skelter situation and needs a hug.

Before this pandemic, I never went to school, or church, or work. Consequently, the only thing that this virus has taken away from me is “hope”. Hope that I’ll be granted a scholarship or find a job or just leave the house and be free from torment. There is just nowhere to run. I can’t help but think about the apocalypse, and if that happens, I am happy I attained something, I wrote this essay and somebody read it.

Wearing masks is now obligatory and no one should fall by the wayside because we look like teenage mutant ninja turtles ready to fight. I am Michelangelo.
The silver lining is everybody will emerge a better person and learn to appreciate things we once took for granted, like touring freely or just visiting friends and family.

Well, —I am listening to Avicii’s song and going back to bed, wake me up when it’s all over.

 

 

An apocalypse is brewing. The adult-toothed news anchors lunged at the television, eating their scripts and roundhouse kicking their directors, shouting at us civilians to stock up on Campbell’s Spaghetti Canned Pasta, juicy, ripe potatoes, and fresh baby corn before the Second Coming. So Mami and I, we trek to the Whole Foods in Union Square on a Saturday, tugging along an Ikea laundromat bag, mosquito repellent, dry figs, a yellow raincoat, and my brother.

Outside, the wind wonks plastic bags and spatters them in potholes. A wood duck hits an external car mirror and explodes into a carcass. The neighborhood Maine Coon who normally hides behind recycling bins abducts a squirrel. The biome warns of an omen of impending doom with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the winter sun and yet we trek on, complacent with the pandemic being a “just China-thing” at the moment but also feeling like the main characters in a Tom Cruise apocalypse film victim to dramatic irony. At the Whole Foods, Mami whispers for me to go find a few cartons of chicken-flavored Cup Noodles, maple syrup (the zero sugar one), and toilet paper. In the paper goods aisle, naked shelves, one homosapien, hauling away, in the arch of his elbow, the last jumbo Charmin Ultrastrong box. I sprint for the ramen and produce aisles, fearing that the Cup Noodles and alphonso mangoes were also licked clean, some primitive instinct mixed with the human-made buzz of impending catastrophe telling me that it’s either I gather half a year’s supply of food, or I perish.

After Saint Patty’s day, they canceled school until further notice. Ms. Superintendent bathed us in mineral rose water and assured us that the decision to close is simply a proactive measure made in conjunction with Health officials. Zoom University commenced on the next Tuesday. Mr. History and Ms. Math Teacher film themselves in front of a popcorn white wall stained yellow with cooking oil. In the background, their beagles and rottweilers bark at mailmen, their babies spit cinnamon oatmeal on the floor and throw forks at granite countertops, and their wives pursue their chatty Tuesday morning face mask routines. Mr. History waves the custom biker’s skin suit he mentioned being excited about getting a few weeks back, in front of his camera lens. I feel like a fungus.

It is strange to hear the voices of school people echo in my room, the holy chamber that I plop into when I come back from school and want to privately cry and sulk about a bad final exam presentation, or a failed Calculus test. An extension of my mind refuses to turn on my camera and allow school kids to notice the Valentine’s Day hearts pasted on my northern California coastline tapestry, the University of Chicago panorama hooked to my bulletin board, the photo booth reels documenting the times I painted my face like an e-girl and thought I looked hot, the “every evil plan needs an evil genius” sticky note on my eyebrow mirror.

Everyday, at 9:25 am, for fitness, I do planks, Russian twists, and push-ups on the hardwood floor of my room. My elbows and forearms burn into bruised checkerboards after day one and I wish for the mushy, marshmallow yoga mats stocked in my school’s fitness center. In Spanish, History, English, Physics, and every-other-class-on-the-face-of-the-planet, it’s worksheet after worksheet after worksheet. We are told that it is best to uphold the illusion of learning. So we turn and turn and persist.

Days mush together. I go blind to the distinct characteristics of school days, the weekends, classwork, and homework. I threw myself against the parlor window yesterday when I realized that I have not left the nine rooms of my house for a month. I used to plop outside at least twice a day to retrieve fresh mail, but the prospect of being in direct contact with corona germs has made me a prisoner of my own self imposed (and, in some ways, mandatory) hermitage.

I refuse to melt into a couch potato, binging every possible French film and bearded dragons National Geographic documentary, and so I occupy myself in writing narratives about spunky, free explorers and pulling the ears and legs of my brother (we fought the other day on who had the right to the last blood orange).

Meanwhile, the schoolwork piles, and the close proximity of college application season stirs anxiety. The SAT lords hung juniors over a boiling jug of magma when they canceled the March exam, and I roll whispered, selfish prayers to God at night, saying that I wish for this isolation to end so that I am not left to mellow the fear of my future in solitary confinement.

I want to poke my friends again but the mantra six foot distance, six foot distance, six foot distance, social distancing, please, degeneratoes (!), thrums a constant reminder of my mandatory desolation. Little celebrities try to tell me that they, too, are suffering in quarantine with their seagaia ocean domes and private spas and I laugh out loud at a screen.

I eat, tolerate school, lounge around in a blanket burrito, listen to the yells of those who are dying outside of my bubble (and, consequently, feel like a fruitless sack of meat), tune in for the daily address of the Coronavirus taskforce, and then sit and sit and sit and sit and sit. #QuarantineRoutine. All while the men on television lollygag, they’re so bumfuzzled. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy feels as if it is about to be loosed upon the world.

