Karen Turner | Vox

The many Asian Americas

2024-04-25T12:35:36-04:00

This article is part of the Asian American identity series.

For the fast-growing group of roughly 23 million Asian Americans, where a person grows up can have a particularly profound effect on their sense of cultural identity.

The Asian diaspora spreads across all 50 states. But the largest Asian populations tend to be in diverse coastal cities where immigrants have historically clustered. The largest Asian American community by population is in New York City, while the next four — Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, and San Diego — are in California, which sits on the coast closer to the Asian continent.

These locations have deep ties to the history of Asian migration, and Chinese neighborhoods in many of these cities date back to the 1800s when migrants started arriving in large numbers as laborers. Hawaii, too, has a long history of Filipino, Japanese, and other Asian arrivals who migrated to work as laborers and remained on the islands. Honolulu today is the American city with the highest percentage of Asian Americans, who make up almost 70 percent of the population.

Still, many Asian Americans don’t grow up in places like Honolulu, but in diverse cities or enclaves far from the coasts or mostly white rural towns or suburbs.

And many who responded to a recent Vox survey about Asian American identity told us that where they grew up (and where they eventually moved) had a significant impact on how they perceived themselves.

“It was infuriating when I first came to the US and moved to a small town in Alabama and experienced my first racial mocking and physical harassment at middle school.”

“I think I was relatively fortunate to not experience too much overt racism, coming from a lower-income, multicultural neighborhood.”

“I grew up in a very white, upper-middle-class area, and I just wanted to fit in. I hid my Asianness throughout my entire childhood.”

“As a third-generation ‘American’ having lived most of my life in Hawaii, I don’t even know if I can really say I’ve experienced any ‘real’ racism that was meant to be hateful.”

“The PEN15 episode where Maya has to be Scary Spice was ripped scene-for-scene from my childhood. I moved to the Bay Area to raise my kids so that they don’t have to experience the ‘othering’ in the way that I did.”

“I grew up in an Irish Italian Catholic suburb. The racism I encountered was annoying but ultimately benign.”

“Having lived mostly in California and Hawaii, I think we have it easy, as opposed to my cousins who grew up in Texas.”

“I grew up as one of few Asians and the only Cantonese person in my Southern US community. How I feel about being Asian is quite different as an adult living in Los Angeles, where being Asian is far more common.”

We also asked six Asian American writers to share how they were shaped by their environments, and whether there were places they eventually visited that challenged their notions of identity. Their responses revealed a patchwork of experiences in the many Asian Americas that exist across the country, from small, homogeneous towns to diverse, working-class city communities to wealthy white suburbs.

While racial identity is only one facet of a person’s life, for these writers, growing up in or eventually discovering a cultural community shaped their sense of safety and freedom to be themselves as Asian Americans. Here are their stories.

“It made me start to think: Maybe someday I won’t live in this super white place”

I grew up in southern Oregon, around five hours from Portland, which was the closest big city. I’m Korean American and my adoptive family is white — so not only did I grow up in a place that felt very insular and was very white, especially around the time that I was growing up there, I [also] did not actually get to know or become close with any fellow Korean Americans the entire time I lived there.

Like a lot of kids, I looked for representation without knowing to call it that. I didn’t have any mirrors in real life, and at the time representation was also hard to find in literature or movies or shows. Because I didn’t see anyone else like me as a little kid, sometimes I really did feel like the only Asian — even though, intellectually, I knew I wasn’t.

When I was 10, my parents took me back to Seattle, where I was born and adopted. It was the first time I had been around large groups of fellow Asians [or] had ever seen so many just walking around in public. We went to the Chinatown-International District, and I remember obsessively watching people there all day long. I looked at every Asian woman around my mother’s age and wondered, “Could she be my mother?” I felt deeply comforted by that trip and that day specifically; it made me start to think about what it would be like not to be the only Asian kid I knew. I thought, maybe someday I won’t live in this super white little town; maybe I’ll live somewhere that feels more comfortable to me. Until I actually saw it, I didn’t know it was possible.

Being the only Korean I knew growing up was formative in a lot of ways, but at the same time, those ways are hard to identify and pin down when you’re still living there. It took years of no longer living there to begin to unravel the ways that it shaped me.

When I went to college, I remember being conscious of wanting to live in a more diverse space and not be the only Asian or the only person of color in the room anymore. But the biggest change for me, honestly, was in how I talked about my adoption. Once I was no longer with my white family day in and day out, once that was no longer the context in which people knew or saw me, it was my choice to disclose whether or not I was adopted. I’d grown up answering people’s questions about my family and how I got to be in it, why I had white parents. To suddenly not have to do that all the time anymore was a huge change. —Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know

“I didn’t fit in. … But within my immigrant community, there were kids like me.”

I was born and raised in a suburb of Miami, Florida, and never knew a time that I was not part of my close-knit Pakistani American community. One of the first things my father did when he immigrated to the United States in the ’60s was to grab a phone book and go down the names methodically, calling anyone with surnames from the motherland and hoping for someone to answer his call. The method proved fruitful. He found the location of the nearby mosque and the beginning of lifelong friendships.

My childhood memories are filled with potluck parties and savory saag, hand-tossed rotis, and an ever-present vat of chai simmering on the stove. These gatherings were a place of comfort for my parents. A safe space where they could speak in Urdu or Punjabi and feel completely understood.

It was a safe haven for me, too. Growing up, school was not a place to learn but instead a place to survive bullies and taunts. I didn’t fit in. The food packed in my lunchbox was unfamiliar and presumed disgusting. My mismatched clothes, my too-short haircut, were rife for taunts. But within my immigrant community, there were kids like me, straddling their hyphenated American identities, who understood my situation. When difficult school moments arose, it was these kids I turned to.

As an adult now, my personal community is far more expansive in diversity and scope than the one I grew up in, but I remain grateful for my childhood experiences with fellow ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi) kids. I am grateful I did not have to navigate my hyphenated identity alone. —Aisha Saeed, author of Amal Unbound and Written in the Stars

“I couldn’t help but feel … that while indeed I was Asian, I wasn’t the ‘correct’ kind of Asian”

I grew up in a diverse, working-class community in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. I was aware of my Asian American identity as simply skin color and where my parents were from — a big continent called Asia. It wasn’t until I started going to high school in a more affluent area that I realized how different I was from even other Asian Americans.

My Asian American classmates had parents who were doctors and lawyers, who spoke English without an accent, and whose family tree in the US could be traced back several generations. Meanwhile, my parents were immigrants who did manual labor and were more comfortable speaking Vietnamese.

I couldn’t help but feel my Asian American identity differently then, feeling that while indeed I was Asian, I wasn’t the “correct” kind of Asian from a place people could easily identify (China, Japan, South Korea) with a lifestyle that I wasn’t familiar with (new cars for birthdays, summers without a food service job, connections to Ivy League schools). There was working-class teenage jealousy there, but at the same time, it made me feel more tied to the working-class people I grew up with. It wasn’t until Ali Wong joked about “Fancy Asians” and “Jungle Asians” that I understood how Asian American identity is entangled in ethnicity and class.

Today I make more than my parents have ever made, and I live near the area where those classmates once lived. But there’s still that consciousness of class, race, and ethnicity that took root in my younger years. —Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to The Water

“It wasn’t until junior high, once I started reading more about current events, that I’d understood Asian people to be a minority in this country”

I was born in Seoul, and then I moved to LA with my family. In fifth grade, we moved to a small town called Cerritos, which is where I did the bulk of my growing up. The town itself is mostly Asian, and my high school was something like 80 percent Asian. Koreans made up a majority of that 80 percent, and I’m Korean. There were so many Koreans that the language was offered as an elective. Even people who weren’t Korean would take it, and they joked that it was because they wanted to know what the rest of us were saying when we were talking shit. It wasn’t until junior high, once I started reading more about current events, that I’d understood Asian people to be a minority in this country.

Then I went to college on the East Coast and lived in New York for a few years after that. College came as a shock, especially given the town I was from. In college, in addition to the high concentration of white people, the level of wealth was wild to me. There, and again in grad school, when I started attending literary parties and events in New York, it was so common that I would go somewhere and be the only person of color or Asian person in the entire room.

Then I moved to the Bay Area. I remember I went to meet some friends of a friend, and I texted them, “I’ll be the Asian girl wearing black.” And they both just laughed and were like “Dude, that’s not going to fly here. There are so many Asian women wearing black.” I thought, “What on earth? That always worked in New York!” It was so wonderful. I was so tired of being the only Asian person in the room.

I feel really lucky, in some ways, that I grew up around so many Asians. And as an adult, I don’t feel any shame whatsoever around my race. I have plenty of shame otherwise; shame is the water I’m swimming in, but I don’t feel that way about being Asian. I love being Asian, I love being Korean, and I always have. And that’s not something that all my Asian friends have necessarily been given by their own upbringings, which means I’ve been very lucky, and which means that I should — and very much want to — pass along that luck. —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“America still holds that sense of exotica for me”

Before starting middle school in America, I had fantasized for months in India about a school with lockers, no uniforms, some teachers who audaciously went by their first names, brightly colored classrooms, and plastic lunch trays. School in New Delhi had not looked like that, but I watched The Wonder Years every evening as though it were a documentary about a fascinating faraway place. America was so exotic to me.

