Mask of the Red Breath

So already, I've been washing my hands like crazy and questioning my every cough and sneeze since 2020 began. It hasn't been all about coronavirus for me, though: in fact, I don't think I heard the word "coronavirus" until mid-January.  

It began because my dad was diagnosed with RSV (respiratory syncitial virus) on New Year's Day. This virus is especially dangerous for babies and elderly persons, and my younger sister and I had to be very strategic about how and when we visited our mother while my dad was sick. In fact, what we ended up doing, if we couldn't visit my mother before visiting my dad, was to split the visiting responsibilities: one of us would visit my mother, and one of us would visit my father on any given day.

My dad recovered fully from RSV and the viral pneumonia that accompanied it, so I was able to head off to Maine the last week of January for my planned writing retreat. My first night in Maine, I was treated to a great dinner in Bangor by an old high school friend and his wife; the headmaster of a Bangor high school that has many international students, he'd just returned from a trip to China and he'd tested negative for coronavirus as part of his traveling home. I hoped for the sake of all three of us that we could trust his test results: I wanted to trust the national governments of China and the USA when it came to COVID-19, but I wasn't sure I could.

I kept my back-burner worries to myself, and decided that for the next fourteen days, I'd tell my parents I was fighting a cold and keep my distance from them. Luckily, my friend's good test results proved to be true. 

By then, my constant handwashing was an ingrained habit--and one I decided to keep up since it was Chinese New Year season, a multi-week season of family-visiting for Chinese people, who make up a significant part of Quincy's population.* My own Quincy neighborhood, the section of Wollaston that borders North Quincy, is home to many Chinese people, and also many elderly people. Face masks have never been an uncommon sight in my neighborhood. But when I observed that so many more of my Chinese neighbors were wearing face masks than was usually the case--I surmised they were protecting themselves from anyone who had recently returned from visiting family in China--I decided to keep playing it very safe. I didn't start wearing a face mask (and I still haven't), but I kept watching to see if I'd see fewer or more masks as time went on.

But face masks weren't the only evidence I had that things weren't normal. Every place I turned, I saw more proof** that my Chinese neighbors were taking no chances. 

First there were articles about the much smaller crowds that participated in Quincy's annual Lunar New Year Festival: less than half the usual number of people attended, and many who did attend wore masks.

Then there was the fact that when I boarded the subway train--something I stopped doing about a month ago--there were significantly fewer Asian people boarding the train or already on it than I generally counted on seeing. 

Finally, when I went to the first concert in the public library's March Sunday afternoon concert series--it featured Korean-American improvisational pianist Eunhye Jeong--there were no Asian people who came to hear her. In other years, Asian families have made up a large part of the audience, especially when the featured performers have been of Asian origin. 

My solution: keep washing my hands. Keep watching what other people were and weren't doing. And also, buy some of Eunhye Jeong's excellent CDs. She's really good!

I have been feeling for my Chinese neighbors as this situation has been unfolding. I'd been reading the articles about struggling restaurants and businesses in Boston's Chinatown, and I suspected that many of my neighbors were already feeling the pinch more locally, despite their being so fastidious and health-conscious: let's face it--no one who runs a business wants to become known as the place that made its customers sick and helped fuel a pandemic.

It also can't be fun to be part of a population that the President's "Chinese virus" comments routinely suggest is "to blame" for America's coronavirus emergency. Anti-Chinese hate crimes are on the increase***, and I hate the idea of people's needing to fear other people as well as coronavirus at this time.

But needing to fear other people is an old American story. I remember how so many of the Cambridge gas stations whose proprietors were of Arab descent began prominently displaying American flags right after 9/11. "We're not terrorists; we're proud Americans," those flags seemed to be trumpeting.  What is this thirst for identifying "enemies of the people," to declare that a subset of "the people" is the "enemy of the people"? It's only a rhetorical question I'm asking, since I know the thirsty ones are doing this deliberately.

With elderly parents, and as a resident of a building that houses 144 different "families," that sits diagonally across the street from a daycare center, and that is 3-minute walk from a subway station, I'm just going to keep my social distance when I have to be out in the world, which I do have to be sometimes. I'm really grateful to my Chinese neighbors for modeling such health-conscious behavior in the face of COVID-19. The world won't end if my husband and I get the virus, survive  it, and manage not to pass it on.

Meanwhile, while I was writing this, I received an email from the Josiah Quincy Orchestra Program. As I flipped through the program's web site, I came across the adjacent photo. One more great reminder about the importance of home practice--in my case, hand-washing. 

Let's face it: washing our hands is better than wringing our hands. But now I'm thinking that carrying a face mask just in case is probably a good idea--so now I have something new to do.

* https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/quincy-ma-population/

** Poon, F. (2020, February 3). The Quincy Lunar New Year festival opened with a dragon dance performance Feb. 2 by the Wah Lum Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy at North Quincy High School. [Photograph found in Sampan, Quincy]. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from https://sampan.org/2020/02/quincy-welcomes-lunar-new-year/ (Originally photographed 2020, February 2)
*** https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/trump_anti_chinese_racism_coronavirus_covid19
**** https://www.jqop.org/jqop-online?mc_cid=d39e2e3dd9&mc_eid=69d1f47191