Dictionary: Life as an Oversea Chinese in the Age of COVID-19
Worry The mental state between January and Mid-March. Checking on your parents every 8 hours. Reading every chart on Netease News or TouTiao news App every 30 minutes. Wanting to talk to your grandparents but could not find a way. Asking everyone you know to find facemasks to send back to China and cleared the last one on the aisle at Ace Hardware store. Read posts on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), marked some of those, only to find they were deleted after 24 hours. Your critical thinking skills went numb - rumors after rumors, from individuals, scholars, and media. Fear Intensified over time. You sensed it when you were asked to sit on the backseat by the Lyft driver and then being asked to leave. News clips started to emerge. Microaggression started to brew. You feel it when you wear a mask while others are not. You feel it when Trump tweeted about the Chinese Virus. You feel it when the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry started to bullshit and sprea...