In the US, I showed up on day one in my J.C. Penney purple leggings and everyone in the class instantly connected my name to a dick, a penis, and laughed. They had no idea how to pronounce a soft D. They asked me if I rode a camel to school in India. I was too shocked by their limited imagination about India to be offended. But, “fair enough,” I thought, “they don’t know anything about India.” I myself was wrong about students in America only taking folders to class like Kevin Arnold. Everyone had backpacks.

Now, years later — as I divide my time between India and America, fortunate enough to be able to call both home — America still holds that sense of exotica for me. Living on two different sides of the world means that America is not my center. I grew up surrounded by Bollywood, and now my husband and I live and work on the peripheries of this industry in which I see myself constantly represented. It’s one reason why the very idea of representation, and wanting more of it in America, rarely occurs to me.

If home is where I don’t have to give the Starbucks barista a fake name, then India it is. But if home is where I graduated from high school, then the United States it is. And I choose both. That feels increasingly precarious in the US where others may label me an outsider based on my skin and vocal intonations. But I choose to be Indian and American, no hyphens, no division, no combination. —Diksha Basu, author of Destination Wedding and The Windfall

“In Hawaii, being Asian American and being mixed are the norms, and I experienced the privilege, power, and ease that come with that”

I grew up in one of the whitest towns in California, in Marin County. Perhaps predictably, living there, I didn’t want anything to do with my Japanese American identity. I hated my Japanese first name and strove to get as close to white as possible. I was quick to say that I knew nothing about Japan — and that I didn’t even like rice!

All that started to change in college. There, the student body was more diverse, and I started taking classes on race, identity, and history. Before long, I did a 180 and dove into my Japanese-ness, learning the language and studying abroad in Japan. As a fourth-generation, mixed-race Japanese American, however, I didn’t exactly feel accepted in the motherland, either.

I didn’t feel instantly at home anywhere until I moved to Honolulu in my late 20s. I initially went just for the summer, to dog-sit for a friend’s law professor, but once I was there, I didn’t want to leave. In Hawaii, being Asian American and being mixed are the norms, and I experienced the privilege, power, and ease that come with that. People could pronounce my name; everywhere, I saw my Japanese American culture reflected back at me; and an Asian-white face like mine was both common and held up as an ideal.

Living in Hawaii felt intoxicating, but over time I saw how that experience came at a price. My acceptance there came at the expense of Native Hawaiians who have been displaced. Being at the top of the racial hierarchy only feels good if you don’t think about the people below you.

After a couple of years, I moved back to California, seeking places with more diversity than where I grew up. I now live in Sacramento, a city with a large Asian American population, but also racial segregation, due to a history of redlining and racial exclusion covenants. These days, I think a lot about what neighborhood I want to raise my daughter in, knowing how much her location can shape her Asian American identity. —Akemi Johnson, author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa

Why Best Picture nominee Sound of Metal resonates

2021-04-21T11:35:02-04:00

Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal. | Amazon Studios

This year, eight films are in the running for Best Picture, the most prestigious award at the Oscars. That’s a lot of movies to watch, analyze, and enjoy! So in the days before the ceremony on April 25, Vox staffers are looking at each of the nominees in turn. What makes this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

Below, Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson, associate editor Karen Turner, and critic at large Emily VanDerWerff discuss Sound of Metal, Darius Marder’s drama about a drummer grappling with sudden hearing loss, starring Riz Ahmed.

Sound of Metal tells a familiar story of dealing with difficulty, but in a new way

Alissa Wilkinson: I didn’t get to see Sound of Metal until way after it was already critically acclaimed, but I was bowled over by it anyhow. The emotional arc of the film, Riz Ahmed’s and Paul Raci’s performances, the way it uses sound design to bring us into the story — it’s just an extraordinary film. I have been urging everyone I know to watch it for that reason.

One of Sound of Metal’s many strong points, narratively, is exploring what hearing people (and those who don’t live with other kinds of disabilities) might not fully grasp: the decision that Ruben (Ahmed) has to make about how, when, and why he will either seek surgery to replace his hearing or basically rewrite his life to live without it. Does he see himself as having a “defect,” or as living a different way? It’s subtle and powerful, and though I’ve never had that experience, I feel like the film helped me understand it in a new way.

What, for you, resonated most in Sound of Metal? What struck you or moved you about it?

Karen Turner: I was also really moved by this question at the heart of Ruben’s journey. The beginning of the movie makes clear that music was core to Ruben’s lifestyle before he experienced sudden deafness, meaning he loses not only his sense of hearing but his whole sense of identity. How can Ruben find the reflection and stillness to figure out not only how to be, but who he is now that he is deaf? For Ruben, there’s a kind of oscillation between his desire to share communal bonds with other deaf people and the desperate urge to come up with enough cash to fund an unfathomably expensive cochlear implant surgery (thanks, American health care system!) to give him some semblance of his old life back.

I particularly loved the parts of this film that took place in the rural New England home for deaf people where Ruben finds refuge. From the gruff but empathetic Joe (Raci), a vet who runs the group home to the room where Ruben takes American Sign Language classes, Ruben is brought into the rich world and way of life of the deaf community there. Scenes such as the rowdy dinner table where residents toss out jokes in sign language, or seeing deaf students place their hands on a grand piano as someone plays to feel the vibrations of the music, filled Sound of Metal film with tender, soulful moments.

I’ve also been interested in reading many of the responses to this film from deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Some have praised the filmmakers for casting deaf actors for many of the film’s parts (although notably, not the two main deaf characters in the film), its open captioning (meaning that captions are burned into the actual film, not an option to toggle on or off, which is something deaf activists have long pushed for in the wider film world), and for its emotionally raw depiction of sudden hearing loss.

Others have criticized the film for setting up a kind of all-or-nothing decision between deafness and the restoration of hearing through surgery, which some argue is much more fluid in reality. Regardless, Sound of Metal feels like an evolution in the portrayal of deaf and hard-of-hearing people onscreen that takes us beyond more one-dimensional depictions in past movies.

Sound of Metal. | Amazon Studios" data-portal-copyright="Amazon Studios" />

Emily VanDerWerff: That’s a really interesting dichotomy you point to, Karen, because there are so few movies about people who are deaf that a film like this one does seem to set up a stark choice between deafness and the restoration of hearing. And for hearing audience members like myself, it’s really easy to conclude that this choice is that stark, when the reality is more nuanced.

But it’s also clear within the film that the choice is that stark for Ruben himself, and the movie is so laser-focused on his point of view that we get very little indication that there might be middle paths here. (Incidentally: What a year for Best Picture nominees that have an almost claustrophobic sense of being trapped in a singular perspective!) This dilemma is the burden of representation of groups that are rarely seen onscreen: Do we try our best to represent every possible point of view within that group, or do we just follow this one character’s story? Sound of Metal chooses the latter, which makes it a stronger film, but which also makes it not a particularly great introduction to debates within deaf communities more widely.

All that said, Sound of Metal’s use of nonverbal storytelling is simply exquisite. The ways in which the loss of hearing is a curse in the movie’s first half simply become a new way of living in the world in the second half. Once Ruben’s cochlear implants give him a version of hearing back, the dull distortion of, say, a party at his girlfriend’s father’s house has an ominousness to it. If the sound design of this film doesn’t win the Oscar, it will be truly unjust. I’ve rarely seen a movie use sound this effectively.

I do think the movie’s plotting is a bit sloppy, particularly in its third act, when Ruben’s reunion with Lou ends up feeling just a touch melodramatic. (She went back home and so easily reconciled with a father she apparently saw rarely? And slid into his life of luxury? It’s all plausible, but it doesn’t really fit with the character we saw earlier in the film.) But, honestly, that might be fine, because the first three-quarters of this movie, as Ruben learns to accept what’s happening to him and then gradually begins to thrive after realizing it doesn’t need to define him transform a well-worn Oscar movie type — the person who has to learn to deal with a new condition — by making it feel so much more immediate and visceral than it usually does.

Also, Riz Ahmed, Paul Raci, and Olivia Cooke do just astonishingly good work with characters who might have come across as clichés but feel real and lived-in here. Raci, in particular, all but walks away with this film. I’m so glad he was Oscar-nominated.

Alissa: Look, Emily, if your French dad was Mathieu Amalric, you might reconcile with him pretty easily, too. And I agree: Raci is incredible. His nomination might be my favorite detail about this Oscar season, and it’s one of those things I think might have slipped away in a more “conventional” Oscar year.

Speaking of the Oscars, I know we’re not all awards experts. But if a movie like this were to win, what about it do you think would attract the Academy members? What, to you, would it say about us if this movie was the representative of film in 2020?

