Tracy Wang, Period 6, 5/22/2023

Tracy Wang

Period 6

Blog Post #4 – Creativity and Fiction 

Modern Mythology 2023

Brooklyn, New York

[It has been thirty years since the pandemic. Schools have long since reopened, the mask mandate has been repealed, and life is “normal.” The interviewee, going by Jane Doe, is a Staten Island Technical High School alumni who was a freshman during the start of the pandemic.]

If you had told anyone before the week of March 13th, 2020 that the world was going to shut down, no one would have believed it. That’s just how people are. Humans, by nature, tend to choose to only believe in good happening. “It can never happen in my lifetime” or “There’s no way I’d be so unlucky” are all things that people say, over and over. Humans have found a way to justify bad situations in nearly an infinite amount of ways, from denial to prayer to science. And they’re not stupid for thinking this way either. The same blunt refusal to believe in their horrors coming to life is the same force that keeps humanity going altogether. 

How did you react? Would you have believed it?

I was the same and I’m not ashamed of it. Like many others, I was vehemently against the idea of a pandemic existing. Retrospectively, I know that whether I disagreed with the news or not, the pandemic was certainly real. But as I followed my mom into Costco fighting for my life to win my third twenty-five-pound bag of jasmine rice after school on the 12th of March, I found the entire thing utterly ridiculous. I rolled my eyes at my mother’s panicked frenzy as she stocked up on groceries to put in our spare freeze and chalked it up to the exaggerated news she reads on the Chinese version of Twitter. Denial was bliss, and I was happy to live in it.

It was only meant to be a few days of school off then transitioning into spring break. But as the White House holds a news conference on the virus, declaring a national emergency, it became more and more apparent that things were serious. I can remember the first email the school had sent reporting a COVID case incredibly clearly, thinking it was the end of the world. Soon, though, I would be back at school and hoping that it was only one close contact email a week– but that’s much much farther to come. 

You mention March 13th a lot. What other dates stood out to you?

I suppose March 13th is universally memorialized as the day because of the number of jokes we made. It was like a fever dream– nearly all my classes were half empty, but we went along with our lessons ignoring the big fat virusy elephant in the room. All of us had thought our parents had been ridiculous. Rather than being vigilant, we thought of the virus as a blessing of sorts. [She frowns and hums, thinking.] Although, it really does make me wonder: should we have seen it coming? It was on Friday the 13th, it was close to the 15th– I remember thinking it was incredibly ironic that we were reading Caesar while this had all happened. 

Spring is when burnout strikes and the month of March is notorious for taking down even the most diligent students. It’s a month of constant school, no holidays. Going from February to March is always a difficult pivot and there’s only so much motivation one has before they’re prying their eyes open with a can of caffeine, taurine, and sheer willpower. Truthfully, we just wanted a day off. 

But to answer your question, I suppose April 4th. I’m incredibly thankful that my AP World History teachers had instructed us to keep journals during the pandemic as an assignment because the documentation is so precious to me now. New York had reported itself to have the most cases worldwide, minus Spain and Italy but they had been dealing with it a lot longer than we had. The first was in Washington, but New York had the most cases in the country and would continue to be the epicenter for the virus following. Then, New York reported more cases than the place that had the most cases in the world - Hubei, which had about sixty-eight thousand since December. 

It just kept getting worse from then on. Eventually, reading the news became too much to bear but it was like watching one of those viral videos of someone getting hurt in an Epic Fail compilation. It was grotesque and painful, but you couldn’t help but keep watching. Waking up every morning to Apple News giving me another death count or my family overseas struggling wasn’t the best breakfast in the world, that’s for sure. 

That must’ve been difficult to hear.

It definitely was. We did our best to make it all better but it was incredibly difficult when living felt… so grimy. My grandparents in China for vacation ended up stuck there for nearly two years! It was worse because my grandmother depended on cancer treatment that they only had in the United States but she was unable to come. She had to be put on chemo again and it was horrible for all of us. 

