Pandemic
Isolation
Sarah Jeong
©
Copyright 2024 by Sarah Jeong
|
Image by cro
magnon13 from Pixabay |
People
speak as if the pandemic is in the past. “We moved in together
during the pandemic.” “I haven’t boarded a plane
since before the pandemic.” It is a discreet period in peoples’
minds – a few years in history that vary by person and location
but are generally characterized by acute anxiety of the unknown, when
traditional authorities lacked answers and where people tested their
new realities with suspicion.
Many
have since moved on. Their worlds operate in much the same way as
before. People make plans with expectations that they will eventuate,
and say goodbye to loved ones with the casual assurance that they
will see each other again soon. Sure, there is more tension in the
air when a stranger coughs, but otherwise our models of the world and
expectations of our bodies to function within it have reverted back
to “pre-pandemic” standards. Not so for me. I caught
covid as we were exiting the pandemic, and it lives still in me now.
The
pandemic is in my limbs. It pumps through my body in the form of an
irregular heartbeat, kept in check by a pacemaker that my
mid-twenties, marathon-training self could not have fathomed before
she caught covid. It lives in my pantry, which was stripped of spices
and inflammatory foods after biopsies confirmed that covid had left a
gift of autoimmune cell mutation in my stomach.
My
friends fret that their workplaces are requiring them to be in the
office. Restaurants are open, people are taking flights. Only now do
I feel the isolation, indoors, Covid in my body, when there are
actually activities taking place that I can fear missing. Earlier in
the pandemic these moments of isolation came with the camaraderie
that the rest of the world was also living this way. I could look at
a window app that showed ten-second recordings of people’s
windows from all over the world and my own silent window had friends.
When I finally got Covid, though, the only person in my world who was
on the same train was Helen. I keep her alive in my isolated mind.
My
pandemic started with Helen. When it began, we were both working for
Professor Alfaro at Harvard Business School. Helen was her personal
assistant - a maternal Taiwanese lady in her fifties - and my
interest in her was limited mostly to the emails she sent to us
research assistants, especially with subjects lines of “free
food in conference room 12B” or “Prof Alfaro will be out
of town for the next three days”, which meant freedom to take
long lunches. Harvard was crawling with full-time RAs - kids in our
twenties hustling for research opportunities that would get us
scouted into prestigious PhD programs. Each professor was assigned
between one to twenty RAs, so in my first year of being away from New
Zealand, I had a home among a fleet of likeminded peers.
In
the first week of March 2020, all the RAs fled Boston. A group of us
gathered for a final board game night, acutely aware that we might
never see each other again. Most of the farewells outside of this
gathering arrived in the form of subtle messages through the RA group
chat – a photo of a U-Haul piled high with apartment items,
pictures taken with the family dog in a suburban driveway –
ominous signs that our community was dissipating into the unknown.
For
the first time since I had arrived in Boston, I felt my international
status and lack of nearby family as a threat. All of the RAs were
Americans or had surrogate parents within road trip distance of
Boston. I had spent months trying to get this research job, and
giving it up to return to New Zealand in less than a year felt like I
would be abandoning my dream of academia. I was determined to remain
in Boston.
This
is why, on the Monday of the second week of March, I found myself
alone at the RA office on campus. Harvard Business School, usually
teaming with students and emissaries who tended to speak loudly even
for their quantity, was silent. The underground research room where
the university hid its research staff was empty. I strolled between
cubicles hopefully, but abandoned jackets on chairs or half-full
water bottles by monitors were just that – abandoned. Stickers
that adorned keyboards and photos pinned on cubicle dividers were the
only signs that my American community had ever existed.
Just
then I heard the kettle boiling in the tea nook and ran to
investigate. Helen’s small frame faced the sink. Her thick
black hair, streaked with gray, was cut in a sharp line at the neck,
giving her a bobblehead appearance. She could not be taller than five
feet. She hopped a bit when I shouted her name too loudly for the
eerily silent space, then turned to face me.
I
was hit by an overwhelming fear that this could be the last
conversation held in this office. Would the apocalypse move on to
ever allow in-person universities again? Would the ergonomic chairs
of my peers be forever abandoned, to be reclaimed by mice and
roaches? I had not spoken to anyone that first Monday, and when I saw
Helen I could not bring myself to speak.
“Tea?”
She gestured at a box of sachets that had Mandarin writing. I felt a
wave of relief at this normalcy.
“Sure!
Normally I’m a coffee girlie. But we’re living in crazy
times, aye?”
She
smiled and poured a sachet into a second mug.
“I
brought these from Taiwan.”
The
tea was reminiscent of a ginseng herbal formula that my parents used
to make me drink as a child in hopes that it would make me taller. I
found it revolting back then, but the familiarity brought comfort
that spanned cultures.