Sound of Metal resonated in a year of isolation

Karen: I’m admittedly not super well-versed in the history of Oscar winners, but my sense is that Best Picture winners tend to be more epic, maybe a little more sweeping in scope than something like Sound of Metal, which has such an intimate feel to it and is, like you said, Emily, really a one-perspective film. The movie also has a really naturalistic tone, something it shares with Nomadland, and at times almost feels more like a documentary than a feature film. As mentioned, Riz Ahmed’s performance is in some ways classic Oscar-bait, but it also feels a little bit more subtle compared to other Best Actor winners that come to mind (I’m thinking of Joaquin Phoenix’s over-the-top Joker last year). All of that would make Sound of Metal a really interesting Best Picture winner, and one that I would hope would usher in more meditative filmmaking to the awards circuit.

In terms of this film being released at this particular moment, I do wonder if a movie like Sound of Metal built an audience in part because it was available to stream immediately on release during the pandemic. On the one hand, it’s the kind of story that might resonate better with isolated audiences who are in a more contemplative state and willing to soak up the atmosphere and specific point of view without worrying about how there isn’t that much plot. On the other hand, I found myself really wishing I could see this one in a theater, mostly because of that excellent sound design you’ve both brought up. So much of Sound of Metal is experienced sonically, and the crappy built-in speakers on my TV definitely didn’t do that justice, especially compared to how I imagine it would sound in a surround-sound theater.

Sound of Metal. | Amazon Studios" data-portal-copyright="Amazon Studios" />

Emily: Sound of Metal is a classic example of Oscar voters getting really into a performance, then checking out the rest of the movie and realizing it’s great too. Riz Ahmed has slowly but surely built momentum all awards season, picking up nominations and praise for his work, and once he started to feel like a sure thing, it was easier for voters to realize that Sound of Metal is good beyond his performance. Its nomination for Best Editing is maybe my favorite one for the film, because the editing is relatively unflashy but also so hypnotically places you in Ruben’s perspective.

I think one reason the movie might have resonated more in this past year has to do with the way it focuses so much on how Ruben feels a little isolated from the world around him, both before he loses his hearing and after. The opening shot, after all, is of Ruben playing the drums, tucked away behind Lou, focusing intently. He’s already in his own world, and when he loses his hearing, he’s drawn into a community that he ultimately rejects.

The movie’s presentation of cochlear implants as a hard-and-fast binary maybe isn’t strictly accurate, but that read of the situation does feel true to Ruben’s character to me. He probably would look at the implants as “solving” his deafness — a “problem” that wasn’t really a problem, without quite realizing that such a solution would return him to the isolation he was in when the film began. Sound of Metal’s final sequence — with Ruben sitting on a bench in Antwerp, finally removing his implants’ processors so he can sit in silence — is so powerful because Ruben rejected the community he had been welcomed into in favor of the relationship he missed.

That decision is one we can all relate to at least a little bit, but it feels particularly raw here. It’s not that Lou doesn’t want Ruben around; it’s that his life has moved past her. She “saved” his life in a bunch of ways, but being saved implies the eventual onset of a time when one has to move past their savior to live as themselves. Sound of Metal presents Ruben trying to regain the life he lived while he was capable of hearing to be a regression of sorts. He had grown so much as a person, until he hadn’t.

Anyway, I think that’s why the movie resonated so much in 2020 and 2021 — the pandemic has isolated us, and that has made regression into older, less healthy versions of ourselves all the more likely. Ruben’s journey feels like a metaphor for so many of our journeys right now.

Karen: That’s such a great point. I would add, too, that the storyline about his addiction, which is something we haven’t touched on yet, also resonates here. Part of the tragedy of his hearing loss is that Sound of Metal heavily implies that music represented a turning point in Ruben’s journey with sobriety, so much so that the first person that Ruben and Lou call after Ruben loses his hearing is his sponsor. Because his relationship with music changes so drastically (though I should note that the film does depict that many deaf people still experience and enjoy music), Ruben is left without one of the key ways of managing his addiction.

This feels really relatable to me after the past year. One of the most challenging things has been dealing with the stress and anxiety of a pandemic without access to the things I usually depend on for relief, such as socializing, going to the gym, etc. What Ruben goes through is, of course, a very specific experience that I don’t want to broaden too much, but I do feel that the way he is forced to find new ways to cope with his demons is one that many people who lived through the pandemic can relate to.

Alissa: Wow, yes — I totally agree with both of you. And Karen, that point about being able to stream the film is a good one; this is the kind of movie that can be hard to convince people to see in a theater (even though you can imagine how fantastic it would be to experience the sound design in that space!). But it stands head and shoulders above a lot of the stuff people have been watching all year, without going over the top.

So I have one more question for you both: If someone watched Sound of Metal and loved it, are there other works you might recommend to them? Movies, books, TV shows, podcasts, articles — the door is wide open.

Sound of Metal. | Amazon Studios" data-portal-copyright="Amazon Studios" />

What to watch after you’ve seen Sound of Metal

Karen: The one movie that immediately jumped to mind when I watched this is Leave No Trace, which is one of those movies that I think about all the time. It’s about a vet struggling with PTSD and his teenage daughter who live in the forest largely cut off from the larger world. The film’s structure, where a nomadic pair are abruptly separated, bringing one of the characters into a peaceful, intentional community on the fringes of mainstream society, felt really aligned with Sound of Metal’s storyline. The films also share a very naturalistic and gentle tone and pace, both in the filmmaking and in the performances, that build into quietly heartbreaking climaxes.

My other recommendation would be The Night Of, which is an HBO crime drama that stars Riz Ahmed. It’s an outstanding series all around, but Riz was really the standout star. I’m such a fan of his and can’t wait to see what he does next.

Emily: Both of those recommendations are fantastic choices. I’m going to pick a couple of stories that center deafness. The first is the 2000 documentary Sound and Fury, which follows two families (within the same extended family) weighing whether to get cochlear implants for their deaf children. The movie surely doesn’t reflect contemporary debates on this topic — since it’s 21 years old, after all — but it presents a very nuanced view of why this is such a fraught topic among the deaf community.

I would also recommend the two-season Sundance Now series This Close, about two lifelong friends who are deaf, played by Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman, who are both deaf in real life and are the series’ creators and showrunners. At just 14 half-hour episodes, it’s a breezy weekend watch, with some great characters and some really beautiful storytelling. It’s one of my favorite under-the-radar shows, and if you need something a bit lighter after Sound of Metal, it would be a great place to start. It’s available on the AMC+ app.

Alissa: I wish I could have recommended Riz Ahmed’s “livestreamed edition” of his album The Long Goodbye, which he performed solo. Unfortunately, the livestream ended in March, but it was an incredible exploration of his identity and heritage. If you get a chance to see it in the future, do not sleep on it. He’s a marvelously talented musician.

So instead I’ll point to something you can look forward to that’s not out yet: CODA (which stands for “child of deaf adults”), a film that brought down the house at this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival and will be released by Apple TV+, most likely later this year. It’s funny and heartwarming and moving, and it won a whole bunch of awards at the festival. I wrote a little about it here. It’s a fine companion piece to Sound of Metal — and let’s hope there will be many more.

Sound of Metal is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Find our discussions of the other 2021 Best Picture nominees here.

One Good Thing: The pulpy joys of the Bruce Lee-inspired Warrior

2021-02-12T10:10:20-05:00

Warrior follows the Hop Wei, a powerful tong that deals opium, in their power struggles during the San Francisco Tong Wars of the 1870s. | Graham Bartholomew/Cinemax

Before he died tragically in 1973 at the age of 32, Bruce Lee was writing the beginnings of a martial arts Western television series. It was a chance for the Chinese American actor, who had long played supporting characters in American films, to finally star as the hero of his own show. Lee pitched it to the studios, but according to him, producers didn’t think audiences were ready for a show with a nonwhite lead. He died before he could see his vision through.

Years later, Lee’s daughter, actress and martial artist Shannon, discovered an eight-page treatment for the show in her father’s journals after taking over the Bruce Lee Foundation, an organization dedicated to his legacy, in 2000. She picked up where her father left off, collaborating with Justin Lin, director of the Fast & Furious franchise. The resulting Warrior feels like the series Lee would have wanted: pulpy, action-filled genre television that centers Chinese American stories.

Warrior premiered on Cinemax in 2019 and aired for two 10-episode seasons, both of which are available to stream on HBO Max. There’s a lot about the show that will be recognizable to fans of today’s dark antihero dramas: The gangster storyline feels like a plot from Boardwalk Empire or Peaky Blinders, the frontier fable of capitalism resembles Deadwood, and warring factions vying for power recall similar conflicts on Game of Thrones. But what sets Warrior apart is its focus on a fascinating chapter in the American story that’s often treated like an afterthought in history books. And it wraps that history lesson in an enticing action-thriller package with nods to spaghetti Westerns, the kung fu cinema of Hong Kong, gangster flicks, and exploitation films, as well as other grindhouse genres.