Another thing was being Chinese American. Everyone wanted to play the blame game, and of course, Chinese Americans were the target of it. Sinophobia was already so prevalent and this didn’t make it any better. It infuriated me. China is beautiful and so rich in culture, with so many wonderful things to experience but all of that was down the drain as people convicted Wuhan guilty. The US called it the ‘Wuhan virus’ and ‘Man-made.’ I don’t know what I can say to that without being extremely rude, but I found it incredibly bigoted. It was not important whether or not the virus was made in a lab when people were still dying and the government isn’t doing half of what was considered enough to deal with it. 

The way that the government reacted to everything was funny in a messed up way for sure. At that point, it felt like we were living in a simulation. Everything was going wrong and everyone seemed so stupid although I didn’t spray Windex down my throat so I suppose maybe I was smarter than a few out there. 

Do you think it was worse for them, or worse for you?

[She sighs and waves her hand.] It will never be something that’s comparable in my opinion. Of course, objectively one person could have struggled more than the other, but what is considered not that bad for me might’ve been someone else’s hell. What I think was horrible could have been nothing compared to another person. Before, I had that mindset. I believed that I had it worse than everyone else and was incredibly envious. 

My pandemic wasn’t what was considered the default. When everyone talked about relying on DoorDash and Grubhub instead of eating in restaurants, I was working a full-time job from the end of my freshman year to the summer before junior year. From eight in the morning to around ten to eleven at night, I was working as a cashier and waitress in a sketchy buffet in Pennsylvania. We left the city around mid-June of 2020 since we were in a financial bind and my mother was immunocomprised still. I worked at my aunt’s place six out of seven days of a week and lived in the basement of her family’s house. It was incredibly inconvenient to “pay attention” in a remote school setting, but too convenient to work while having my attendance taken. It was incredibly tiring but there was a small victory: I wasn’t stuck in my room anymore! I was only stuck behind a giant glass pane that loomed over me, threatening to fall on me or a customer any minute. I was dead tired. [We both laugh.]

Now, I think the best way to approach the question of how bad it was is to simply not. Two lessons we all took out of the pandemic in some way or another were sympathy and how nice not thinking too much was. Seriously. Being ignorant in times of apocalypse is intrinsic to staying happy, in a way. 

Stop reasoning with facts and numbers; you can tell how horrible something is without knowing how much it is. Keeping your spirits up is far more important than the figures– it takes a great toll on you to know just how much everything sucks. If you’re someone who’s a pessimist like me, it's better we just don't know. The virus taught me that thinking the scientific way is much easier on the heart than thinking altruistically. Knowledge either kills the spirit or keeps you going, but a lot of us aren’t the latter. Just stay dumb.

Would you do it again?

If you mean for a second one to happen, then absolutely not. You see, what people don’t realize is how many different ways the virus had impacted people. Yes, the Great Resignation, but also in other ways. Women, for example, were still encouraged to lose their jobs and take care of children at home now that things had switched to remote. Nearly half of all lower-income families lost a job in the household. For years, a cough slightly more aggressive than acceptable was followed by cautious stares from others in the vicinity. Hospitals never truly recovered from the pandemic– there was an extreme lack of staff, they were barely supplied, and for a long while, they were packed to the point where beds were set in the waiting room. 

But if you mean going back in time, I would go back without a doubt. I think many people would choose to do so. A lockdown is unprecedented. We had no clue what were supposed to or even could do with the surplus amount of time we had. It was the perfect opportunity for self-improvement, discovery, and bonding with family. We all came out with regrets. 

When do you think it ended?

I don’t know. I don’t think things like this ever end. The impact of it all is carried through each and every one of us who lived it, and then transmitted to the next generation, then the next, and the next until it slowly fizzles out and dilutes itself.  But even then, at that point, the mark of it would’ve written itself so deep it would be indiscernible anyways. In history and fiction alike, that’s how it always is, no?