photo courtesy of Angie Chau

Ways of “Knowing About China” in the Time of Covid-19

“Do you know about China?” This was one in a series of questions posted on January 20th this year on the Facebook page of a lecture about the Uyghur crisis, which was to take place at the university where I work.

I teach Chinese literature and film classes in Canada and this spring, my Chinese film class had 77 students enrolled, composed of around 90% international undergraduate students from China. My other course on gender and marriage in popular Chinese media was smaller, but with a similar demographic in a classroom of 23. In the first three weeks of the semester, I repeatedly told both classes about how important it was to be aware of what is currently happening in China and received mixed responses. Most students stared blankly at me, but a few reached out privately, outside of class, to let me know of their interest on the topic.

I’m Chinese American; I was born in California and lived in the U.S. until the end of 2017, when I moved briefly to Shanghai for work, then moved to Canada. For most of my life, the spelling of my last name—Chau, written in Chinese as the character 周—has been a minor inconvenience. When my dad’s Cantonese-speaking side of the family immigrated to the U.S. in the 70s, they were assigned its Vietnamese romanization, so that at my parents’ house growing up, we received Vietnamese-language mail once or twice a year.

In my academic career, my name and its implications on my cultural and racial identity have been the root cause for considerable perplexity and consternation. Many people don’t know how to pronounce it even though they may be familiar with its more common Cantonese spelling, “Chow.” When I was on the job market, I made an off-handed remark to my mom about changing my last name to its Mandarin pinyin equivalent “Zhou,” as a way to appear more authentically Chinese. She one-upped me and suggested that I take my husband’s Irish last name (even though I had refused to do this years earlier) as a way to impress potential employers that a white person could know about Chinese literature. My Chinese students frequently approach me at the lectern asking, “Where are you from?” This is almost the same as being confronted at bars by drunk guys asking insidiously, “No, where are you from from?” Only instead of “Wow, your English is really good,” these students sometimes ask me, “Why is your English so good?” Or inversely, they speak in Mandarin amongst themselves to complain about the assigned films on the syllabus, not yet knowing that I can understand them, then blush profusely when I respond in Mandarin.

I reflect on these past challenges to my identity and name because in my film class this January, my students were in the process of forming small groups in which they were supposed to produce short films for their final projects. One Chinese student, upon reading the English (non-Chinese pinyin) first name of a potential group member, asked around casually in Mandarin, “Is this a foreigner [waiguo ren]”? In fact, the student whose name was in question was ethnically Chinese, and had lived in various countries, I later discovered, but in the moment I could only snap back instinctively, “What do you mean by foreigner?” What I meant to say was, and what I really left unsaid was, how many among us in that classroom could not be considered a “foreigner” in Canada?

This brings me back to that question, “Do you know about China?” Three days after it was posted on Facebook, Wuhan was locked down and I reached out to my friends and family in China wondering if they were okay, mostly because I spent all my free time obsessively reading the posts on my WeChat parent groups from my kids’ former school in Shanghai, in which moms were freaking out about whether Wuhan escapees were infecting Shanghai citizens. I started waking up at 4 every morning, reaching for my phone and seeing what new calamity had befallen overnight. I started talking about the virus in my classes at the university, and Chinese students started sending me emails, about not feeling well, not being able to come to class, not wanting to do group work with particular students who were coughing.

At the end of January, the dean sent out an email about the dangers of racism on campus. I shared with students my experience of leaving the gym at the community recreation center, when a mom and her toddler crossed paths with me on the way out the door. As they approached me and the front door, she cautioned her child, “Now, don’t forget to use hand sanitizer!” Was she merely repeating advice she routinely gave her daughter? Did my presence serve as a timely reminder of the importance of personal hygiene? Was I being overly sensitive, as the only Asian person I could see in the rec center? I never found a satisfactory answer to these questions and probably never will. On February 6, when the whistleblower physician Li Wenliang died, news of his death spread on social media right before my film class started Thursday morning. Devastated, I read the posts on my phone in the classroom, wondering how many other students in class that day were reading the same news at the same time, and I couldn’t figure out what to say. Later that afternoon, halfway through my other class, I sat down when a group started their presentation, and mentioned to a few students that Li Wenliang had died. They were shocked and saddened to hear the news.

In mid-February, my film students presented their short film ideas for their midterm assignment. Multiple groups got up in the front of the classroom and explained how their film adaptations, based on various works of Chinese cinema from the 1940s to the present-day, would speak to the way that events throughout Chinese history have been rewritten or covered up. Many students referred specifically to the death of Li Wenliang and how he was rebuked for expressing concern about the coronavirus, and they connected this tragedy to events in recent Chinese history that we had discussed in class. A few students had worn masks to class sporadically since January, but by the end of February, no one was wearing masks to class anymore. One student confided in me that she had worn a mask a few times, but after noticing how classmates were scared to sit next to her, stopped.

My Chinese students and I shared one joke throughout this pandemic. It was about facemasks. I told it so often, since it was the one thing that could reliably get a chuckle out of them. “I don’t get it,” I would start, “No one wears masks here!” And my punchline goes like this, “No one wears masks here, but they’re sold out everywhere!” A student told me that she finally saw someone wearing a mask on the street, but once that person got on the city bus, he took off his disposable mask and threw it in the trash.

After the university moved to remote learning, many of my international students went back to China. From Canada, they had spent most of the semester worrying about relatives and friends in lockdown back home. Now in mid-March, they had to worry about finishing the school year and whether the pandemic would worsen in Canada. They had to worry about the bizarre shortage of toilet paper, and the mysterious stigma of mask wearing. They had to worry about going home for the summer, and whether they would be able to return to Canada in the fall to continue school.

I think back to the strangeness of the semester, and recognize in hindsight that in some ways my classroom was an insular safe space for me. I felt protected by my students because I could blend in with them in a way that I couldn’t in other places on campus. At most colleges, students have ten minutes in between classes to get from one classroom to the next on their schedules. Usually, students from the next class will start opening the door when the class in session is about to end. By March, students in the next class would wait patiently outside in the hallway until every single last one of us, usually me, exited the classroom, to enter. Were they being patient, or were they being fearful and paranoid?

In other ways, my classroom also scared me. When the university raised the issue of campus racism in the face of covid-19, how could I tell them that sometimes after a long day on campus, I went home exhausted and scared, half-believing that I caught the illness from my students? Was I that different from one group of Chinese students, who complained when a member was absent because she had a cold, so they didn’t want to work with her anymore?

The covid-19 pandemic has inflicted countless forms of destruction around the world, but it has also forced me to think about that initial question, “Do you know about China?” How many racist assumptions held by Chinese and “foreigners” are based on perceptions of “knowing about” China? When I read the accounts of violent hate crimes inflicted on Asian Americans in the U.S. and Canada, of course I worry about everyday life for loved ones in California and New York. But I also continue to worry about the unknowability surrounding the other kinds of less visible, less confirmable effects of racism. Did the mom at the gym only need to apply hand sanitizer because she saw me? Did all those non-Asian students wait outside in the hallway because they felt like my predominantly Chinese classroom would have more germs? Or had I imagined all of this in my head?

I don’t expect to ever definitively know. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong likens the condition of Asian American racial identity to being ghosted, “where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior.” As the unresolved questions swirl around me, they cast self-doubt and guilt. So I remind myself, as my students remind me: trust what I see, listen to what I hear.

- Angie Chau is an educator born and raised in California, and currently living in Victoria, B.C. Canada.