Warrior takes place in 1870s San Francisco — the city where Bruce Lee was born — during a wave of Chinese migration, primarily to provide labor for America’s new railroads. Newly arrived Chinese immigrants, facing discrimination and sequestered in Chinatowns in major cities across the country, self-organized into gangs, or “tongs,” as a way to survive. The violent Tong Wars ensued as anti-Chinese sentiment swept the nation, ultimately leading to the 1882 passage of the shameful Chinese Exclusion Act, the sole piece of legislation in American history that banned the immigration of an entire nationality.

Warrior’s story follows Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji), a poor Chinese immigrant with first-class fighting skills who arrives on the shores of America in search of his sister, Mai Ling (Diane Doan). Once he arrives, he’s immediately initiated into the Hop Wei, a tong that sells opium in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Soon he discovers that Mai Ling, who had come to America years earlier, is now married to the powerful leader of an opposing tong. Their reunion ignites long-simmering tensions between the tongs, triggering a power play between the long-lost siblings over who will take over Chinatown.

The show’s universe is hard-boiled, steeped in menacing violence and the cutthroat core of American capitalism. The tongs operate on enforced loyalty under threat of death, but you can’t help but admire them for staking out a small piece of power in a country where Chinese people are villainized and shut out of society. The alternative is to work as a cheap laborer subjected to backbreaking conditions for starvation wages. Meanwhile, the city’s Irish workers, who have found their jobs undercut by the new migrants, routinely attack both the Chinese and the factories where they work.

Warrior’s characters are survivors. Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng), the bisexual madam of a Chinatown brothel, is trying to not only build a safety net for herself but also provide a better alternative to more exploitative avenues of sex work — or, in the direst circumstances, sex slavery — for Chinese women. Weapons dealer Chao (Hoon Lee) makes his way and tries to get ahead by selling hatchets and information to the highest bidder, including the police. For me, the standout character is Baby Jun, the bastard son of a tong leader and sex worker, who is played with humor and recklessness by Jason Tobin.

Warrior focuses on its Chinese American characters, who are just trying to make it in this country. But the show’s villains are compelling figures too. Dean Jagger’s Dylan Leary is particularly interesting as a union leader who mixes genuine concern for his fellow working-class Irish immigrants with the terrifying and violent rage of a racist. The show’s police, mostly Irish themselves, are depicted as unbridled enforcers of wealth and white supremacy, but a Southern cop named Officer Lee (Tom Weston-Jones) makes an admirable attempt to do actual police work. To the industrialists, the Chinese matter little beyond providing a cheap labor source, but it’s hard not to root for Penny (Joanna Vanderham), a woman whose inherited steel factory is her only route to independence from her horrific husband, the mayor.

The immigrant caste system of the show is one of its strongest storytelling features. Recently migrated Chinese are at the bottom, Irish migrant laborers and police officers the next rung up, yet all sit underneath the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) industrialists and politicians — who are, of course, on stolen land themselves. The question of who gets to truly be American and how that question is used to exploit the working class is a core theme of Warrior that feels especially relevant to today’s politics.

And the real-world stories and figures that inspire Warrior’s storytelling — Ah Toy is based on a real gold rush-era madam, and Dylan Leary is based on the labor organizer and founder of the Workingmen’s Party, Denis Kearney — are refreshing. As a huge fan of period television, I’ve long wanted to see more people who look like me at the center of these shows. This is part of what felt so intriguing about the recent debut of Netflix’s popular Bridgerton, which transplants characters of color into a Jane Austen-style romance. But representation can feel like a shallow concession when portrayed without consequence, subbing out would-be white characters for nonwhites with little more than an obligatory nod to the realities of racial dynamics. That’s why I’ve found Warrior so satisfying to watch: Here is a little-known piece of actual Chinese American history, rooted in America’s history of immigrant exploitation, playing out on screen.

The fact that Warrior is imbued with the legacy of Bruce Lee, an icon of Asian American cinema, just adds to the show’s Asian American specificity. The influence of Justin Lin, action-movie mogul and one of the most powerful Asian American creatives in Hollywood, is most obvious in the series’ terrific fight sequences. However, I was reminded more of Lin’s underrated first film Better Luck Tomorrow, which also depicted Asian Americans — freed from the stereotype of silent obedience — breaking bad.

But I don’t mean to make the show sound preachy or pedantic. I promise, Warrior is just really fun to watch. Its martial arts sequences are standouts, as complex as they are bloody, and the dialogue feels straight out of a dark graphic novel. Because the show originated on Cinemax, there’s a lot of sex and violence, as well as racial slurs that at times slip into “gratuitous” territory. But because Warrior feels like a deliberate tribute to grindhouse movies, it all sort of fits.

Sadly, the untimely demise of Cinemax in 2020 means that Warrior is effectively canceled. Now that it’s streaming on HBO Max, however, there is a glimmer of possibility the show will find a wider audience and maybe get picked up for another season as an HBO Max original. I hope it does. I’d love to see the universe of Warrior expand, especially to include other groups in late 1800s California; an episode that focuses on a Mexican American street-fighting host and the introduction of the show’s first Black character are signs the show, at one time or another, intended to do just that.

But regardless of whether the show is ever revived, Warrior’s two completed seasons provide a satisfying storyline. The penultimate episode of season two, a violent clash in Chinatown following the lynching of a Chinese man — based on the real-world San Francisco Riot of 1877 — feels like a culmination of the series, despite the cliffhanger that follows in the next episode.

Ultimately, the episode that best encapsulates Warrior for me is a season one installment in which a spaghetti-Western-style shootout erupts in a saloon in Grass Valley, Nevada. The small business is owned and operated by a former Chinese railroad laborer who toiled for decades before using his long-saved earnings to build a homestead in the middle of nowhere with his American wife. Their life feels like the realization of a humble immigrant fantasy that, suddenly sieged by violence, is as precarious as it is rare. As Baby Jun, one of the show’s few second-generation Chinese migrants, says in the episode, “I’m sure no fucking American. I don’t belong anywhere.” Warrior is about the many Americans who have not (and probably will never) really belong, but who have no choice but to keep grinding for the chance at a small piece of the American dream.

Warrior is streaming on HBO Max. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

How ballots are actually counted, explained by 3 election officials

2020-11-03T20:11:30-05:00

Local election officials work are tasked with counting ballots in every election. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

With record numbers of early voting, a pandemic raging, and the president seeding doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots, the nation is bracing for a potentially long election night — or multiple nights — before a winner can be called.

Reports have already surfaced that President Trump is prepared to seed skepticism about the vote count, especially in close-call states. As Astead Herndon and Annie Karni reported for the New York Times Saturday evening: “Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after.”

But as uncertainties swirl, local election officials are working hard. There are somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 (depending on how you count) local election boards across the nation — either elected or appointed depending on the state — and they are composed of people from within the communities they serve. This election, they are processing the surge in absentee ballots and early votes, training up new poll volunteers, battling misinformation, and prepping to spend the next few days counting votes. They are also increasingly concerned that their efforts to preserve integrity in the ballot counting process are being met with misunderstanding and distrust.

“One of the most important things about being an election official that people forget is that we’re citizens very concerned with the health of our democracy, and we act in about as bipartisan or nonpartisan a way as anybody could,” said Adrian Fontes, an election official in Maricopa County, Arizona. “While we have to make our own selections on a ballot, the integrity of the process is so much more important to us than the results of any contest.”

I spoke to three election officials from across the nation about how the ballot counting process works. All of them stressed that those who count election results are members of the community, that it’s normal for the process to take time, and that, above all, voters should be confident that their vote turned in will be counted correctly.

“The biggest challenge that’s different this year is voter confidence”

Ricky Hatch, Weber County, Utah

I’ve been doing elections for 10 years now, and I’ve been involved with elections on the national level for about seven years.

This year, it’s funny because in Utah, as far as processing stuff, there’s really not much difference at all. We’ve done it by mail for a couple of years statewide, so it’s not a big deal for us. The biggest challenge that’s different this year is voter confidence. We have voters who voted by mail for 13 straight elections that all of a sudden are concerned about the security of their ballot.

And so instead of having one, maybe two phone operators to handle phone calls, we’ve had four full-time operators for three weeks handling the calls of voters saying, “I heard that I can’t trust the vote by mail system.” We tell them, here are the controls we have in place and virtually every one of them says, “Oh, ok, so it’s not a big deal.” And then a really small number will say, “Yeah, ok, well, I trust you, but what about California? Or what about Pennsylvania?”

Here in Utah, every active registered voter is mailed a ballot weeks before the election so that they know exactly what’s on the ballot — no surprises. The voter can mail it back to the Postal Service, or they can drop it in a drop box, or they can drop it off in person on Election Day, or they can come in on Election Day and we’ll give them a new one.

The first thing we do when we receive the ballot is we make sure that that voter is registered and that they’ve only voted once and that the ballot envelope that we’ve received hasn’t been spoiled and actually belongs to them. The next thing we do is we look at their signature and we make sure that it matches the signature that we have on file.

