Trying to Adapt
My family moved to Chongqing, China in 2016. Me and two younger siblings took a gap year here, in which I was able to reach a level of Chinese comparable to the HSK 4. I practiced my speaking and listening skills by merely talking to the taxi drivers, waitresses, and street vendors. Chongqing is also where I stay during this epidemic, but the city does not feel the same anymore: it’s become entirely quiet. I practice Chinese not with the people of Chongqing but with my siblings. I read and write Chinese when speaking to my Chinese friends, but I rarely hear it being spoken. You used to have to push your way through the people on the streets. Nowadays, when the need for supplies drives us out of our apartments, people are careful to remain at least 2 meters away from you at all times.
As I mentioned, I live with two younger siblings, all of whom are, like me, taking online classes. We’ve repeated the phrase “Zoom meeting” so much it starts sounding more like “zoo meeting” “Una cita en el zoológico, (an appointment at the zoo),” we joke. You can guess how fast the internet is nowadays. It seems to crash after 9:00 PM if you’re trying to stream high-res videos, like movies and TV series. Of course, after a long day of not doing much, everyone in Chine turns on their TV. Only Chinese websites can pass through, like Meiju or 53ys。
The most affect ones are my parents. They worry and debate on the consequences we would experience due to the worrying news that they had found in the many ‘articles’ about the virus that they were sharing every day: “it mutates too much, a vaccine can’t be made,” “the military created the virus,” “the crash will be worst than ’08.” The next day, they send an article that proves the previous one wrong, but that doesn’t stop them from sending more fake news later that day. They’re just so stressed they don’t know what to believe. For the first couple of weeks, I was almost as stressed as them. I, too, looked up numbers in the news, but I was careful enough only to look up numbers; stories are too emotional for me. But I’ve stopped now. Every time anything related to ‘it’ comes up in my media, I click on “I’m not interested” so it stops coming up.
The epidemic caught us all by surprise in so many ways. I soon realized how few people I actually had on WeChat. Why would I need WeChat if all of my friends lived less than 10 minutes away from me, if not on the same building? Few of us, additionally, had never learned online. Many of us treated Zoom lectures just as any other form of video streaming. If everyone starts talking, your voice will be lost in the crowd, so the result is a long, awkward silence whenever the professor asks for participation. You wonder what the other participants are doing that makes them not want to share their screens. Are they on another tab? Are they on their phone? Are they even behind the screen? But that means you can also be on the bathroom, ‘quickly’ messaging a friend, or even ‘doing other homework.’ And sometimes you are. But not everyone is on a similar time zone, so they have to watch the lecture another time. Besides, you can skip the boring part of lectures if you see a recording. So even if, perhaps, you can actually attend that lecture, you skip it.
I did that at the beginning. I was rather optimistic back then. I naively wanted to believe it would be over in a month, or that at least we’d be able to return to 上海 by the first week of March. I really did. So I didn’t take the first few weeks seriously. But as the online classes went on, and I realized this would go on for good. So I started embracing the online vibe. I’d be saving commute time. I didn’t have to run to my locker nor wait for the 6–15 floor elevators; everything I needed was at the tip of my fingers! That Friday came along with a mountain of exhaustion, and I realized I hadn’t had any free time that week. But that was impossible; I was supposed to have more time than before, not less! Yet time wasn’t the issue here: it was my mood, my techniques, my motivation. I had fooled myself into thinking that having 10 windows open with 20 tabs each did not mean that I was doing 200 assignments at the same time. In 上海， our peers and a whole staff of people were there to remind us what we were there for and proving that we could do it. Being stuck in an apartment felt pretty lonely, and I was doing things much, much slower.
One day, a notification was sent in NYUSH Home workout. Feeling lonely, I, for once, read what it said. Jason Tao was telling us that the next home workout would be in 15 minutes. I was for sure lacking in exercise. In 上海， I used to go to the gym at least twice a week for two hours. I had tried to work out a couple of times on my own, but, alas, I wasn’t able to keep up the discipline. But what I needed was something more than exercise, something that made the idea of a group workout so unexpectedly desirable… so I joined. The first few exercises were quite easy. C’mon, Jason, is that all you got? About 10 minutes in, the exercises started ramping up until my muscles hurt. This happened with any workout that I had tried by myself, at which point I usually gave up. But then, oh Jason all-knowing, scaled it down, something that I seriously would have thought of on my own. The exercises became easy again. “You can do it!” Jason told us. And we could! We could do it! Shortly after that, the exercises became harder, but then easier again, and hard again, until, losing track of time, we finished! Completing that workout felt unexpectedly fulfilling and satisfactory. Since the epidemic started, I had half-finished every assignment, not checking it before turning it in. But that day, I proved to myself that we could do something, finish something, even in this time of adversity.
I’ve improved a lot since then. I’ve been more disciplined with myself, but I’m still working on it. Those ARC and Health Center workshops do give good tips on productivity and health, and for different kinds of people. I found that turning the camera on, having everyone look at me, as scary as that sometimes may be, pressured me to actually pay attention to the lecture. Occasionally joining extra-curricular video calls help us keep the vibe on, and remind us that no matter where in the world we are, we are all in NYU.
