Who Is Inside
(Your Pandemic)

The first time I heard was in late December 2019. I was on the phone with my mother and she was rapidly chatting about a deadly flu spreading across central China. My mother and her friends across Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan were non-stop talking about it over FaceTime and WhatsApp. The information they had (through Chinese social networks) and the information I had (through English social networks) were already telling two very different stories.

At first, I didn’t find much information on the symptoms or the impacts of this new virus. It sounded a lot like SARS and MERS, which, to me, existed more as memories of anti-Asian racism than a second coming. During SARS, I never once thought about getting sick as I was more concerned with the day-to-day hostilities from angry Albertans. Even now, more than fifteen years later, I was more aware of the external threat to my racial difference than to an attack on my immune system.

My difference and my bodily systems are interrelated, especially when there are increasing incidents of white settlers attacking Asian ones. Despite not knowing their actual heritage, the suspects explain their actions in the name of protecting public safety. Increasingly, people of Asian descent in North America are beaten up, spat on, and violently targeted. Under white settler logic, public safety does not include my difference.

I heard about the virus because my father lives in Hong Kong. He has lived there since 1974, fleeing with his wife (my mother) and their two oldest children from the Communist regime in China. Under international humanitarian law, the millions of people fleeing China’s authoritarian government were not deemed to be refugees. No country would take them, so Hong Kong grew exponentially beyond capacity and refugee camps were set up all over the city. Even then, the world looked on, reasoning that this was a national, and not an international issue. The willful inability to recognize Asian suffering as a global problem is not new.

Canada, like many white settler societies from the United States to Australia for the past two hundred years, preferred to imagine their nationals, be it refugees or citizens, as whites only. Early Asian settlers in these societies were subject to fear-mongering and dehumanization from the state and their neighbours, in what is commonly referred to as “yellow peril” in North America. From labour exploitation and exclusionary taxation to internment, Asian suffering has never been legible here.

I heard about the virus because my father has been in and out of hospitals since fall 2019. In an act of solidarity with the surge of student protests, he was active in marching with the millions of citizens who opposed the controversial extradition bill and the encroaching heavy hand of China making its way into Hong Kong politics. During the increasingly violent escalations between demonstrators and police, my father had a heart attack while running away from police-released tear gas. He collapsed in the street and strangers brought him to the hospital.

While we were awaiting news on whether we needed to leave for Hong Kong, my mother informed me that he had two stints put in and was doing much better. No need to visit. Not yet. Finish your term and go visit him in the summer. Her fear was that if we went during a politically tumultuous time, we would not be able to return.

I heard about the virus because my father then had a stroke. My 77-year-old mother bought herself a plane ticket, but needed to get her final affairs in order. She just got a new dog and wanted to wait for him to turn twelve weeks old to get fully vaccinated. I flew to Vancouver the week before she was supposed to leave to see her off. The fear of the virus was already in Vancouver as news was quickly spreading beyond central China and into Hong Kong and most of the neighbouring Asian countries and cities. My mother was preparing for this trip like it was her last. I came to help her consolidate her banking accounts, her will, and most importantly for her, the well-being of her new dog. I was going to take him back with me to Ontario.

When we got to a near empty Vancouver airport, we were told the dog, a six-pound ball of fur, was suddenly too big for the cabin. No slurs were used, but I felt covered in the common and unspoken residue of being unfairly singled out. It unfolds on the micro level and it is imbued through the systemic level. Sometimes this residue appears after somebody says something so unconscious and deeply rooted that nothing you say will ever pierce their thoughts about you and “your kind.” Sometimes this residue splashes off of someone who is proving how “woke” they are by going out of their way to infantilize you. Spending three days in Vancouver in January, I felt this residue all over my face and body as we prepared for my mother’s departure. It was remarkably familiar. Other people’s repressed hostilities and unreasonable fears were leaving marks all over us. From airline staff to strangers in stores, people moved their bodies away out of fear. They looked scared (or was it disgusted?) to have to talk to us for longer than necessary. This is how we now treat each other in cramped aisles at the grocery stores or in line anywhere. There are government-led snitch lines set up in place to watch each other and I wonder how this is going to disproportionately impact racialized people. This residue leaves traces everywhere.

I had to leave the dog behind. A white man and his miniature poodle ahead of us had no problems at the Air Canada ticket counter, but I was stopped. My mother pleaded with them, but the counter agent and her supervisor said that our family problems were not hers to deal with. They said they had to think of the safety and well-being of all the customers. For them, that clearly did not include us.

I shared the news of the virus and its residue with everyone I could. I have written the airline numerous times. I posted updates on social media. I had phone calls with friends. I shared the story over dinner and coffee. My peers had very little to say. They were sad or sorry or scared to see someone in their age group with a parent being hospitalized. They wondered when the dog was coming. They wondered if I still wanted to visit Hong Kong. They heard me, but they did not see the world I saw.

My mother’s trip to Hong Kong was indefinitely postponed a few days later. The dog situation was a factor, but the city suddenly went on lockdown. By late January, no visitors were allowed in hospitals. Schools were closing their doors. The majority of the city’s 7.5 million people were already practicing social distancing in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Her worries of being stranded were inching toward reality.

By late February, infection and deaths were soaring across Europe, the UK, and North America. In other words, this became a “global” issue. By this point, it had been almost two months since I first heard about the virus. It had been over a month since South Korea and the United States registered their first cases on the exact same day, January 20. The United States, like much of the Western world, did not believe that the sudden deaths of more than 2,000 Asians were a substantive warning. Even if Asia accounts for more than half of the world’s human population, the crisis was not yet global until it reached white-majority nations.

By now, everyone I know has heard of, if not directly felt the devastations of, this virus. Most appear to be struggling with this uncertainty. For others, this is not new; this uncertainty has been a primary reality. What you could not imagine is now our shared reality. Let us not forget each other.