All of these pre-checks are done with the envelope closed. So we can’t tell by looking at the envelope if the voter is Republican or Democrat or Independent or how they voted. When we slice open the envelope, we do it in a way where you can’t see the voter’s signature and the ballot at the same time. We remove the ballot, but don’t unfold it, and we do this, of course, around a table with multiple poll workers or election judges. And so everyone’s a check on each other to make sure that no one’s trying to be silly and trying to see how somebody voted.

Once those are removed, then we unfold the ballot and examine it, looking for tears, blood, sticky stuff that might get stuck in the machines. Then we place the ballots in batches from the time we receive them, and we reconcile at each point throughout the process to make sure we don’t lose any ballots or that no new ballots are introduced incorrectly or improperly into the system.

The scanner is the device that actually reads the ballots and converts them from the voter marking the paper into something that a machine can read. We put them into the scanner and then we pull the memory stick out of the machine and walk it over to our tabulation server, which is also in the locked separate area that only a couple of people have access to.

We don’t look at the results until the polls close on election night, at which point we will pull up the report on the tabulation server and that becomes the official report. Then we take a clean memory stick with the report on it and walk that over to the Election Directors office, and they will upload it securely to the state election night reporting system. We also process ballots after Election Day, since in Utah a lot of people will drop their ballots off on Election Day. We expect that by this Friday about 95 percent of the ballots will have been counted.

Passions run high in presidential elections. And that’s as it should be. But as election officials, as election administrators, we have refined that process to make it efficient and secure. And we want the public to have confidence, because we shop at the same grocery stores, we go to the same church buildings as the people that we serve. We’re your neighbors. That’s how we look at it.

“The integrity of the process is so much more important to us than the results of any contest”

Adrian Fontes, Maricopa County, Arizona

I get asked pretty regularly what keeps me up at night, whether it’s hackers or, you know, miscreants from North Korea. And the reality is that it’s misinformation and disinformation that are the biggest threats to our democracy right now.

You know, our system operates on trust. We trust our fellow citizens who are actually the workers that handled the ballot. These are actually Republicans and Democrats who do the bipartisan hand count audit at the end of every election here in Maricopa County. These are retired teachers and college students and folks who live next door.

When these conspiracy theories and rumors abound, what they’re doing is they’re undermining the faith that folks have in their next-door neighbor. You know, citizens just like themselves. And that’s unfortunate. These are people that we can trust.

One of the most important things about being an election official that people forget is that we’re citizens very concerned with the health of our democracy, and we act in about as bipartisan or nonpartisan a way as anybody could. While we have to make our own selections on a ballot, the integrity of the process is so much more important to us than the results of any contest.

Maricopa County, Arizona, is unique because we’re the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the United States of America. So our process is probably about as high speed, low drag as you can get in the country.

So effectively, what we’ve got is two types of tabulators or scanners that take care of the ballots once they’ve been processed. For the earlies to get processed, each mail-in ballot has an envelope with the affidavit on the outside and the voter signature gets scanned and verified, and then a bipartisan board opens up that envelope to verify that everything’s good to go. They send those in a stack into a big ballot tabulation center. If it’s a person who’s voting in person at a polling place on Election Day, they’ll actually have a fresh ballot printed for them at one of our vote centers, and any voter can vote anywhere, which is incredibly convenient for our voters. Those ballots will go through their own scanners there at the vote center on Election Day.

We do results [for early votes] at 8 pm on election night, which is one hour after polls close. Then we do results of the vote center tallies as those come in physically to the ballot tabulation center through the evening, and then any of the late early ballots you receive on Election Day or that haven’t been fully processed before Election Day. As the tally goes up, we report those out every evening at 7 pm, starting one day after Election Day until the final results are complete. So it really depends on how many ballots get turned in late on Election Day in those envelopes.

We won’t have final, final, official numbers until the earliest after 5 pm on Tuesday, a week after Election Day. And that’s because, in Arizona, we have what’s called conditional provisional curing period of five business days after Election Day, where a voter who may not have ID on Election Day can still draw a ballot and still vote that ballot.

I was a candidate [for Maricopa County recorder] in 2016, but it took us, I think 11 or 12 days after Election Day to get to the point where we could actually call my race because it was so close. So, you know, I know what it means to wait for results from a candidate’s perspective. And there was a lot of close races in 2016, as folks remember. But we’ve done a lot better as time moves forward, so I don’t expect to be waiting anywhere near that long this year.

“We are trying to make sure that voters know exactly what’s happening behind the scenes”

Maribeth Witzel-Behl, Madison, Wisconsin

I’ve been city clerk since 2006. We have 5,365 people scheduled to work at the polls on Election Day. Ordinarily, we have about 3,000. And so we have more poll workers than ever during the pandemic, and a lot of those are first-term officials.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who are new to working at the polls and they have a mom or grandma or an aunt who ordinarily would be working but is unable to this time. So they’ve decided to step up and fill that role. In addition to that, we have some large employers in the area who are giving their employees the day off so they can work at the polls.

In Madison, we process the absentee ballots right at the polling place for those voters. The officials there will carry five absentee envelopes at a time up to the poll book, announce the voter’s names and addresses at the poll book, and those voters are assigned a voter number. Then, the officials will open those envelopes, separate the envelopes from the ballot and feed the ballots into the tabulator to be counted. So when the results are posted on election night, the results from each ward in Madison include the absentees from that ward and the votes cast at the polling place at that ward on Election Day.

When you cast that absentee ballot, the envelope is specific to you. And that’s what gets announced at the poll book. But whether that ballot inside is gonna be counted is determined by the envelope itself. No matter who you vote for or whether you even choose to return a blank ballot, once that envelope is checked in and assigned a voter number, we are processing that ballot.

So it’s not like anybody can open the absentee envelopes and then decide whether they’re going to be counted. That sealed envelope is checked into the poll book. Once the ballots are set into the machine, there’s no way to go back into the ballot box and figure out which ballot was yours. That ballot is a secret ballot.

There are concerns about how do I make sure my ballot was counted after Election Day, and we have to actually manually update that information in the state system. So the next day, you can’t go into the state system to verify that they processed your ballot because we’re going page by page through the poll book and updating everybody’s voter record. But you can, in Wisconsin, log into the state system with your name and date of birth to see that your absentee was received by the clerk’s office and that it was sent to a polling place to be counted.

We should be able to process those during the day on Election Day and run the results as we would usually. We don’t expect any delays because we have so many poll workers available to process these absentees.

We really value transparency, and are trying to make sure that voters know exactly what’s happening behind the scenes. We developed a podcast series about everything that’s taking place. And we’ve had more media in the office than usual, just so voters could be able to see what is going on while they’re unable to come and observe like they ordinarily might do.

Sean Connery, legendary actor known for his role as James Bond, dies at 90

2020-10-31T12:29:29-04:00

Scottish actor Sean Connery, pictured here at the 1987 London premiere of the film The Name of the Rose, has died at the age of 90. | PA Images via Getty Images

Sean Connery, best known as the first actor to play James Bond on the big screen, has died at the age of 90. He “died peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family,” publicist Nancy Seltzer said in a statement Saturday.

His son, Jason Connery, confirmed his father had been “unwell for some time,” the BBC reported.

Connery leaves behind a legacy as an icon in the film industry. His most famous role as James Bond in films like You Only Live Twice and Dr. No helped launch the 007 film franchise that continues today, but he’s also beloved for roles in films such as The Hunt for Red October, The Name of the Rose, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Connery was also a proud advocate for his home country of Scotland and a strong supporter of the Scottish National Party, known for pushing for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Connery was the son of a factory worker and a cleaning woman. After a series of odd jobs, including working as a milkman and a competitive bodybuilder, Connery began auditioning as a stage actor at theaters in Edinburgh and London.

He continued working as a stage, television, and film actor when, at the age of 32, he starred in his breakthrough role as James Bond in Dr. No, the first film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s novels. Connery went on to star in six more Bond films as well as a slew of other movies, earning the 1988 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the film The Untouchables. He was knighted in 2000.

Connery will be remembered worldwide as a legendary actor, a sex symbol, a proud Scot, and the first (and quite possibly the best) Bond.

“Sean was born into a working class Edinburgh family and through talent & sheer hard work, became an international film icon and one of the world’s most accomplished actors,” Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted Saturday. “Our nation today mourns one of her best loved sons.”

He is survived by his wife, painter Micheline Roquebrune, and his son, Jason, also an actor.

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The often-overlooked reasons why young people don’t vote

2020-10-15T09:35:52-04:00

“I voted” stickers sit on a table inside an early voting site in Chicago, Illinois, on October 1, 2020. | Kamil Krzaczyski/AFP via Getty Images

Young people don’t flock to the poll like older Americans do. In 2016, only 46 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted, compared to 71 percent of those over 65; in 2012, those numbers were pretty much the same.

