When I have assignments normally I would print them and read afterward. I was trained to read the paper book as a child and all my adulthood. I would only read brief news on the screen and some emails. When I went back to school in 2019 it was clear to me that I have to strain my eyes to read on the screen otherwise I would be behind the program. Especially things become more severe when we went fully remotely. I had to do a test on the screen and it is still challenging. I believe soon the paper books will be obsolete. I learned how to speed my reading on the small screen. 

I remember a year ago from today, I was in school enjoying my time with my friends and family, traveling to Central park, movie theaters, restaurants, and just living my life. Flushing was one of my favorite places to go out to eat out with my friends; Flushing was kind of like Chinatown but better. It was filled with different types of Asian cuisines and I had a goal of exploring Flushing and tasting all the dishes I can. That soon ended when I received a message from my friends saying NYC is on lockdown, public schools will be closed, and people needed social distance, I had to confirm it on the news to make sure this was not a prank. When I was confirmed I was shocked by what I was listening to. From there on, life changed fast, actually, too fast.

My Mother Is A Hero

    New York City is my home. I love New York City. It’s a place of opportunities, different ethnicity, and cultural festivals. People don’t care what you wear, or what your skin color is.  During the pandemic, everything changed, so did New York City. When lockdown started, New York City became a city that left the streets quiet with no people and traffic. Everyone stayed home, students did online classes, and some people had to work from home. Others had to work on the front line to save lives. Social workers had to continue working and risking their own lives to keep grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience stores. The pandemic caused a lot of worry, sadness, stress, anxiety. I was worried about my 33-year-old mother, who worked in 7/11 at Manhattan 75th street as a cashier for ten years. Across from where my mother works is a hospital, my mother witnessed ambulances arriving and taking bodies out and rushing inside, seeing that my mother feels worried and scared. Every day my mother comes home and tells me how many people entered the hospital and how many ambulances arrived. It increased every day and that terrified us. “What happens If i lose my mother because of covid?”  “What happens If I don’t see her tomorrow?”. All these negative and painful thoughts were running in my head, I started to fear losing my mother so I made sure every day I spent my time with my mother as much as I could. I love my mother; she is my inspiration and my biggest support through my education. Knowing my mom being brave and risking her own health to work and provide for nurses, doctors, and other essential workers made me feel worried but also inspired me to work harder in college. My mom is an essential worker and she is helping so many people and I consider her a hero too.

High School Graduation

I never thought I would ever graduate from high school during a pandemic. It sounds cool, but in reality, it was depressing and exciting at the same time. My last half-year of senior year was spent at my home, on my desk and working on assignments, and making sure I submitted all the assignments that were assigned. I am an introverted person but an extrovert when I hang out with the right people. What I missed the most was hanging out with my friends but the pandemic didn’t stop us from hanging out. My friends and I would have group calls and we would do our assignments together and talk about how close we were to graduate and how we will miss each other.

The years 2020-2021 have been riddled with disturbing and unprecedented incidents, such as the death of George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter campaign, the raid on the capitol in Washington D.C.,an increase in bigotry and brutality against the Asian population and many more . The years 2020 and 2021 have been very frustrating and perplexing for many people throughout the world filled with challenging obstacles that we had to face and overcome. The World Health organization declared Codiv-19 a worldwide pandemic in March 2020, forcing the whole world to close down and quarantine in their homes as the pandemic was being monitored. As the cases of Covid-19 grew exponentially, we were all worried, panicked, or in mourning for their loved ones who passed away from covid or were hospitalized.Because of the pandemic, many countries around the world have imposed stringent laws that must be followed in order to protect themselves from the virus. During quarantine all students had to stay home and learn from online using apps like google classroom or Zoom which in the beginning made many students happy because they had to stay home and not really pay attention i myself was one of them but when the cases rose exponentially all i saw on the news was the number of deaths increasing every single day which made me very concerned for the safety for me and my family and it also made me emotionally unstable overthinking about everything always getting paranoid when my mom or my sister had any problems such as headache or stomach ache, watching the number of deaths increase more and more as time passed didn’t help either but my parents always reassured me and as time flew i graduated high school and started college which was weird because it was still all online and i would have never guessed that my first year in college would be me studying in my own house. At this point I stopped overthinking everything and started to relax since the cases were decreasing and everything was slowly getting back to normal. However, as the number of cases of covid decreased and everything started to return to normal, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose to the point that they threatened the lives of Asian Americans. This caused thousands of  people to rally all around the country to raise concern of the racial injustice that Asian Americans have faced. from 2020 to 2021 Asian hate crime has increased by 145% and the overall hate crime dropped by 6%( Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021 Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism). Many people have experienced stress, rage, sorrow, and other negative emotions as a result of the pandemic but some instead of coping with it properly they needed someone to let their anger out causing the increase in all the violence and harassment towards Asian Americans even now as the pandemic is slowly coming down people are still attacking Asian American. On April 26 2021 a 61 year old man Yao Pan Ma was violently attacked, he was pushed down and got kicked repeatedly in the head when all he did was collect bottles in his grocery cart to earn some money and now because of this Yao Pan Ma is in a coma. This is very disturbing to me and it makes me sad that some people think attacking an elderly person till he is in critical condition is ok

[…] The pandemic closed down many things, but we had to continue with our lives. At the time quarantine began, I was in highschool, and had art class on my schedule. I drew the above picture to describe how I felt. I felt trapped inside my own apartment, yearning to go outside in the rain. I enjoy walking in the rain, so I drew the girl with her umbrella ready to go, but all she can do is stare out her window. Some people consider opening an umbrella inside as bad luck, but I wasn’t thinking of that. Instead, although everything else was drawn and traced in black contrasting with white, I drew a yellow umbrella. In this case, yellow symbolizes hope. Since yellow is also a color for happiness, I was hoping my happiness would remain with me, although my surroundings seemed to rain on what was supposed to be a great year.

One way I kept my joy was by giving. I tried to help others and worry less about the problems around me. This gave me strength.

Pictures of envelopes in which I wrote letters to neighbors, to help cope through the difficult times.

[..] On this multimodal documentation of my pandemic life, I decided to focus on the positive outcomes of the pandemic. It would be hard to include everything, and my pictures went from pictures to screenshots, but the focus is the same. This pandemic has taught me resilience and the importance of attitude. There are so many problems in the world, and when I watch the news, the virus is probably the least threatening thing right now. It appalls me to see how horribly people have acted towards each other in history, and how humans continue to demonstrate hateful traits. However, if I want to see a change, I know it must begin with myself. 2020 was a confusing year, but it allowed me to grow in endurance and patience. I’ve had opportunities that I might’ve never received otherwise. In the beginning, I did feel trapped and anxious for the future. Sometimes that feeling creeps inside of me again. Still, there’s been a before and after in me. I feel more ready than ever to tackle what the future should throw at me. If I was happy before, I’m happier now, because I’ve endured.