In the time of coronavirus, AAPI voices fill the internet with irony, sadness, reflection and anger

SCREEN CAPTURE / YOUTUBE

The Berklee College School of Music students give a performance of hope.

One of the benefits (or, curses) of staying-in because of the coronavirus is that I spend a lot more time on the Internet than I usually do. 

What was driven home to me is the reinforcement that the AAPI community is so wide and so diverse, our experiences are so fastly different from each other and the only thing that might connect us is that somewhere in our background, is that our origins eventually lead us to Asia, which in itself is is widely diverse it is hard to magine combining us into one amorphous block. 

But non-Asians tend to do that.

There are 23 million Asian Americans in the US and it seems most of them are online in some shape or form. Out of that multitude voices cry out telling their stories of what it is like being AAPI during this particular time in our history. Some stories are moving and bittersweet, others that are limited by 120 key strokes are just pithy, playful and witty. 

All together, they paint a picture of this point of time. Someone should collect them together for future historians for this is a moment in history we'll all be telling our grandchildren, "I remember the time of the virus. The world changed ..."

I thought I'd share a few with you.

Actor Daniel Dae Kim contracted the coronavirus  and on his social media account made the announcement from his home home in Hawaii . It was eloquent in its simplicity and honesty. There's really no much to add, except to say that since he posted it online, his condition has improved. We wish him well:

From Huffpost, an article by Brittany Wong, starts out:

In early March, just before California put out a stay-at-home order, writer and educator Rachelle Cruz’s parents were taking the BART train back to their home in Hayward in the San Francisco Bay area after a long day at work in the city.

The couple owns a small remittance business with a largely Filipino and migrant clientele who send a portion of their wages back to their home countries. To protect themselves from the growing threat of COVID-19, the couple were wearing masks. It drew attention.

“All of a sudden another passenger yelled at them, telling them to go back to their country,” Cruz told HuffPost. “The person called my Filipino mother a ‘Chinese Coronavirus bitch’ and said that both of my parents are ‘bearers of the virus.’”

They stopped taking the BART train last week, a day shy of the lockdown in San Francisco. When Cruz asked her mother if it was OK that she shared the story with HuffPost, she agreed with one request.

“My mother wanted to clarify that this was the third racist incident she’s personally experienced or witnessed on the train in the last few weeks,” Cruz said. “My parents are now working from home, where my mother misses her clients, but not the racists on the train.”

READ the entire article.

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Also from Huffpost, here's an account by Louise Gleeson:

Just before I climbed back into the car, after dropping bags of groceries at my parents’ door and firmly declining an offer to come inside for a cup of tea, my mom stepped outside to wave goodbye to me. My dad stayed behind the door watching us through its window. I grabbed my phone and asked her to pose for a snapshot to send my sister an update about our successful social distancing in the face of COVID-19.

Never one to shy away from a camera, my mom threw her head back and gave me a dazzling smile. It’s always a surprise when people learn she’s almost 70 — she’s playful and vibrant, with the high cheekbones and beautiful skin often seen in Chinese women. I always say I hope to inherit her agelessness to join the dark eyes and olive skin she gave me. I drove away with tears in my eyes; my desire to keep my parents safe overwhelming me. I’m grateful they moved close to us years earlier, so I can take care of them now.

“This is who I am protecting. I need you to protect her, too,” I wrote when I shared the photo on my social media once I got home.

Hours later, I read a tweet from Donald Trump in which he called COVID-19 “the Chinese Virus”

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Thuc Nguyen in :betr writes about how a new generation of Vietnamese Americans view the diaspora of their people:

Natalie and I are a year apart in age. She and her father were sponsored to America by a church in San Bernardino, California. My parents and uncle and I were sponsored by a church in Kinston, North Carolina. It turns out my family was also at Galang. It turns out my parents had been searching for a man with her dad’s name for a long while and hadn’t yet found him. My parents told me the man had given me a pair of shoes at the refugee camp. As Natalie puts it, “these little acts of kindness are so impactful for many refugees and the fact that two little refugee girls can meet at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and have these amazing lives in America is short of a small miracle”.

READ the entire article.

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And from Kyle Navarro, a California RN, an encounter sparks a wider discussion that AAPI should take a step back and realize they are not alone in this struggle. Its a time to recognize and respect allies.

As a followup, Kyle's tweets went viral so he added these:

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Some like Kalaya'an Mendoza took a step back to acknowledge this moment in history's timeline.

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The District Pinoy was even more succinct in his tweet from the nation's capitol.

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Pearl Low wrote about her bicultural, biracial experience with illustrations. Low is the woman behind “Hair Love,” the animated short film that won an Oscar this year.

Low literally drew on her own experience as a Chinese-Jamaican Canadian kid growing up with a Chinese single mom who didn’t know how to handle curly hair, just like the father in her film.

“There are a lot of parallels in the story and in my life,” Low told HuffPost Canada. “While watching the [finished] film I was like, ‘Aww that’s me!’”

Our apologies for not writing about her during the Academy Awards. While there were lots of coverage from the African American media, there was scarcely a mention in the AAPI media. We should have looked deeper into her racial heritage at the time.

Link to Low's entire illustrated 8-panel article here.

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We'll end on this note (pun, intended): Asian American musicians and singers joined in

for the Berklee College School of Music in Boston doing a virtual performance of What the World Needs Now." It was sappy, but effective. It had me sniffling. The video's message is something we need to hear and to show, ehough we are isolated in our residences, whether it be a mansion or a dorm room, we are all connected to each other.

My apologies to my readers: After finishing this post, I realized that there's a lot of good stuff on this post that probably deserved a story of its own. I hope the length and the seemingly chaotic organization  doesn't scare anybody away. I added links if anybody wants to find out more information.