Then the World Stopped

Food for Thought in the Time of COVID-19

On March 7, I attended an Armory week party at a townhouse in SoHo. The party was one of those fabulous downtown things — it was hosted by an art gallery and packed with metrosexual men who perceived accidental eye contact rom women as an invitation for small talks. They asked questions like “what do you do” or “what brings you here,” but didn’t even care enough to wait for the answers before their eyes turned to a model passing by. Nobody’s attention was on the art. Rather, it was on shoes, vintage Dior saddle bags and the new work done on each other’s face. A group of close friends wanted to catch up afterwards, the highlight of my night, and we were lucky enough to get a table for six at a tiny bistro before everyone followed us there. A gaggle of expensive looking glitterati crossed the kitchen to what seemed like an afterparty, under the guidance of a woman in a golden gown, whose earlier comment on what I do for work was “Amazing. Love it!” Their demeanor carried an ostentatious secrecy that briefly stole the mise-en-scène.

That was a week after the first case of the coronavirus was reported in New York: a Manhattan healthcare worker who recently traveled to Iran was tested positive. Everything felt strangely normal. For a whole month or so, rumors were spreading, faster than the virus, about the consumption of a bowl of bat soup. Speculations were disseminated: the virus was carried by the US military to China because of a leak from the biological warfare laboratory. In lieu of demystifying the virus or debunking the conspiracy theories, the media seemed to spend more time criticizing the loopholes in Chinese governance than crying the wolf who was destined to arrive. New Yorkers went about their lives for another week, all while the tolls in Italy and in Iran were climbing exponentially.

Something changed on the night of Mar 11. That was the night when the number became a name: Tom Hanks. It also happened to be the day the president announced the travel bans from most European countries. The morning after, people walked into the office with pronounced anxiety–they scrubbed hands obsessively and sprayed their phones with an enormous bottle of Clorox. Overnight it wasn’t a distant, foreign “Chinese virus” anymore. Two days later, the world stopped.

In face of drastic changes, we seek meanings, to make sense of things, to understand how we feel. In hindsight, everything happens for a reason. What’s the reason this time?

“Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

This is the Didion quote that I kept replaying in my mind for the last couple of weeks. “The question of self-pity.” As events are intellectualized into opinions, opinions interpreted into certain notions and emotions, along comes the questioning. In fact, lots of good questions have been raised.

Here’s one: how do you place a mass quarantine in the free world where individualism is a primary value and (at least physical) mobility is unabashedly a human right? However, everything I considered impossible or too preposterous unfolded in front of my eyes on a six-inch screen. I still feel whatever pops up in news notifications is happening in a parallel world if not for the new ritual that every day at 7 pm the entire city cheers for the healthcare workers changing shifts. We are questioning how these people on the front line can be so ill equipped with protective gear and how the government could have not seen this coming. Some compared western individualism with eastern collectivism and linked the comparison to how the west missing the optimal time window to curb the spread. Despite it being a solid point, I couldn’t sign off on that. It is simply too early to conclude who did right and who did wrong. Some choose to put it in a bigger picture and rationalize the outbreak as nature’s self adjustment, as the skies clear out and the animals return to the canals in Venice. Like Andrew Sullivan wrote in this week’s New York magazine, “we will also hear the sound of nature–as our economic machine pauses for a moment and the contest for status or fame or money is canceled for just a while.” No one can buy into that without a little bitterness — we are not used to being a participant on this planet; we are used to dominating it. I wonder, what if everything didn’t happen for a reason, can we just be content with “everything happens?”

Here’s another good question: How do you feel? How do I feel? Why does it matter? What’s the value of feelings in this scenario? One evening in the first week of quarantine, I ran one last time free of the fear from all the anti-Asian sentiments circling around. The super moon over the East River was coming towards the promenade like a giant balloon and I knew something’s gotta give. Back home, I found myself revisiting the frameworks we used to talk about in grad school about chaos and the futures. It dawned on me I had once again chosen to over intellectualize and put my feelings aside. In fact, I had not known how I felt until I walked into my therapist’s office before all the sessions went on zoom and I was pressing the pump on a bottle of purell violently and he pointed out that I seemed really anxious; a team of experts from Wuhan visited my father’s company right before the city’s lockdown and spent a whole week together. The day my father finally told me and thank god none of them had it, I found myself weeping on the floor overwhelmed by the conviction that one small tweak in the plotline would’ve flipped my whole life over; running has become a trust exercise for the vast unknown. Why do I have to worry about a shadow coming at me from behind? What have I done to deserve this? Why do I have to live with this fear on top of everything? I’m scared. I’m sad. I’m angry.

Questions induce more questions. We are forced to take a long hard look at what privilege really means in America. Asymptomatic celebrities are getting tested to “just to be safe” while over ten million Americans filed for unemployment as of Apr. 2. When the wealthy are hiding in their country homes, waiting for this havoc to end like waiting for a storm to pass, so things can finally “go back to normal”. We are having second thoughts on leadership, or the lack thereof, and how it affects the handling of a crisis. We are reflecting on corporate social responsibility — did Everlane, the brand of radical transparency, really do its best? What about the brands flaunting their donations to charity while laying employees off the second week in quarantine? And finally, how can a human be priced beyond productivity in a capitalist society? Who matters and who doesn’t? There is a great chance that the word “normal” will never read the same way again.

I keep thinking about that party, the last one before everything was put on hold. Weddings were canceled. Album releases were postponed. Gathering restrictions tightened from 500 to 50 to 10 and eventually to two people. How would that party be different after all this? I honestly don’t know. But I know that the things we pursued and promised were for our own good — a designer bag, a new face, a Soho House membership, a man who would never reciprocate the affections — they evaporated along with the delusion that true happiness comes a hundred percent from within. But as all the constructs of value are tumbling down, hopefully our eyes can see with a little more clarity and our hearts feel with more humility. This time for real.