“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness,
which unites your body to your thoughts.”1
—Thich Nhat Hanh
TODAY AS I WRITE during the fraught U.S. presidential election, the novel coronavirus has infected over forty-eight million people worldwide and counting. Covid-19 has captured our lives and extinguished the breath of over one-million people in over 200 countries. While Europe, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Oceania had drastically quelled their numbers, the United States and Brazil remain the global epicenters of the pandemic.
Ana Ruth Santana, a nursing technician from Belem Do Para, Brazil, talked about her experience of battling Covid-19. Amidst struggling colleagues and friends, she herself had contracted the virus. Yet, she is now bravely back at work, helping her country. She said: I have gone back to work. One lung still hurts, and when I make a lot of physical effort I feel very tired. The same tiredness as when I got sick, that lack of air. (The New York Times, July 13, 2020)
Across Place and Race
Covid-19 was first recognized in Wuhan, China by news media outlets around late December 2019, and rapidly spread to countries of the European Union and found its first American epicenter in New York. The editors and staff at the Asian American and Asian Research Institute (AAARI) decided that we needed to step up and to offer a platform for views on the pandemic from comparative East/West perspectives. Going into high gear, we solicited colleagues, friends, students, writers and artists originally from the U.S., the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Philippines, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Macao, and the European Union (EU). We ourselves could barely keep up. We also could not anticipate the death of George Floyd who lost his own breath and life from the violent actions of Minnesota policemen on May 25, 2020, or the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement across the globe.
We decided, for the sake of time and energy, that it would be best to put forth works of writers and scholars online each month, beginning in May and continuing on to July/August, in order to reach students, teachers, educators, and communities across race and place.
East/West Conversations
As the pandemic evolved, and hopefully, resolved itself, CUNY FORUM would have created a historical/cultural electronic and print record of “conversations” among writers and readers, an exchange, albeit singularly isolated across rooms, towns, cities, and nations around the world.
Yet, as educators have pointed to the need for more “anti-racist education” around Blacks and Latinx, it became apparent that, in addition to decrying the spate of anti-Asian U.S. violence, there is a need for a broader conversation and better education around the essential role of Asians and Asian Americans (factory workers, caretakers, nurses, doctors, scientists, teachers) in this new era of pandemic and protest. No pass here merely as bystanders; our job was set.
At the same time we were putting together this print edition of “Corona Conversations,” Maria Ressa, the co-founder of the Filipino online site Rappler, stated that “power is consolidating power around the world” as autocrats and politicians work to dissemble independent media, journalists, and news groups, and academics who do not tow the official government line, whether it be around the pandemic, the now globalized Black Lives Matter Movement, or free speech. (The New York Times, July 13, 2020) Ressa is not alone in her trepidation: we do not have to look far to see independent editors and journalists, and online sites around the world facing similar challenges (Meduza, in Riga, Latvia; Mada Masr, Egypt; Scroll, India; Malaysiakini, Malaysia; Hong Kong Free Press, Hong Kong, and other countries) including in the Americas.
During the past eight years, CUNY FORUM has also become a part of independent, critical academic research and media that crosses borders. We thus conceived this issue as covering the following general areas, which the contributors, often presciently, address. These areas include:
In this special “Corona Conversations” edition, for the sake of a rough historical trajectory, we present materials in three sections as they appeared online from present to past: from this current moment of pandemic and protest, back to the origins and responses in the U.S., China and the world, to the coronavirus as it manifested in the early months of Spring 2020.
BIOLOGY ACROSS BORDERS
- Three Level Virus: Biological, Media, and Nations across Borders
- COVID-19 in the context of SARS, MERS, AIDS, Ebola, etc.
