(Should it have made me feel anything? Were tests about feelings or putting the right answer down on a page?)
Mark said it should make me feel cheated. Through tests or any quantitative measure of ability, Asians have already proven that they’re assiduous, compliant, and competent, but then in interviews, in real workplace settings, they must also prove to their colleagues and superiors that they have some semblance of a personality, else they immediately get classified as robotic.
I wanted to put my head in my hands. Then with my head and ears covered, I wanted to walk out of my apartment and go somewhere else.
Wellness was a spectrum, my neighbor emphasized. Someone else’s well might be another person’s not-well. To force everyone to follow a standard set of mannerisms, set inevitably by a majority group and ruling class, was wrong. So, he couldn’t help but suspect that the real purpose of my training was to discreetly check in on me and to make sure I wasn’t one of those robots. He used air quotes around “robots,” and I watched his fingers move up and down like rabbit ears. But could it be possible that some Asians seem stiff because of differing cultural norms and expectations? And some Asians seeming stiff doesn’t mean all of them are, so if a wellness training couldn’t be culturally sensitive enough to accommodate disparate starting points, then it was just another form of institutional discrimination.
The d-word caused me to flinch as well, after which I lost my train of thought. I asked, Who are we discriminating against again? The people or the robots?
He didn’t give me any answers. Instead, he said that I was an incredible person. You’re one of a kind, he told me. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t forget who you are.
* * *
—
ON JANUARY 23, WUHAN was sealed off, in the strictest meaning of the term: no one enters and no one leaves. Days before the lockdown took effect, five million people left the city without being screened. The crowds at the train station were astounding, buying tickets to go anywhere, as long as the place wasn’t Wuhan.
On January 24, Chinese New Year started, a one-month holiday, and the largest annual human migration in the world, with, on average, four hundred million people traveling, three billion trips being made, thousands of train tickets sold per second, and selling out within a minute of being posted. The migration was usually from urban to rural, as some 250 million migrant workers left the cities to see their families back home.
At some point, these numbers just became numbers to me. I couldn’t comprehend the size of China anymore, nor what growing up there would’ve been like.
I called my mother, but it went straight to voicemail. I called my brother, but he didn’t pick up. I texted Tami, What’s going on?
Tami replied right away that nothing was going on, everyone was just busy skiing and having fun. Your mother forgets to charge her phone sometimes. Or she accidently turns it off.
I asked Tami what she thought about the news, since all of her family were still in Chongqing, and wasn’t that kind of close to Wuhan?
She replied that I clearly wasn’t familiar with China’s geography, and why would I be? But Chongqing was like an eleven-hour drive from Wuhan or a six-hour bullet train ride. Almost five hundred miles apart and in completely different provinces. But should there be any trouble, her family would follow government guidelines exactly and be fine.
On January 25, which was New Year’s Day and officially the year of the rat, the lockdown expanded to other cities in Hubei Province, confining fifty-nine million people to their homes, or a larger population than New York City, London, Paris, and Moscow combined.
On January 25, Mark was sitting on my broken futon reading a book of poems while I was sitting in Suede Chair watching clips on my phone about the Hubei lockdown. I saw images of red electronic banners running up and down buildings that said in Chinese do not gather this new year, do not celebrate, remember to wash your hands, and unless you wish death upon others, be a good citizen and stay inside.
After turning a page that was mostly blank, Mark suggested that since I was home so much now, we should revisit the idea of cohosting a get-together for the building. It could then be the entire ninth floor, both our doors would be open and guests could go back and forth. We had the same dinnerware now, the same decor sensibility.
I said I was worried about Wuhan and by extension China. I had him look at the images, and even after I translated, he didn’t seem too concerned.
Yeah, but didn’t the last SARS outbreak peter out? The virus mutated within a month or something. At least that’s what he’d been reading online.
I said, Each virus is different, no two are alike.
Like snowflakes, he said, and I said nothing. Because a virus was nothing like a snowflake.
But we’ve all gotten a type of corona before, he stated. It was in the common cold, albeit a bit more severe this time. Just don’t touch your T-zone, what every article seems to suggest.
He showed me these articles that he was referencing, all fact-checked, he said, by reputable sources. I scrolled through them and saw only words, predictions. Much of medicine is built on hindsight, but hindsight usually means that in exchange for knowledge a lot of people first have to die. I said whatever happened, demand could not exceed supply. I thought I was speaking calmly, until Mark pointed out that I was not.
Hey, he said.
Hey what?
Our health systems are built for this stuff.
I said they really weren’t.
Let’s agree to disagree, for now. And remember—he paused for some sort of effect.
Remember what?
It’s on the other side of the world.
* * *
—
NO FORMAL ANTONYM FOR catastrophizing exists, but why did it seem that more people had this trait than not? Isn’t it more evolutionary favorable to catastrophize? Does fortune truly favor the bold?
* * *
—
FOR OVER A WEEK, I didn’t hear from my mother in a significant way. She had ignored my texts about why she was ignoring my calls with one-sentence replies that all was fine, and since January 23 I’d tried to call every day. I had become that daughter, the overprotective and possibly annoying kind, the daughter who believes she is also the parent to a parent who doesn’t like being the child.
I could picture my mother glancing at her phone. Who’s texting and calling me so much? Who’s blowing up my phone? Oh, it’s just Joan-na. Then turning the phone down, facedown, and resuming whatever it was that she was doing, like finishing a hot beverage. She wasn’t bound to me, and besides being my mother, she was free to do other things. I’d come to realize long ago that my parents didn’t fit parental norms and whether that was a result of their own personalities, genetics, or the slow grind of immigration, who could say. A normal parent calls too much, wants to be there every step of the way, and can never leave their kids alone. But that my parents could leave me alone, and separate themselves from me, did not necessarily mean that I was uncared for. We know what you’re made out of, daughter, because we know ourselves. We won’t always be there for you, but we trust ourselves to have raised you well.