Running from Coronavirus (Part 6)

I spent the next twelve days or so taking walks on the beach, swimming a bit (though my landlocked and ocean-devoid life experiences hadn't prepared me for the fierce waves of the Australian ocean), hiking, monitoring the news, hanging out with Jo and Dave, and strategizing about when to head back to the States. The plan for university wide online teaching was that courses would start three weeks after they date they were supposed to start, giving folks enough time to recalibrate their courses and get settled wherever they were, as nearly all the non-Chinese national faculty had left  China. That said, the graduate programs  decided to move their timeline up, and so after a few emails, I discovered that I also needed to start teaching again immediately. This was a bummer. So to qualify my description of the twelve days in Australia, all of the above occurred after I got my work done for the day. Teaching online was a bit of an adjustment but for the most part I was able to run my class as I would in person, given my small class size (only eight students in each of my two sections), the relative ease of having synchronous class meetings over Zoom, and the fact that it was a writing course. Scenes from Australia:

Hiking with Jake

Looking north, a rainy day in Hastings Point

Cool dude in all blue outfit at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary (note: I never would have thought that I'd be so enamored by koala's but they are amazing creatures. I highly recommend visiting this place.)

Democratic Debate, February 2020

Meanwhile, beyond the order to reduce air travel from China to the US, things seemed to be more or less as usual back in the States. My family and friends implored me to leave China, the threat of an authoritarian government plus a scary virus equaling an strong impetus to leave. "I'm glad you got out," wrote a friend. Yet, it seemed to me that eventually the virus would be everywhere and what China was going through would happen in other countries around the world. Though I am not the first person to write this, I think the lack of preparedness on behalf of the States, to name one country, was partly a function of, at best, a habitual othering of Chinese people and at worst, racism. As in, "China might have a bad virus but China is China, and they are so different than us! Their government is authoritarian and they eat bats! It could never happen here!" (Strawman, 2020). This is why calling it a "China virus" is not only mildly racist, but also detrimental to public health: the term insidiously suggests the unspoken belief that viral epidemics are something that only happen in places like China and to people like the Chinese. To this day, these "terministic screens" (as the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke named them) are leading the attention of Americans away from combating the virus to combating the idea of China or each other.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've been back in the States for almost four months now and the hyperpartisan politics of contemporary American life have already recalibrated my memory such that Australia seems like a long time ago. I flew back to the United States on a Wednesday morning, February 12th, Brisbane to Los Angeles with a connecting flight to Indianapolis. When I was checking in the Qantas airline folk asked if I had been to China in the last two weeks. Though at this moment, that question invokes nostalgia for a time when coronavirus wasn't everywhere. At the time it had the power to keep people off of planes. I answered yes, and they led me to another counter where one of the ticket agents scoffed, and said, "He's an American. He can get on the plane." I didn't know to interpret this as a disdain for for my nationality or something else related to safety. Hardly anyone was wearing a mask at the airport. In Los Angeles I almost made it through until the last bit, when the customs officer seemed to take a bit more time for me. After confirming that I'd been in China, another officer lead me down a level to large room full of empty chairs. There were about six people in the room, all of them health workers or airport people, all wearing masks. They asked me to fill out a form with my address where I'd be saying, asked if I had any symptoms, took my temperature, and gave me a pamphlet with some phone numbers in case I felt sick. And then they let me go.