Attempts to turn the pandemic into a cultural divide, scapegoating an ethnic group for the suffering caused by a pathogen, continue to reveal what the current administration intentionally chooses to value and devalue. It suggests a profound fear, on behalf of White House officials, that they will be blamed for the policies and political narrative they continue to support, which have failed and continue to fail millions of Americans through lack of adequate healthcare, compensation, and infrastructure. They are afraid that enough people will understand that their choices are designed to maintain the narrative of blame—and to keep others oppressed. So long as we remain in their boxes, which cast my face as unwelcome or diseased, this racist scapegoating will remain unquestioned by a large portion of the population. The president’s attack on Jiang reveals a lack of, or unwillingness to hear, accurate stories to help combat racism. The solution as suggested by Chee’s reconfiguration of his face is to push stories that have within them poignant understandings of the self into existence. The presence of such stories will continue to challenge arbitrary valuation systems currently in place.
But even where writing might provide us space to be freer than our boxed realities, I wonder how I can begin to write an account that is as important as this feels. Matters of life and death are dropped into my lap for me to shape into something coherent. I remember that Chee has advice for this, and that part of writing himself out of those predicaments was to stop trying to measure up, or to imagine writing for those people who couldn’t write themselves. But the current political climate, which continues to scrutinize reporters and bash media sources, seems to make it nearly impossible to be heard, or to be taken seriously. If even professional journalists cannot land their writing, what makes me think mine can hold weight in a time of constant streams of content production, and a time of life and death?
Perhaps what I am seeking is to be able to name what makes my place in this special. I think back to reading Marina Keegan’s posthumous book The Opposite of Loneliness, and of how her youth did not prevent her from being heard, instead, amplifying her further. Keegan, a brilliant and promising young writer, died in 2012, just five days after her graduation from Yale. In her essay “Song for the Special,” Keegan writes, “Every generation thinks it’s special—my grandparents because they remember World War II, my parents because of discos and the moon.” She playfully suggests that we will have the Internet as our marker (“Song for the Special”), but with our current pace, I wonder if it might be more than that. A deadly pandemic seems a notable reference point for our time, too.
Keegan mentions that she feels intense jealousy for everyone that she sees accomplish something, or make something valuable, or who can have their written work heard from the dead—eerily ironic for a writer whose book was published after her premature death. But she considers that what might save us from such jealousies is the possibility that either none of us is special, or that all of us are (“Song for the Special”). Maybe what matters is connection—when we are able to dance near to each other, “punctuated by an 808,” as Smith describes—that affirmation that we are here, too.
I’m not yet sure what we will claim for our future, though if we are deliberately rebellious and empathetic enough, I have hope that it will be more than a death toll. It is extraordinary to be sitting in my shoebox apartment alone for two months, but to continue my education online and not to have skipped a beat with my loved ones. I reject the idea that quarantine will make us prisoners to a narrow way of experiencing our lives, or that no change can come from a period that may feel stagnant at times.
Keegan wrote to her classmates, in her final installment for the Yale Daily News, “I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness” (“The Opposite of Loneliness”). I think of all the time that I have spent through my life finding ways to write my own name, finding home in my own body, and then meeting others that could see, hear, and connect with that self. Keegan confronts her own fear, and says that we do not have to lose this feeling we have worked to build. I believe that we are still finding ways to hold onto each other, even now. And I believe that we can write new spaces for ourselves, learning from what has been made visible in our stillness.
I think of the nightclubs and the lipstick and the classrooms for writing, the essays I make, and it inspires me to know that we have always been doing this, somehow. I might think my generation special for having lived through something as horrific as this, or even for being able to message each other instantly, but those before us have experienced their own horrors. They made choices, consciously, about what they would value, and they wrote their realities to reflect it. The America that we need is one made up of the many different homes, all added together, rather than one top-down vision. I believe that it can be true that my family is enduring struggles, while it is also true that others have lost their families, while others have been untouched. It will be our ability to synthesize those realities, to make room for the value of many, that will determine America’s future.
One thing I am sure of is that I do not want to be remembered for having witnessed a pandemic and emerging much the same. There is not yet room in the narrative for so many of us—essential workers, marginalized groups, even writers—and there is no incentive for those in power to try to make space for our stories. We have been charged by those before us to respond to what we are facing, and the people that read us later will do the same. They are watching, relying on us, on me.
Chee acknowledges that it will always be a strange time to teach one another to write our stories, but that we will always be better for having done so, for having seized the opportunity to reveal truths. Writing for his deceased loved ones, Chee says that “I live and work and I feel them watching me. And so I leave this here now, for them. And for you” (277). And as Chee leaves his words for us, I think that we must keep holding on. We can leave our words here for each other, and, at the same time, see ourselves in each other. We can speak to the things that are sacred to us, and make our imagined futures holy when we write them into being. I hope to leave things that are special, and I think that we all can.
I have not been able to dance with my friends for over two months, and I cannot be sure when this will end, how many of us will be left, or what will be left of us when we emerge. I miss the way that the city moves, rife with laughter, under bright lights on the weekends. It feels most alive to me when I remember to write about it, when I remember that we have made it special, that we can make tomorrow more promising. I grieve for the times and the people that we lost, for what we would have been doing, and for the America that has not been here for us, but that could be. Yet how extraordinary it is—here we are, still writing, hearing each other, affirming ourselves. And here you are, reading this, listening.
Works Cited
CBS News. “Trump tells CBS News reporter to ‘ask China’ about deaths and abruptly end briefing.” YouTube, uploaded by CBS News, 11 May 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF_LvrUvozQ.
Chee, Alexander. “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life.” The Morning News, 16 Oct. 2009, themorningnews.org/article/annie-dillard-and-the-writing-life.
—. “Girl.” Guernica, 16 Mar. 2015, www.guernicamag.com/girl.
—. “On Becoming an American Writer.” How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, pp. 251-277.
Editorial Board. “Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics.” The New York Times, 9 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-inequality-america.html.
Keegan, Marina. “The Opposite of Loneliness.” The Opposite of Loneliness, 2012, www.theoppositeofloneliness.com/essay.
—. “Song for the Special.” Yale Daily News, 9 Sept. 2011, yaledailynews.com/blog/2011/09/09/keegan-song-for-the-special.
Smith, Sable Elyse. “Ecstatic Resilience.” Recess Art, July 2016.
@weijia. “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.” Twitter, 17 Mar. 2020, 10:35 a.m., twitter.com/weijia/status/1239923246801334283.