XENOPHOBIA: POLITICAL AND RACIAL VIRUSES
- Mass Media/Social Media’s Response & Racism Re: Chinese and Chinese Americans
- Pandemics and Asian and Western Literature
GLOBALISM: ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC & COMMUNITY ISSUES
- Tackling Globalism and Environmental Issues Through the Lens of the Coronavirus
- Nature’s revenge and/or Nature’s healing for man’s encroachment and exploitation of land, water, air, and wild animals and habitats
- Impacts upon the Chinese and Chinatown Communities (Socio-Cultural-Economic)
FRONTLINE & ON THE LINE
- Personal accounts, literary accounts, graphics and photo images by those working on the frontlines of medical care, research, reportage, or as critical observers
- Comparative Asian and Asian American Perspectives: Identities “on the line” of fire
- Healing, Spiritual, and alternative perspectives on the pandemic
In this special “Corona Conversations” edition, for the sake of a rough historical trajectory, we present materials in three sections as they appeared online from present to past: from this current moment of pandemic and protest, back to the origins and responses in the U.S., China and the world, to the coronavirus as it manifested in the early months of Spring 2020.
As I pause to finish this note, I am reminded of what the distinguished Taiwan scholar Shan Te-hsing, in his discussion of the origins of the coronavirus, states in his essay: “Human greed, which finds its fullest expression in the rapid growth of capitalism and the exploitation of nature, has led us to transgress the boundaries of nature, and with grave consequences for all.” Thus the virus can be seen as a form of Nature’s protest against such exploitation. As we have colonized and settled into forests and wetlands, destroying the Earth and upsetting climate balance, animals (including bats, civets, etc.) have now move into densely inhabited human communities, bringing to us pathogens which only existed previously in their own population.
Between Pandemic and Protest (July-October 2020>)
Three separate lead essays in this section by Frank H. Wu (President, Queens College); Vivian Louie (Director, Asian American Studies Center & Program, Hunter College/CUNY) and Phil Tajitsu Nash (University of Maryland) explore the tenuous relationship among the Covid-19 pandemic; Black Lives Matter and racial/economic justice; and the ambiguous status of Asian Americans at this juncture, often caught between “Black and White.”
Vinay Lal contributes research on Gandhi, nursing and medical care in India and South Africa. Approaches to documenting Covid-19 can come in many forms: through graphic comics as detailed by Pin-chia Feng; or through the “novel” ways in which the novel coronavirus speaks to writers including award-winning Burmese writer, Wendy Law-Yone. Shan Te-hsing shares insights around the pandemic from Eastern and Western traditions, including Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Henry David Thoreau. Researchers Lee Xie and Bud-Erdene Gankhuyag, in their respective essays, argue that we must organize and stand up for the rights of immigrants, women, and other essential workers of color during this crisis.
Two accounts harken back to Asian martial and family traditions: Henry Lem on martial arts, food, and masks; and Ming Xue on parenting during Covid-19.
Outspeaks (June 2020)
CUNY FORUM editorial board member Phil Tajitsu Nash provides an account of the pros and cons of Zoom-teaching and learning for his students; while remaining hopeful. Vinay Lal, chronicles the difficult journeys of migrant workers in India back to their hometowns, yet nurtures hope that the returned workers will infuse their places of origin with new life.
Speaking out about the effects of the coronavirus, Chinese poets and artists Lei Mo, Mai Mang, Zhang Hongtu, Eric Kong Io Chun, Qin Qin Zhang (originally from the People’s Republic of China), write in many languages including: Chinese, Putonghua, Portuguese, and English. May Joseph, in a lyric homage to Isamu Noguchi, links the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans in desert camps with the current internment of migrants and others today. Here also are a memoir by Ven. Sagarananda, a Buddhist monk originally from Taiwan, and a poem by CUNY FORUM editor Russell C. Leong.
World on Pause (April-May 2020)
During the early months of the pandemic from January to March, writers, scholars, and observers often went back to their families, friends and communities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to present their accounts of living in the world on lockdown. Whether poet, scholar, or community activist, perhaps their job was more difficult as they captured, in words and images, neighborhoods and nations on pause. These writers include: Indran Amirthanayagam (Sri Lanka and the U.S.), Luis H. Francia (The Philippines, Asia, and Europe), Ming Xia (U.S. and China), Sybao Cheng-Wilson (New York City), and Antony Wong (Manhattan Chinatown and the Lower East Side).
Yet, our social and political response to such biological disasters, dependent on complex intertwined health and economic systems which differ among nations, affects each individual and local community.