“I
think we have something similar in Korean culture. It’s
sweetened with honey but still has this herbal kick.”
“Ah
I think I know what you mean. I am vegan. This one has no honey.”
“I
see.” I sipped. I had never talked with her about non-research
topics, and did not wish to pry.
“Do
you know whose coffee that is?” I pointed to a mug of black
coffee next to the sink.
“No,
I haven’t seen anyone else since I got in an hour ago.”
“Maybe
they’ll come back for it,” I said, hopeful that signs of
life meant there were others who had stayed behind.
Over
the next week, Helen was the only person I saw on campus. The
students had been sent home, and the gardening staff worked in the
cool hours before we arrived. The grounds bloomed on schedule for MBA
student tour days. The gentle pink apple blossoms erupt filled the
air with their sickly sweetness. Green grasses remained perfectly
trimmed, and birdlife flitted among the trees. The campus was a
reminder that life existed even without humans around to appreciate
it. The beauty was solely for the many rabbits that roamed among the
buildings, and, it seemed, for Helen and me.
We
clung to the routine of commuting to work and sitting at our desks.
The university had not made any announcements to staff to stay home,
but as we watched restrictions and horrors from China and Italy on
the news, I felt the imminent end of freedom from my claustrophobic
apartment. All my flatmates had fled to their family homes, and the
emptiness that awaited at the end of each workday would soon become
my whole world.
I
believe Helen kept returning to campus out of anxiety rather than a
need for freedom. She insisted that she should be present in case
Professor Alfaro needed anything from his office. She reminded me of
my fellow immigrant mother - different country of origin, same terror
that asking for a sick day would result in being fired. I suspected
Helen’s dedicated attendance might also relate to the heaving
pile of notes and knick knacks that she had accumulated over eight
years as Professor Alfaro’s assistant. She squirreled away as
much as she could carry home at the end of each day, and her desk was
noticeably cleaner by the end of that week.
I
needed a distraction from the horrors of the impending lockdown.
Helen was my only companion, and I was determined to make the ghostly
campus our playground. We played the untouched Steinway that stood in
the MBA lounge. I shared my emergency stash of Shin ramen with her,
which led to us trialing and reviewing six of our favourite instant
noodle brands. The untouched mug of coffee grew a floating island of
mould that got bigger every morning. Helen insisted we name the mould
blob Terrence.
Halfway
through the week, I remembered we had access to Harvard’s
negotiation lecture room. We had a feast of chairs to choose from,
all front row seats designed to create staggered levels in a
Socratic-style half-circle. But instead of the usual clips of
negotiations scenarios playing on the big screen, we played Helen’s
favourite movie, In the Mood for Love. Although I
could not
understand Cantonese, the soaring ballads and slow, yearning scenes
reminded me of car ride music with my Korean parents. That Harvard
lecture room was a haven of nostalgic peace amid the craziness of the
apocalypse outside, and I cried next to this Taiwanese woman who had
somehow come from the same world as my parents.
At
the end of that week in limbo, Boston announced its lockdown. Helen
had a car, and took me grocery shopping before we were to retreat to
our homes for the immediate future. An old white lady pushed her cart
at us and screamed, “Stay away, you sick Chinese!” I
asked Helen if I should give up my research and return home to New
Zealand.
“Don’t
give up on your dreams!” She vehemently replied. “I quit
my PhD to support my ex-husband’s career, and I have never
stopped regretting it.”
When
I returned home from the shop, my phone was filled with messages from
the remote flatmates. With Boston’s lockdown announcement, they
did not know if they would ever return and wanted to end our lease
immediately. I couldn’t afford to continue paying on my own,
and finding a new flat during a lockdown felt impossible. I called
Helen. Two days later, I moved in. Four days after that, following a
cheeky last-minute health checkup before the lockdowns kicked in,
Helen was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer.
I
quickly learned that Helen’s loves in life were scholarship and
her Qigong faith. Between her chemo transfusions, she translated
Chinese Medicine research from Taiwanese scholars into English. She
had never acquired a PhD but was determined to make her mark in
research by spreading Eastern medicine as a practice that had value
in the West. I believe it kept her going during the worst time to be
a cancer patient. The pandemic added to her isolation, but I started
to suspect over the weeks that she had isolated herself before the
lockdowns.
She
practiced Qigong three times a day in 90-minute sessions. It was her
religion and her lifestyle. She collaborated on research with Qigong
colleagues, and had been an active member of her community, which
sounded similar to the Korean churches that had been my family’s
immigrant haven. But she told no one of her illness.
