Where Are You From?

Qi (Stacy) Wang

Instructor’s Introduction

Teaching a class on racial disparities in health has rarely been more meaningful than in the past two years. The disparate impact of COVID-19 on the poor, the young, the aged, and the sick, and most notably on communities of color, vividly illustrates concepts I have taught for over a decade in “Ethical Missteps in Public Health.” Since the pandemic’s inception, WR 120 students have written a final essay about the intersection of their own identity with some feature of pandemic life, then read the essay to the class. The degree of personal disclosure is entirely up to them. Remarkably, nearly all students write about our common vulnerability, a feature of the crisis that is somehow obvious yet too rarely talked about.

Qi Stacy Wang describes the stigma experienced by Chinese people not only in the United States but at home, and how the question, “Where are you from?” often signals neither curiosity nor openness but rather, prejudice and fear. By the summer of 2021, when she was a student, Stacy’s home town of Wuhan had been identified as the origination point of the virus, and worry about her family became worry about her own safety in the United States, where hate crimes against Asian people were on the rise. Yet in her essay, Stacy proclaims her intention to resist responding in kind: “I won’t form the stereotype that all people in US are going to harm me just from pieces of news.” Her essay should prompt us to ask another equally important question: In the face of our shared vulnerability, whom do we want to be?

Melanie Smith

Where Are You From?

I had been asked this question when I was doing the self-introduction in my grade 7 summer tour to Britain. I remember standing on the stage and routinely saying my name, my habits, and the place I was born in. The other students looked at me in silence, implying that I might need to add something. Then, I thought of the snacks, the spots, and the customs in China. I soon realized that I should have a lot of things to say. My classmates in primary school came from different parts of China. Teachers asked us to make posters about our hometown after the winter holidays. I could simply learn a lot by merely reading the posters. For me, my hometown is Chongqing. I would never allow anyone to say that they don’t like the spicy hot pot from my hometown. However, my English was extremely bad when I was in Grade 7, so I couldn’t speak a word if I had not prepared it in advance. It was a pity. Therefore, from then on, I began to prepare introducing my country and my hometown every time I had the chance of self-introduction.

But there’s one thing I haven’t thought about. The question, “Where are you from?” is no longer a question from someone curious about the culture behind a certain person, but a question about whether a person carries communicable diseases during the outbreak of Covid-19.

During the lock down, my family ran out of necessities, and we couldn’t get a takeaway order. Therefore, my father took on the responsibility to risk being infected. My mother and I were waiting at home and worrying about him.

The doorbell rang.

My mother rushed to the open the door with a bottle of alcohol spray and a laundry basket. She sprayed the alcohol on my father, and asked my father to put his clothes into the basket and to take a shower immediately. I remember my father took off the “extremely precious” masks in a really cautious way: he untied the straps on both sides, and only held the straps so that he wouldn’t touch the surface of the masks. I brought a plastic bag and fastened it right after my father threw the masks inside the bag. However, my father brought nothing back. We asked if the store didn’t have the goods we wanted.

“My numbers on the ID Card begin with 420,” my father said, “which shows that I am from Wuhan.”

Therefore, my father was not allowed to enter the shopping mall even though there was no evidence to show that my father had left Shanghai in the last 3 months. Instead of perceiving that Wuhan had more patients who contracted Covid-19, people were simply thinking that everyone who is from Wuhan had the possibility of having Covid-19. They linked Covid-19 and Wuhan so closely in an unbelievable and irrational way. People were hashing the people from Wuhan on the Internet. Though there’s no evidence showing that Wuhan people caused Covid-19, many people on the Internet still wrote that people from Wuhan were bringing troubles to the whole country. Donald Trump, the President of the US, even phrased Covid-19 as the “China Virus,” which was quite a discriminatory word towards Chinese people.

