Voices from Asian America During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Part One
The Unmargin Collective is creating a space for Asian Americans to share their stories and perspectives during the COVID-19 Pandemic. This is the first collection of voices in an ongoing series. These short essays and op-eds were edited by various members of the Collective.
The coldest days in winter are the brightest ones in Minnesota. When we first arrived as refugees, many Hmong people were shocked by this fact. The bitter, biting, unrelenting cold happened always on the days when the light reflecting off the white everywhere blinded you the most. In these weeks of the Coronavirus, when the whole of the world is afraid of death and dying, sickness and despair, our healthcare, familial, and community systems overloading, many Hmong families and our Asian American friends--which in these parts include many families like my own who first came here as refugees of war--are also blinded by the violence and racism of our neighbors. In Woodbury, a suburb several miles away from my home, Hmong families have found notes on their doors. The notes read, "We're watching you fucking chinks take the chinese virus back to china. We don't want you hear infecting us with your diseases!!!!!!!!!!" The notes are signed, "Your friendly neighborhood." Not far from Conny's Creamy Cone, my childhood place of joy, an elderly Hmong man was beaten up by a group of teenagers "afraid" of a virus he may be carrying because of the dark of his hair and the color of his skin. My children have not been to school in the last three weeks. They see the spring rains falling, the snow melting away, and grass beginning to green. Like all young, growing things, they clamor to enter the new season, to venture further from home. On our slow walks through our neighborhood on the east side of St. Paul, the sound of cars coming or going, the bark of a dog, a sudden voice makes me afraid. I'm scared of a time when their mother's small body cannot protect my little ones from the words, the actions, the hurt that will come. As the days grow longer and the light of the sun stronger here in Minnesota, I am more aware of all the things I cannot see in the brightness of the unfurling days, the dangers of known and unknown viruses, the pandemic of racial injustice that this country was founded on, expounded on, and continues to feed off of.
-Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer working from Saint Paul, Minnesota.
On March 26, 2020, I wrote on Twitter: “I’ve been asked to write about the anti-Asian acts/sentiment and Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric. Both are so stupid and dangerous: Because they’re dangerous I’ll write about the topic but what new is there to say about such stupidity?”
The anti-Asian Covid-19 sentiment and tropes go all the way back to when Asian Americans first came here. Back in the nineteenth century, we were first associated with disease and vermin, with invading and taking things from white America, with a foreign fifth column threat, and all that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And it wasn’t just anti-Asian laws or slurs; there were lynchings, beatings; houses, businesses were looted and burned. In 1877 Chico they tried to burn and destroy Chinatown. In 1885, in the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre, whites killed 28 Chinese and burned 78 Chinese homes. In the early twentieth century, we were the Yellow Peril, and in 1924, the Asian Exclusion Act banned all immigration from Asia. And then, in World War II, 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps and branded a threat to national security, and anti-Japanese war posters portrayed the Japanese as rats, snakes and insects.
But our common Asian American history also tells me this: Our forebears have often suffered far worse than we are experiencing now, and the strength and resilience they demonstrated is part of our heritage and can help sustain us in this difficult current moment. Whether fourth or third generation Americans like me or a recent immigrant, we are all so often considered F.O.B.’s. But because the United States is our home and not our home, we can use this knowledge to see see not only America’s entrenched racism but also its limiting myopia and inability to see the world beyond our borders. We can recognize a sense of humanity that goes beyond the petty currents of nationalism. We can understand and empathize with the racism faced by other people of color, and we can make their fight ours—even if, sometimes, they do not recognize what we share or see a common bond with us. We can understand that immigrant children in cages are children in cages and that those children are our children, just as the unarmed black teenager shot by police is our fellow citizen, our fellow American.
It is our uniqueness, our status that hovers between American and non-American, that provides us with an insightful vision of America and the world, of who we are and who we can be. So, contrary to the sentiment with which I opened this piece, we need to keep telling America that we are here, we aren’t going anywhere, and we are part of you, despite your desire to deport or disavow or disease us. Our history is your history, and if we know that history better than you, shame on you. We have fought for this country, taught your children, grown and offered you our food, cleaned your hotel rooms, been elected to Congress, and we are serving now as doctors and health care workers helping to heal your loved ones and combating this very disease you would mistakenly associate with us. Whatever slurs or acts you throw against us, we are braver and stronger than you know and we will not be cowed.
-David Mura’s latest book is A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing.