 

 

Author’s Note: This piece contains allusions to William Butler Yeat’s Second Coming, which is now in the public domain. This poem has been coming to mind a lot recently and, in my opinion, mirrors the rooted fear of the coronavirus pandemic perfectly. 

i didn’t think i was an extrovert
until my state basically shut down
and i stopped being able to regulate myself
with all the new regulations

i didn’t realize how much i needed
the in between interactions
reading in crowded classrooms
paragraphs at a time, not chapters

lunchtime conversation
to tune out half of
and play twenty questions
or finish lyrics of lorde songs

i can make up the big things
my teachers have google classroom
ap tests are online now
and i probably was never getting that job

it’s the little things—
not worrying about how much tp i use,
weaving my way through crowded hallways—
that i can’t make up

it’s the little things—
microscopic not quite organisms—
that I wish were made up
instead of real

The headline “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” published by The Wall Street Journal on February 3^rd inflamed public rage in China. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs required an official apology from the Journal but received little response. Steps taken by both governments to restrict the other’s media caused continued escalation, and the rising tension has aroused extensive concern.

In my perspective, behind this media and diplomatic event is in fact a cultural misconception. Let’s walk in each other’s shoes to examine the origin of the phrase “Sick Man” and its connotations in China and the West respectively.

In the Chinese’s minds, “the Sick Man of Asia” is directly related to the Opium Wars and China’s shameful hundred-year history of being colonized. During that time, many Chinese suffered from weak physical and mental conditions due to opium addiction.

However, most Chinese don’t know that “Sick Man” is far from an exclusive epithet for China. In fact, the term “Sick Man” originated in 1853 when Tsar Nicholas I of Russia first described the declining Ottoman Empire as “the Sick Man of Europe”, mainly referring to its economic issues. Later in 1896, “Sick Man” was used to describe the Chinese Qing Empire that faced social, economic, and political upheavals.

Interestingly, the first one who fixed a direct connection between “Sick Man” and opium addiction was Qichao Liang, an advocate of domestic reformation around the end of 19^th Century. He translated “Sick Man” into “bingfu” in Mandarin with elegant accuracy in his work Xinminshuo, a book that called for change in China. Liang is highly respected in Chinese history for his patriotism and influence, and “Sick Man” is still considered as a nasty national insult in China today.

In contrast, “Sick Man” has been used in the West throughout history to describe many countries without any direct connection to the Chinese Opium Wars. Recently, the phrase has been used regularly by media to discuss economic issues in countries such as Germany, Britain, Philippine, and Singapore. Even The United States was once called “the Sick Man of the Developed World” by Bloomberg News in 2017.

The Wall Street Journal itself published an article titled “The Sick Man of Europe Is Europe” in May 2019. As a result of  the pandemic COVID-19, perhaps the Sick Man of the World is the World now. Global collaboration is crucially needed to deal with this extremely challenging global issue.

To sum up, we’d better reexamine the “Sick Man” event by analyzing meanings of “Sick Man” under different historical and cultural contexts. Personally, I believe it might not only be a historic event in the area of media and diplomacy, but also become a typical case cited by cultural anthropologists. In this age of globalization, the issue of cultural differences requires from both sides mutual understanding as well as respect.

Sunday night. I had just returned to campus after spring break and I was in my best friend’s room. I asked, “So, what do you think about this Coronavirus thing? The last words my dad said to me before I left home were, ‘See you in a month!’ That’s crazy, right?” Before my friend had a chance to respond, her roommate retorted in an exasperated voice, “There’s no way we are going to be sent home. We’re not even the ones in danger. It is crazy.”

Friday morning. I lay on my bed, as my roommate got ready for class. My phone buzzed with the email that this entire week seemed to have been leading up to. The gist was, “No one knows what is happening. Because of that, you need to go home.” I packed up my entire room, my entire year, my entire life in less than two hours. I said goodbye to some of my closest friends, not knowing when I would see them again.

Friday night. Twelve hours later I was home with my parents and brothers, watching some terrible horror movie about a young woman fighting alligators in a hurricane. Later that night, I created a schedule to keep myself busy. If I could have control over anything, even just a piece of paper telling me when to wake up, I grasped for it. I started exercising. I started praying.

Monday night. I finished my “first” day of online classes. I finished my homework. I burned through my first of many candles to come. I began to sink into a state of emotionless repetition to ignore the discomfort and insecurity around me. I listened to my parents, my protectors, share fear and look depressed. I listened to my oldest brother worry endlessly about his cherished job.

Wednesday afternoon. I finished my classes. I finished my homework. My parents continued to work, and my oldest brother continued to work. It was just my other brother and me. This is always my favorite part of writing: introducing my other brother. His name is Peter. He has the best smile, he has the best laugh, and he has the best attitude. He also happens to have Down syndrome. Peter and I went outside to play with chalk. He began running around our driveway until I chased him down to tackle him. He got up, I chased him, he sat down to color. He got up again, I chased him again, and I caught him. As I tickled him, he leaned back into me. He smiled up at me with a breathtaking smile. I saw his beautiful eyes and their Brushfield spots looking directly into mine. Without words, he reminded me of how we can support each other and hold each other up, no matter our ability level, no matter our own, personal despair. While drawing with chalk and chasing my brother, I fell in love with life again.