Narratives around the youth vote have long centered around apathy — that young Americans just aren’t showing up, even though elections impact them on issues such as climate change and educational debt. Michelle Obama said on a recent podcast episode, “I understand the people who voted for Trump. The people who didn’t vote at all, the young people, the women, that’s when you think, man, people think this is a game.”

Others insist that young people don’t vote because the candidates offered to them don’t represent their political views. This was a key argument behind Bernie Sanders’s 2020 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, which was built on the idea of a political revolution of youth voter turnout inspired by his socialist-leaning political agenda. (Youth voter turnout disappointed Sanders in the 2020 primary: “Have we been as successful as I would hope in bringing young people in? The answer is no,” he said.)

But the reality is that most young people are neither apathetic nor ideologically disengaged. They aren’t turning out to vote because their lives are not set up for it.

Young people are attending college, often in a different location from where they grew up. They’re working full-time or part-time while attending school, often at low-wage jobs that can have unstable work schedules. They don’t have access to transportation. They move around a lot, change schools, or study abroad. They don’t know where they’ll be living three months in the future.

“You think about the fact that most 40-year-olds … have a stable workweek where you kind of know when you’ll fit voting in on that first Tuesday in November,” said Sunshine Hillygus, a political science professor at Duke University who co-wrote a book on young voters, on the EdSurge podcast. “Whereas young people have a far more fluid and unstable schedule and lifestyle.”

Registering to vote — and figuring out where and how to vote — can look easy on paper. But for many young adults, getting clear instructions, along with all the variables that can change at the last minute, is more challenging than you might think. Hillygus suggests reforms that ease the process of voting, such as preregistering young people to vote in high school or when they get their driver’s license at 16, as well as better overall civic education in schools that connect government and politics with teens’ everyday lives.

Vox spoke to three young people who encountered logistical difficulties that prevented or nearly prevented them from voting. All of them wanted to make clear that they and their young peers do want to vote, but that the barriers to making it happen can feel daunting.

“I wondered where my ballot would go, whether it would be mailed back to my address in Atlanta or Shanghai. And my college was in Tennessee, so I had three locations to worry about.”

Angelina Tran, 26, just graduated with a master’s degree in education policy, Georgia

For the last presidential election, which would have been my first time voting for president, I was in Shanghai, China, for a college semester abroad.

I signed up for an absentee ballot when I was home in Atlanta, Georgia. But I didn’t know which address to put, and I think I ended up sending it to the generic study abroad office in Shanghai. It was really confusing. There wasn’t a lot of information on what it’s like to vote when you are living abroad, especially in a country that may have more barriers when it comes to receiving mail from your home country.

I wondered where my ballot would go, whether it would be mailed back to my address in Atlanta or Shanghai. And my college was in Tennessee, so I had three locations to worry about — typical millennial, moving all over the place. I remember calling and asking my mom at home if she received an absentee ballot, but my mom doesn’t speak English so she said no; I wasn’t sure if that was actually the case. I literally was like, “Can I just vote online?”

There was a group of us from across the US all studying abroad. We were really sad when we heard the election results. From my college, there were about 15 of us — I don’t think anyone abroad voted via absentee ballot. China was just confusing, just receiving any mail in general was confusing. The study abroad program, which assigns us to housing, that all wasn’t finalized until late in the process.

It just sucks that I couldn’t vote. There’s definitely a sense of pride and accomplishment when you vote, especially since that was such a historic election — even though Georgia is pretty much conservative, so I knew which way it would go. But I think the idea of voting, just as one person making a difference, was important to me. As soon as I got back to the states, I was voting in local elections because that was so much easier to navigate. But it was disappointing that the absentee ballot abroad was really confusing. I wish there were easier ways for people abroad to vote.

“I requested my absentee ballot months in advance. It never came. ”

Lucas Carroll, 20, college student, Massachusetts

I’m registered to vote in southwest Michigan but go to college in Massachusetts, and in this year’s primary, I requested my absentee ballot months in advance. It never came. I lived with four siblings along with my mom, my aunt, and my little cousin, so it’s kind of a crazy house and I wasn’t sure if it was my fault I never got my ballot or if it got thrown away. This problem is only going to be amplified by a million come November.

I called the clerk and she promised me it was okay to go in and vote in person. I’m not immunocompromised, and I live with people who are generally young and healthy, so I wasn’t too worried, though I did wear gloves and a mask. But I wondered if everybody else would feel just as comfortable to do so.

I was able to end up voting in the primary, but it was really confusing. Especially with the news coming out of Georgia that 1,000 people had voted twice. I question if that’s really what happened or if they requested an absentee ballot that never came and went in person as well.

The coronavirus has made everything a million times more difficult. I called my clerk and I talked to her about that. I mentioned that I was going back to school in the fall, but I have no idea what’s going to happen or if we’ll still even be in school by November or if we’ll be sent home because of an outbreak. She just said, “Don’t worry about it, just let me know where you’ll be by the first week of October.” And I was like, “I have no idea.”

I didn’t even know what my school address was going to be until a couple weeks ago because I was supposed to be studying abroad and that got canceled, so they were waiting to see what opened up before putting me into a new dorm. It wasn’t anybody else’s fault, it was just the logistical nightmares that Covid has caused. But that happened to a bunch of people I know who are still trying to find places to live, on or off campus. All of these barriers that have already been present are being amplified at a time like this. Luckily, it all worked out and I was able to vote.

What really worries me is that all of those students are registering for absentee ballots at their college address. And we’ve already had, what, a dozen colleges who have closed down schools and sent the kids home? Is their first priority really gonna be, “I need to call my clerk and get my address changed”? Or is it gonna be, “Where am I gonna live for the next several months? How am I gonna do school? How am I gonna get all my stuff home?”

This election, everyone I know is really motivated to vote in. In 2018, the conversation was like, “How do I get a stamp? Where should I mail my absentee ballot?” This year it’s like, “I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t even know where to start.” It’s not about apathy. It’s not about having a clear choice in November. It’s all about this situation which has made preexisting roadblocks to voting 10 times more difficult to overcome.

I have friends that are like, “I will make my mom come and drive to pick me up to take me home to vote if I have to. If I have to book a flight to go home, I can’t really afford that, but I will figure it out.” This election is too important to sit out.

“I was registered to vote at my home for the primary, which was about 45 minutes away from my campus, but I didn’t have a car”

Erika Neal, 22, graduate student in California

During the 2016 election, I was a freshman. I had just moved in on campus. There was so much going on. I was a work study student, I was an honors student, I had a full class load. Unfortunately, my school did not close for Election Day, and I had so many tests and assignments that were due that I wasn’t able to figure out how to vote.

I was registered to vote at my home for the primary, which was about 45 minutes away from my campus, but I didn’t have a car to go back home. I didn’t know that you had to re-register to vote in your locality. It was really hard to know where to go for that information as a 17-year-old.

It’s not that voting wasn’t important to me. It was. But because I already assumed I was registered to vote in Virginia, where my college was, I didn’t realize I had to vote in my home polling place. Making that assumption definitely could have been combated with Google, but also making sure that educational gap is filled by the university, and holding my alma mater accountable for it, has become important to me because some people don’t know this stuff. They don’t know where to look. I didn’t know there was such thing as an election registrar. It really comes down to that gap in education. We have students coming from all kinds of school systems. And at 17 years old, 18 years old, you’re not thinking about four years ahead of you. You’re thinking about now.

I was a full-time student. On top of that, my school is heavily dependent on financial aid, and that includes work study. Freshman year, tuition was a significant expense for me and my family, so I wanted to use as much of that work study money as possible to defer those payments. That was my No. 1 priority.

I was really fortunate to have a work study position that was on campus because I didn’t have transportation. But not having a car made it even harder to try and get home. I would have had to take the train and I didn’t always have time to do that, and my parents didn’t necessarily have time to pick me up from the train station so I could go vote before my polling location closed. That was definitely a hurdle. My priority at the time was my school and my work.

I think not all, but many school systems are failing to connect the importance of civic engagement with our daily lives. For a lot of young people who are getting ready to vote in this election or are just barely too young to vote now, they are starting to see how politics is involved in every single aspect of our lives. So many young people of color are starting to understand the impact that voting can have, especially with Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, or any other movements going on. We have the power in voting who represents us in these spaces.

When it comes to young people voting, an added hurdle is worrying about having enough money to have a roof over your head. You are considered a young adult, you graduate college, and you just want to make sure you have everything to stay alive — like food, water, and shelter. The cost of living is so expensive. It’s so hard to find time to vote for a lot of people who fit into that demographic.

“I miss my friends a lot”: 5 students on the uncertainty of school openings

2020-08-25T10:48:52-04:00

Students across the country face uncertainty over in-person or virtual school this fall. | Getty Images/Westend61

During a normal year around this time, parents would be heading to the store to get folders and pencils for their elementary school children, incoming college freshmen would be packing up for a fresh start in a parent-free space, and high school seniors would begin celebrating their final year at home before college.