Her
home felt typical of an Asian household. I laughed when she proudly
shared her collection of cleavers but did not own a single chef
knife. In her eight years of living in that house, she had never used
the oven for anything besides storage. She balked when I baked vegan
brownies, stating that she should not eat too many because they were
not healthy, but the batch was gone by the end of the day. She used a
water filter but also boiled that water before she would drink it.
Our rhythms became synched and I enjoyed our routines of researching
separately, coming together for meals and our afternoon walk, and
discussing our shared cultures in the evenings.
Several
weeks had passed before I managed to ask what her family and friends
thought of her cancer. She explained that she had had breast cancer
five years before, and the culture of karma in her community had led
people to accuse her of wicked thoughts. She acted on her beliefs
stringently – being kind to all creatures, making no exceptions
to veganism, practicing Qigong even during the most painful bouts of
chemo - so the only explanation for getting cancer twice by her
mid-fifties must be that she was being punished for secretly
harbouring evil intentions.
A
month into living together, I received news that I had gotten into my
dream graduate programme at Harvard, but that the first year would be
fully remote. I knew Zoom learning was not for me, but the choking
fear that I am running out of time has always dictated my life. I
asserted to Helen that I should find an apartment in Boston soon and
prepare myself for the horrid undertaking of school over video.
“Or
you could go home, enjoy a Covid-free year in New Zealand, then start
school when hopefully it is in person.”
“I can’t
waste a whole year.”
She
laughed. “Do you know how much I could learn if I had thirty
more years?” Don’t live so stressed and burn yourself
out. Or you might get cancer in your forties.”
I
loathed to leave her alone in Boston, to face chemo treatments on her
own. But I also feared too many months of living with only each other
as company might one day sour this precious friendship. When she
dropped me off at Logan Airport for my flight to New Zealand, she
expressed that she saw me as a daughter, and that she looked forward
to my return for graduate school.
Helen
died three months later. I received an email from the leader of her
Qigong community. He had taken charge of organising her funeral, and
asked if I could speak about her life, as a colleague whom she had
spoken of favourably.
In
one of the few conversations where she had acknowledged the
possibility that she might die, she had held up a garishly pink
t-shirt and told me, “I’d like to be buried in this
shirt. It’s comfortable.” She was cremated. I wondered if
she had managed to relay her preference to someone who had authority
over her funeral, or if she had been ignored. I wondered if her shirt
had burned with her body, or if it was now sitting in a Goodwill.
She
had also made off-hand comments about the leader of their sect,
saying “Don’t let him speak at my funeral!” I got
the impression over Zoom that he was a man who loved the sound of his
own voice. He spoke for the people, mourning her loss, expressing
shock that someone as devout and moral as her (“she was the
best of us”) could succumb to cancer. He was confused why she
had not appealed to their leader, who surely would have saved her
life if she had asked.
I
noticed her ex on the call. I recognised his boyish face and large
eyes from her photos. He had more hair now though, whether due to a
convincing wig or plugs I could not tell. Helen’s mother was
distracted as she tried to find the correct Zoom window. The way she
tilted her chin up from side to side was a telltale feature that she
must have passed down to her daughter. The hotel room in her
background had ornate metal lights and a large painting of waterfalls
in a Chinese watercolour style. She was in Mongolia with her son’s
family. They had not managed to reschedule to attend her daughter’s
funeral.
The
organizer introduced me as Helen’s coworker, and motioned for
me to speak. I wanted to share what I had learned about Helen’s
life. Was the funeral’s purpose to give peace to loved ones who
had questions? Why had she not told them of her illness? Had she not
wanted to burden people who loved her? Could she not bear their pain
or perhaps their judgment and pity?
She
had mentioned there was no point in telling her family about her
cancer, as “It’s not like they’d come to help.”
Sure enough, none of them were at the funeral. Perhaps she was
terrified of their indifference, that she would make herself
vulnerable and they would be not be there to help.
Older
Asian faces stared at me, and they reminded me of the Korean church
elders from my childhood. I felt the same expectation to be a
daughter, a filial recipient of the knowledge of elders, without the
audacity to question their judgment. I wanted to scream that their
criticism had left her alone in her last months. But I knew from our
shared culture that this would break her heart. I spoke instead of
her influence on me as a mentor and mother figure. That I respected
her commitment to scholarship and that she would be missed by the
university. As I battle prolonged health issues from Covid, I think
of Helen every day and am reminded of her teachings – that
dignity matters above all else, above health and above life.
Sarah
Jeong is a former policy analyst and aspiring writer based in the
sleepy town of Waikanae, New Zealand. Her pet chickens are named
after the Hamilton musical cast and she spends more time with them
than with humans. She shares a name with a NY Times editor but has
never met her.
(Unless
you
type
the
author's name
in
the subject
line
of the message
we
won't know where to send it.)
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