What do you mean by central issue? I asked, which I shouldn’t have, because it launched Mark into a long, abstract speech filled with words that made me wince. He thought my wellness training was a sham, a ruse, and a consequence of systemic r-word, through and through. Whenever he used the r-word, my left cheek muscle would twitch and I had a desire to crack my neck.
An odd coincidence, don’t you think, he asked, to mandate an Asian doctor complete this kind of training when the hospital might’ve been laxer on someone else. Don’t Asians have to outscore their white counterparts across the board? Don’t they have to outscore other Asians and sometimes themselves?
I said, Well, yeah, but that’s for everything.
And how does that make you feel?
How does outscoring someone make me feel?
（Should it have made me feel anything? Were tests about feelings or putting the right answer down on a page?）
Mark said it should make me feel cheated. Through tests or any quantitative measure of ability, Asians have already proven that they’re assiduous, compliant, and competent, but then in interviews, in real workplace settings, they must also prove to their colleagues and superiors that they have some semblance of a personality, else they immediately get classified as robotic.
I wanted to put my head in my hands. Then with my head and ears covered, I wanted to walk out of my apartment and go somewhere else.
Wellness was a spectrum, my neighbor emphasized. Someone else’s well might be another person’s not-well. To force everyone to follow a standard set of mannerisms, set inevitably by a majority group and ruling class, was wrong. So, he couldn’t help but suspect that the real purpose of my training was to discreetly check in on me and to make sure I wasn’t one of those robots. He used air quotes around “robots,” and I watched his fingers move up and down like rabbit ears. But could it be possible that some Asians seem stiff because of differing cultural norms and expectations? And some Asians seeming stiff doesn’t mean all of them are, so if a wellness training couldn’t be culturally sensitive enough to accommodate disparate starting points, then it was just another form of institutional discrimination.
The d-word caused me to flinch as well, after which I lost my train of thought. I asked, Who are we discriminating against again? The people or the robots?
He didn’t give me any answers. Instead, he said that I was an incredible person. You’re one of a kind, he told me. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t forget who you are.
* * *
—
ON JANUARY 23, WUHAN was sealed off, in the strictest meaning of the term: no one enters and no one leaves. Days before the lockdown took effect, five million people left the city without being screened. The crowds at the train station were astounding, buying tickets to go anywhere, as long as the place wasn’t Wuhan.
On January 24, Chinese New Year started, a one-month holiday, and the largest annual human migration in the world, with, on average, four hundred million people traveling, three billion trips being made, thousands of train tickets sold per second, and selling out within a minute of being posted. The migration was usually from urban to rural, as some 250 million migrant workers left the cities to see their families back home.
At some point, these numbers just became numbers to me. I couldn’t comprehend the size of China anymore, nor what growing up there would’ve been like.
I called my mother, but it went straight to voicemail. I called my brother, but he didn’t pick up. I texted Tami, What’s going on?
Tami replied right away that nothing was going on, everyone was just busy skiing and having fun. Your mother forgets to charge her phone sometimes. Or she accidently turns it off.
I asked Tami what she thought about the news, since all of her family were still in Chongqing, and wasn’t that kind of close to Wuhan?
She replied that I clearly wasn’t familiar with China’s geography, and why would I be? But Chongqing was like an eleven-hour drive from Wuhan or a six-hour bullet train ride. Almost five hundred miles apart and in completely different provinces. But should there be any trouble, her family would follow government guidelines exactly and be fine.
On January 25, which was New Year’s Day and officially the year of the rat, the lockdown expanded to other cities in Hubei Province, confining fifty-nine million people to their homes, or a larger population than New York City, London, Paris, and Moscow combined.
On January 25, Mark was sitting on my broken futon reading a book of poems while I was sitting in Suede Chair watching clips on my phone about the Hubei lockdown. I saw images of red electronic banners running up and down buildings that said in Chinese do not gather this new year, do not celebrate, remember to wash your hands, and unless you wish death upon others, be a good citizen and stay inside.