But since the coronavirus pandemic swept the world in January, education has been disrupted. Schools quickly moved online, forcing teachers and students to adapt to a new mode of learning while coping with the uncertainty of a pandemic. The whole process felt makeshift — some students were better equipped than others, which tended to fall along socioeconomic lines, while others struggled with lack of child care, the safety of high-risk family members, or busy multigenerational homes. The academic year concluded with lots of unanswered questions about what would happen to schools in the fall.

After a summer of planning, strategizing, and weighing risks, some schools are reopening or gearing up to reopen part time, while others will be completely online for the foreseeable future. Educators, stressed about the potential dangers of the classroom, are organizing around workplace safety issues or quitting altogether. Parents, forced to make decisions based on their families’ personal risk factors, are fretting about what’s to come.

But how are kids themselves thinking about the pandemic, the upcoming school year, and this uncertain time? Vox spoke to five students, from second-graders to college freshmen, about their feelings surrounding returning to school.

Ryla Ruscio, 7 years old, Laurelhurst School in Portland, Oregon

When coronavirus first happened, it changed my life a lot, especially school, which went totally on the apps. Reading is also on apps now, with my teachers all onscreen. I don’t like it that much, but I think it’s fine. My mom says I will go back to school in the fall. It’ll be different because instead of just the apps that I do over the summer, there will be meetings with my teachers too. I would rather go back to school in person, though, because it’s much easier.

My summer’s been pretty much like a normal summer, but we didn’t really get to do everything we did last summer, like camps and swim lessons and vacations, because of the coronavirus. We’ve been watering our neighbors’ gardens. We do more screen time. We started playing Animal Crossing. It’s a really great game. I have also been watching more movies. But I don’t have a favorite.

We see some friends sometimes, but we always wear masks for safety. One time I hung out with four friends at once. We definitely had to keep our distance and all of that stuff, so we were on bikes.

We also got two new kittens because my mom thought it would make us happy. I think it’s really cool. The first one is pretty much a big fat cat, but she is really cute. She’s always asleep. Her name is Covi because of coronavirus. She’s a very silly kitty. The other cat is named Blueberry.

I’m so excited for school to come back so I can see my friends. But I think it’s gonna be weird. I’ve never started school this way, where we have to be on technology. I’m nervous about it. We did school on screens when coronavirus first started, using little apps and readings on their screens. I didn’t like doing school on the apps, but I thought it was okay.

Coronavirus is changing my life a little bit. I don’t know how long it will go on. I think it might harm my family, but maybe not. Coronavirus is not really so great. I’m definitely not liking it.

Lauren West, 17 years old, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas

We are planning on heading back to school right after Labor Day. Our school district has to decide if they want to be fully online for the year, or if they want to do a hybrid type version. Those are the only two options, so you just pick whichever you’re comfortable with. The online would be permanent for the whole entire year, where the hybrid is gonna be based off of how many Covid cases we have in our county. So if it’s kind of spiked that week, we would see ourselves doing online, and two weeks later, if it’s gone down, we could potentially be at school for a few days out of the week.

Personally, I decided on doing the hybrid option. I actually, unfortunately this month ended up getting Covid, so I have kind of — it changed my perspective a lot. For me, I really struggled doing online school for the remainder of my junior year. But I do understand how important safety and all of that is, and if I felt like my school wasn’t taking safety precautions, I could definitely see myself not feeling 100 percent comfortable going to school.

Since I did get Covid, I was just kind of surprised by how many things are open. I think it’s crazy that our swimming pools and stuff like that are open and there are just people running around pretending like maybe there’s nothing going on. But I think for me, when I did catch it, it just put in perspective how real and scary this all is, which is too bad that it took me getting it to kind of realize that.

I was kind of the first person in my area to get it. But it was definitely kind of hard coming from the social aspect even more than the actual illness. A lot of people kind of looked at my family as the people who spread it in our area, which, of course, if we knew we had had it, we would have never wanted to expose it to anyone. But there were definitely some people I think personally, who were looking at me like I was some kind of Covid monster, and I think that part was definitely hard.

Demarri Troupe, 11 years old, Montera Middle School in Oakland, California

We went back to school August 10. I’m excited to be back. It’s really good to be back at school, not back fully in school, but it’s so good to see some of my classmates and to have somebody to talk to. I’m in sixth grade now.

The first week of summer vacation, I did nothing. Second week, before coronavirus was major, I went to the gym. Then the third week, I stayed home and played my video games. Fourth week, stay home, fifth week, stay home, stay, home, stay home. Sometimes I play Fortnite, but the most games I play are Need for Speed and Madden.

Once school started again, it was all on Zoom. It doesn’t feel the same. I like regular school better, because you get to be in school, because you get to have recess with your friends, instead of seeing them online at their houses doing nothing. School in the classroom is more hands-on than on the computer. There’s more to stuff to do; the hours are shorter.

I miss my friends a lot. Every day after school, we used to go to a hangout place and kick it there until our parents came and picked us up. Now we can’t. Normally when I get bored, I ask my mom to take me to the gym. But I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do sports because of the pandemic. I can’t do anything except sit at home, watch TV, and do homework.

My favorite thing about the pandemic so far is getting to go back to school, even though we are not fully back to school. I like seeing my new teachers, and getting to do work. I really missed school. I know other kids don’t right now, but I really do. I’m just praying we can go back to real school. Staying home is not going that well.

I am really ready for the coronavirus to be over. I know everybody across the world is also ready, ’cause nobody likes staying at home doing nothing. Unless you are rich and have everything.

Camden Schmidt, 19 years old, Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon

I will be going into my freshman year at Oregon State University. Some classes are in person, some are remote learning, and some are just online. I’ll move in in mid-September. I’m surely conflicted about it. On one hand, it means kind of a return to normalcy. My life has been upended the past couple of months, and so I see this as a way to kind of get my life back on track. But on the other end, I know that it exposes others and myself to risks that we don’t necessarily have to be in, so I’m deeply conflicted about it, I guess.

I’ve already had the coronavirus, actually, but the safety concern I’m really worried about is being able to enforce rules where rules are already hard to be enforced. Kids on college campuses aren’t known for being the best rule-followers, and so I just see it as hard to put in any safety measures and make sure they’re followed.

I, and I think so many of my peers, crave normalcy. This part in our lives seems so exciting and eventful and it feels like we’re missing out on so much. By colleges returning to school like before, it feels like we can experience what we expected. That being said, we have to weigh that against the incredible risk returning to normal poses to our community. While I would certainly give up all of the college experiences in a heartbeat if it meant people didn’t get sick, it’s hard not to dwell on what I might be missing.

I also can’t help feeling frustrated with how poorly the pandemic has been handled in the US, especially in juxtaposition of many European and Asian nations. One of my concerns is that we see their faster return to normal life as an indication that we, too, can go back to normal; that will only make things worse. I feel strongly that we are far from the place they are and need to respond to the crisis where it is, not as where we want it to be.

Ewan, 9 years old, in Missouri

I got sick right before coronavirus hit and we all had to stay in our houses, so I was already out from school. I haven’t been to school for a very, very long time. I did classes on Zoom, and I really didn’t like it that much. It was just kinda weird, and it was hard for my mom because she had to run back and forth for my sister and me with so many different things.

This summer has been so different because we’ve had to stay in our houses and we’re not really able to see anybody or go and do anything. My grandpa will come and sit in our driveway or on our deck six feet apart, but that’s really the only people we get to see. I went to one play date with my sister where we just rode bikes around, but that’s the only one I’ve gone to.

I’ve been mostly staying at home and playing video games and reading a lot of books. I’ve been playing one of my favorite video games with my dad and my sister called Rocket League. I love reading the Harry Potter books.

I got to see my friends a little bit on Zoom during school, but it’s not like now, this summer, where I get to video-call them like two times a week, maybe. I mostly do video calls with my friend Timothy but sometimes my other friends. We play video games together, and do stuff like that.

I’m really excited about starting homeschooling [this fall], because we are pretty much going to be doing the same stuff as regular school. Also, we don’t have to do school for as long. We had to do it for seven hours before, and now we’ll only have to do it for, like, three or four hours.

I think that homeschool is just going to be easier for both [my mom and sister]. But I never thought I would ever do homeschooling. This has been the biggest change from coronavirus.

I don’t really like having to be with the sickness in my surroundings. The worst part is not being able to go places and be with people.

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The future of feminism

2020-03-09T17:41:32-04:00

The Women’s March started off as a worldwide wakeup call to women’s frustrations. However, it quickly came to highlight how feminism still needed to make room for intersectional concerns. | Sarah Morris/Getty Images

There has been much debate about what wave of feminism we are currently in (and whether any of that even matters). Have we officially moved past the riot-grrrl third and its disruption to the disruption of gender norms? Did we squarely enter a fourth, with the rise of Donald Trump and Me Too — the grip of the patriarchy personified and the rallying against it, both of which exposed how much more we had to learn from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s lessons of intersectionality?