SARS Then, and Now
Ironically, I remember almost two decades ago in 2003, I was living and working in the epicenter of the first SARS pandemic, in the city of Hong Kong. Here is an memoir excerpt, a description both of the civil response and the class inequities between local Chinese and their Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers shopping for their at-home employers, not unlike the inequalities between stay-at-home workers and Black and Brown essential workers in the U.S. today.
Then overnight, it seemed, my destiny changed…Riding the sixteen-passenger siuba, or mini-bus, from Sham Shui Po, where I lived, to Tsim Sha Tsui, where I worked, my ears picked up, for the fourth time, the public service announcement on the TV monitor to the left above the aisle.
To prevent severe atypical respiratory syndrome, or the disease commonly known SARS, avoid shaking hands. Avoid touching public facilities—door handles, telephones, elevator knobs. Avoid the spread of SARS. Wash your hands often. Wear a face mask. Your health is in your hands.
On the screen, thirtyish-something guys in gray business suits and blue surgical masks covering their mouth and jaw, bob their heads and bow to each other, rather than shake hands. An official voice recounts the figures again, which are rising by the day. Over 1,500 infected in this city alone, more than 100 dead, and more infected frontline health workers and people from housing project estates. Across the Taiwan straits, he added, 2,000 people are already infected in Beijing. Together with the bus driver, most of the riders also have on masks. This report would reach our ears and eyes at least a dozen times a day, whenever we ride the bus, or pick up a copy of the Mingpao Daily, or Next Magazine. SARS, like breathing, was becoming a part of life for the past two months. And when we stopped breathing, we’d die.
Wherever I walk, chain drugstores—Watson’s and Mannings—and discount stores hawk hygiene products: liquid soap, rubbing alcohol and other cleansers, cotton swabs, packets of surgical masks, latex gloves, and fancier rubber and plastic gas masks. Lines of Filipina or Indonesian maids stock up on bagged rice, canned meat and fish, coffee, tea and sugar in case Hong Kong is declared an infected port. Supermarkets restock their supplies of vinegar and garlic, household remedies against sickness. Chinese herbalists display gold boxes of pricey immune boosters—Jilin red date and rock sugar jelly spiked with ginseng, or essence of chicken tonic for building up the body. Silver foil packets of Ban Lan Gen, a mixture of Isatis root and cane sugar, promises to clear the body of heat and to flush out toxins. I buy a box of 12 packets for twenty dollars. I wonder why blonde-haired Australian and British sluff off SARS as an Asian disease; few wear masks. Other locals suspect a new form of biological terrorism. But who’d do this to my home? I don’t know.
One Breath, One Unequal World
The preservation of breath during disease, or the suppression of it within civil society, came together in the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. No doubt the human protest (BLM) is linked to the historical and bodily exploitation of African Americans, peoples of color and indigenous communities, from the founding of the U.S. to now. Here in the U.S., Pooja Pundhir, a hospitalist in Houston, captured this dual crisis, describing patients who came to the hospital: “They came in gasping for air—two men, two women, three Hispanic and one African-American….The tears in their eyes reflected not only the fear of their lungs drowning in the cytokine storm but also the struggle to keep fighting the whirlpool of social inequity.” (The New York Times, August 10, 2020) This storm was a breaking one, and predictable given the lack of equitable health care in the U.S., and the dearth of medical and scientific research that regularly includes peoples of color in studies of health, disease, and wellness.
Other nations, taking cues from the American BLM uprising, followed with street protests from India to Latin America to the EU, seeing the BLM Movement as symbolic of the repression of marginalized racial, ethnic, or religious groups in their own countries.
We as a nation must continue to write, to testify, to share, and to move towards a new equilibrium based upon sustainability, equanimity, and equality. Towards rebalancing breath, biology, and redressing broken human rights, these conversations from East and West in this volume further advance that dialogue.
CORONA CONVERSATIONS ONLINE (https://aaari.info/cunyforum)
All materials above can also be found online, together with a listing of multilingual health resources around the coronavirus compiled by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center; a guide to self-help strategies by the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, and selected articles and website links gathered by AAARI. Photographers and artists who contributed original works to this print edition include: Tomie Arai, May Chen, Gisele Guarisco, William Tam, Antony Wong, Zhu-Hui Wu, and Russell C. Leong.
Notes
[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, Breathe! You are Alive: Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990).