 The international world started to pathologize Wuhan and China, which even led to some bad results. The bloggers who were excitingly welcoming the Chinese students who received college offers and depicting wonderful college lives before were now warning Chinese students in America to take care of themselves. The news that Asian Chinese were being attacked because they were suspected of carrying Covid-19  shocked Chinese people. For example, “An Asian man walking with his 1-year-old child in a stroller in San Francisco was punched in the head and back multiple times.”¹ There were even the guidelines for Chinese students to help them avoid this kind of attack as much as possible. Why did the situation deteriorate into one where Chinese students were in the position where they might be hurt by others? When people get used to linking a certain race with the disease because the disease and the race are presented together without any context, as some medical scholars suggest, people start to pathologize the race itself.² The appearance of Covid-19 falls so precisely into this trap. No one knew where Covid-19 was from, and no one knew why Wuhan had the first case. Even though people tried to provide some context, they couldn’t find one. In this case, people can only attribute it to Wuhan, which is completely wrong. 

To make the problem even worse, the panic made people less rational and more gullible to follow what was said by most people on the Internet. Do you remember I put the phrase “extremely precious” before the masks my father took off? Here’s another story. I had searched for a whole afternoon in order to find a store that was selling the masks. The price for the masks had skyrocketed: the only store that still had some masks sold 20 masks for above 200 Yuan. The price for 100 masks should be below 50 Yuan in normal times. I realized the store was making profits in a quite unethical way, but I had no choice. To make the things even more absurd, that masks were not that efficient in preventing Covid-19. 

Instead, they were merely the masks that protected people from the smog. People knew it, but people still made the purchase decisions, which made the price for these masks rise, believing that having inefficient masks was at least better than having no masks. People were so anxious that they rushed to buy the Lianhua Qingwen Capsules right after the scholars announced that the medicine might have the possibility to cure Covid-19.

After a short time, Covid-19 has been successfully controlled in China. People in China were very happy. Chinese people started their lively lives again. They go out for dinners, and even attend Music Festivals where there are crowds of people. Other places were still suffering, but it doesn’t seem to matter to Chinese people. However, Covid-19 doesn’t ever leave completely. For me, as an international student, I am in a special isolation. I wake up in the afternoon and stay up late until the sun rises. I stay in China, and all my surroundings are enjoying the normal life. However, I can’t. The time when I wake up, all the amusement activities are about to close. And it was too early for the stores to open before I sleep. Once, I suddenly wanted to eat the Snapdragon, I opened the takeaway apps and found that even the breakfast shops were not open. That’s the time I realized that I was still being affected by Covid-19 so badly.

This problem can be simply solved by going to US in the coming semester. However, I’m a different person than I was before the pandemic. I hesitated because I was afraid of the violence towards Asians in the news. Discrimination fosters hate, and hate moves people to fight for their own small groups based on race, ethnicity, or gender. However, people should share only one feature: we are all human who would be terribly affected by the disease and the emotions. 

The question “Where are you from?” should only ask about the culture instead of the personality and health conditions of certain people. Accepting this, I won’t be that deceived by the discriminatory words, and I will still introduce my hometown proudly. On the other hand, I won’t form the stereotype that all people in US are going to harm me just from pieces of news. Find a right way, believe in it, and try to finish the task with my biggest effort. In this case, I decide to enjoy my college life in US. 

References:

1. Cabral, Sam. “Covid ‘Hate Crimes’ against Asian Americans on Rise.” BBC News. BBC, May 21, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56218684. 
2. Amutah, Christina, Greenidge, Kaliya, Mante, Adjoa, Munyikwa, Michelle, Surya, Sanjna L, Higginbotham, Eve, Jones, David S, Lavizzo-Mourey, Risa, Roberts, Dorothy, Tsai, Jennifer, & Aysola, Jaya. (2021). “Misrepresenting Race — The Role of Medical Schools in Propagating Physician Bias.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 384(9), 872–828.

Qi “Stacy” Wang is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her family is from Wuhan, China.