I’m sheltering in place with my septuagenarian immigrant parents in Elk Grove, California, and we’ve fallen into a comfortable routine: I get up at 7:30, and find my dad sitting in the dark and in the kitchen, on his laptop, working on whatever it is that he’s working on. I get dressed and make breakfast, making sure I make enough for him and mom, who will be getting up shortly. The better part of my day is spent doing the online version of my high school teaching job: teaching classes, prepping for the next ones, attending virtual faculty meetings, all of which I do in my parents’ guest bedroom, laptop propped on my childhood upright piano. In the afternoon we take long walks around the neighborhood, with some time spent at a nearby park. My parents live in one of those retirement communities for active senior citizens, where all the houses are uniform and yards are pristinely manicured. Aside from some neighbors walking their dogs, the streets are quiet and empty. My mom, always the one in a hurry, marches ahead of me and dad, who often like to sing together while we tag along behind. Most recently, we went through as many national anthems that we knew at the top of our heads. My mom, who would usually shush us out of embarrassment, pretends to ignore us. In the evenings we have dinner together with the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour on in the background. Mom cooks and dad washes the dishes. If I don’t have virtual hangouts with friends or virtual dates with my boyfriend, we find a movie to watch together before getting ready for bed.
These day-to-day pleasures don’t block out the existential dread. Of course I want people to stop dying and suffering from this pandemic, and I am enraged by the White House’s handling of it. I fear the oppressive forces that are exploiting this time of emergency, the hate crimes against Asian Americans that are raging, the spike in gun purchases that betrays the ugliest part of U.S. culture. And yet, I know that compared to most, I occupy a position of immense privilege, as someone who is housed and employed. My personal health needs are not in crisis right now, nor are those of the members of my household. I don’t have children to raise and I’m not on the front lines fighting this pandemic, so those responsibilities aren’t added stressors for me.
So it is with that acknowledgement that I hesitate to say that I am also cherishing this time of sheltering in place. I value this time with my parents, this opportunity to offer them some care that they had always shown me, learning things about them that I hadn’t known (really, my dad’s knowledge of national anthems is encyclopedic). I am realizing the extent to which my life before COVID-19 was overly scheduled and sleep deprived and am confronting the list of things that I had to do but never wanted to, of the things that I had always said I wanted to do “if I had the time.” I am finding myself more deliberate and present at each moment of my day and making more of an effort to check in with people I care about. This opportunity to slow down, to take stock of what’s most essential, is translating to my work as a teacher. I am focusing on what’s most important-- which is to stay connected with my students so that we can maintain our sense of humanity-- and not worrying about “falling behind” or feeding some previously established bottom line. This crisis is reminding me of what motivated me to be a teacher in the first place. The main challenge for me is missing human touch; I had never pegged myself as a touchy-feely person, but being deprived of it is making me realize the extent to which touch is one of my love languages. Yet another thing I have learned about myself.
Indeed, this moment in our collective history is truly terrifying-- I spent too many years studying totalitarianism and reading dystopian fiction to paint a rosy picture. But at the same time, it can also be the revolution we’ve been needing. Plenty of folks have been writing about how this global pandemic is exposing the failures and injustices of capitalism. That universities and colleges can suspend the use of SAT and ACT scores for admission demonstrates that those tests were a sham in the first place, and we can hope that we can finally get rid of them altogether. An argument against universal health care will be impossible to justify as this pandemic reaches its peak. There will come a point when prisoners and detainees have to be released. So along with my dread is also my righteous hope that this is the time to get rid of shit that wasn’t serving us and to never look back, and to put in place things that we always needed.
I am indebted to the POC, queer, trans, Indigenous, refugee, disability rights, workers’ rights activists who have been my teachers. It is because of this community that I don’t call this pandemic the apocalypse. Just as the 2016 election was only a shocker for those ensconced in a liberal American fantasy, this pandemic is only an apocalypse for those who bought into the narrative of American exceptionalism. Yes, things are going to get really, really bad. Even those who condemn American empire can fear the suffering that will come from its fall, if that is indeed what we are witnessing. But plenty of us come from people who have been through worse, many times over. It is this ancestral knowledge, combined with collective care that we’ve had to practice in order to survive, that will get us through this. In some ways, we have been training for this moment.
The thought of returning to our former “normal” makes me want to cry. I have to maintain hope that we will build something better at the other side of this.
-Catherine Fung is a writer and educator based in Oakland, California.