Even with all the recent attention paid to the long centering of “white feminism,” the movement is still grappling to understand the ways race, social class, education, and queerness play into the systemic and everyday problems women of color and nonbinary people face. Add to that the unfortunate side effects of feminism going mainstream because of events like the Women’s March — the corporate branding of “persistence” shirts, empty gestures about lady empowerment — that have brought fatigue to all this feminism talk. Which leaves us wondering: Now what?

For Women’s History Month, we asked five renowned feminists and scholars where they thought feminism was headed. Many believe the movement indeed needs to make serious strides to address intersectional issues, especially in the face of climate change. Others, meanwhile, are hopeful that as that happens, the next phase will bring something more rewarding than female domination — true, unfettered support of each other.

In 20 years, I want feminists to see it as standard to consider the impact of proposed policy on women in every single community — not just wealthy white women. Mainstream feminism would consistently create and sustain policies that would be intersectional by default because the impact on those with the least privilege and resources would be the first concern.

Feminist marchers would turn up en masse to protest everything from police brutality to cuts to food aid. Candidates backed by organizations like Emily’s List would push for everything from decriminalization of sex work to advocating for immigration policies that aren’t the mishmash of cruelty and racism that we see now. Instead of bans based on religion and race, family separation policies, and arbitrary bigotry dictating who is worthy of citizenship, we could steer away from colonialist ideals of a nation that only serves the interests of the rich. We could honor existing treaties with Indigenous nations as well as create new ones informed by current events instead of white supremacist rhetoric.

We’d see mainstream feminism support movements ranging from disability rights to labor activism because it would understand that every issue that impacts women is a feminist issue. I don’t expect perfection in 20 years. But it would be nice to see the next wave of feminism live up to the goal of actually advancing equality and safety for all.

Mikki Kendall is an author, activist, and cultural critic. Her latest book, Hood Feminism, was just published.

When people say we are living in divided times, I say we are living in a time of extremes: We both have role models like Rihanna and we can’t get a woman in the White House. A woman is told she can “have it all” — but women are still paid less than men.

Measuring feminist progress can be challenging. In many ways, women’s lives are dramatically better than they have ever been. But there are also places where feminism’s work is far from over: women who don’t have access to sanitary products, women in certain states fighting for access to reproductive health care, women everywhere facing the constant threat of harassment and assault, to name but a few.

There is an endless list of places we could expend our feminist energy, but as we look at the status of women globally for the next 20 years and beyond, the one crisis that is not seen as a gendered issue, but often is, is climate change.

Women stand to lose the most as we continue to see the impacts of global warming. As communities are displaced, women are the most vulnerable to the implications of mass migrations and home loss (according to one statistic, 80 percent of those displaced from climate change are women). It is often women farmers in the global south who have fed their families off crops they will no longer be able to produce, seeds they no longer have access to. As climate change related diseases increase, such as Zika, it is often women who suffer the greatest consequences.

It is also women and girls who are fighting on the front lines of the global climate crisis. The future of feminism is Greta Thunberg. It is Jamie Margolin. It is Xiye Batisda. It is the Sunrise Movement. It is the Indigenous organizers who have led the way for decades on environmental activism. It is the women farmers in the global south.

As the ecofeminist and activist Vandana Shiva, who has worked to raise awareness for both how women are impacted by the degradation of the environment and how women hold the solutions for it moving forward, famously said: “We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth, or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is the executive editor of Teen Vogue and the co-editor of the anthology Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America.

Historically, male-dominated politics and structures have been zero-sum games: For you to have more, I must have less. Value is gained by devaluation elsewhere, and for anyone to win, someone must lose. It’s a framework built on scarcity, and it’s an illusion created by those in power, to keep them in power.

Over the past two decades working with domestic workers — nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers who are predominantly women of color — I have seen the leadership we need for the future of feminism.

Domestic workers have lived and worked in the shadows of the economy and society for generations, excluded from traditional sources of power, so they have turned to each other to build power, rather than look for a source to take it from. Our movement is expansive and abundant: It is multiracial, multilingual, and multigenerational. And rather than creating a hierarchy of issues that further our cause, we challenge the way all hierarchies of power create harm — including gender, race, and immigration.

Despite what seems obvious, the opposite of male-dominated politics (and the future of feminism) is not female-dominated politics and power structures. Instead, it is to move beyond the zero-sum game to systems and structures of abundance, where power is built and shared. This third option is best described as the “shine theory” by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow: “I don’t shine if you don’t shine.” It understands that when I lift you up, when you “shine,” my own “shine” becomes brighter. It’s a theory of power built on multiplication rather than addition and subtraction. It moves beyond competition and the dualism of less-more.

This future feminism creates the path to a world where all people have the support to realize their full potential. Where every worker is valued for their contributions to our economy and professional women working out of the home aren’t building power on the backs of the domestic workers who support them in their homes. Where we look to each other for the value we can add, rather than the power we can take. Only then can we build a society where we value every person, their lives and their contributions, with dignity and respect. It’s the end of zero-sum politics, and it’s the future of feminism.

Ai-jen Poo is the director of Caring Across Generations, an advocacy group for families and domestic workers, and the director of National Domestic Workers Alliance.

The feminism of our future will hold the whole of me. In the future, we will take for granted that I am a feminist, Latina, queer, and progressive. The feminist movement will be tethered to the Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native experiences. It will be informed by a politics of liberation, of sovereignty, of belonging, and of movement-building. It will be a feminism of organizers and intellectuals, a feminism of artists and innovators, and a feminism of presidents and political leaders. The good thing is that today, in my community, this doesn’t feel impossible or far off.

The challenge I see for today’s feminism is how it is funded. As the incoming president of a nationally endowed foundation — the youngest and only Latinx person to hold this position in the country — I worry that the vast majority of funding to feminist movement organizations continues to move to white and wealthy organizations. I worry that as funders, we like belonging in our organizations and networks so long as it’s not in the leadership or boards.

I worry that it has taken us too long to expand the aperture of a feminist agenda beyond a woman president and abortion. I worry that we don’t see parity in funding to those seeking to address the treatment of Black mothers by our health care system, the political representation of our Native and Asian sisters, the protection of our Trans sisters, and the fact that it takes Latinas 23 months to earn what the average white man earns in 12 months. We all need to be at the forefront of a feminist movement of the 21st century.

The next wave of feminism will be a core part of the movements for economic opportunity, political power, and representation. It will be about protecting the vulnerable among us and holding those who make us unsafe accountable as well as imagining and creating a democracy and economy that works for all of us. The next wave is upon us, and I can’t wait to surrender to its possibility.

Carmen Rojas is the founder of the Workers Lab and the soon-to-be CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which provides grants to low-income families advocating for change.

White feminists must recognize dismantling white supremacy as a core project of feminism.

This is not about being a better “ally,” though certainly there is no valid feminism that doesn’t prioritize the liberation of women of color. White supremacy is literally built on the subjugation of women: White supremacist men sterilize women of color against their will, allow them to die from pregnancy and childbirth at astonishingly high rates, and outright rape and murder them — anything to keep them from having more children. And they refuse white women our bodily autonomy, lest we choose not to have children, or to parent with someone other than a white man.

That’s why there is no path to feminist liberation that doesn’t involve dismantling white supremacy. And for reasons of both efficacy and equity, the labor of taking it apart must be disproportionately borne by white feminists.

Too many white women cosign white supremacy because of the bargain it offers them: uphold the power of white men who see you as nothing more than a combination housekeeper, broodmare, trophy, and sex dispenser, and you can wield some of that reflected power against people of color, LGBTQ folks, and more. White supremacist men also offer to “protect” white women against the imaginary dark man lurking in the bushes, while never mentioning that those same white men are themselves the greatest danger to the safety of the women they purport to love.

We’re all, right now, living out the daily consequences of this devil’s bargain between white men and white women. If white feminists can figure out how to convince more white women to break their white supremacist pact, it could be politically transformative.

Imagine the tectonic shift that could happen when white women recognize that white patriarchal men will never treat us as equal humans; when we withdraw our consent to be governed by them and en masse join with the women of color already at the forefront of feminism. When white women stop trusting white men more than women of color (or even ourselves), feminism will be unstoppable.

Jaclyn Friedman is a feminist writer and activist. She hosts Unscrewed, a podcast exploring paths to sexual liberation, and co-edited the new book Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World.

“Our new life of isolation”: 5 people across the world on staying inside to avoid Covid-19

2020-03-30T17:17:08-04:00

Singapore raised its coronavirus outbreak alert to orange, sparking panic and shortages of essential items like toilet paper, on February 8, 2020. | Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images

As the coronavirus continues to spread to more countries, and outbreaks accelerate in places like Germany and France, people around the world are staying inside.

Thousands who live in areas with major outbreaks, or who have tested positive for the Covid-19 disease, have been put in quarantine or isolation. Millions of others who live in countries where coronavirus has spread are avoiding crowds or not leaving their homes in order to reduce the risk of contracting the disease. They are stocking up on food and hand sanitizer. They are hunkering down, turning to the television and internet to pass the time as they wait out the crisis.

Public health experts, including officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasize the importance of choosing to stay home, especially if you feel sick.

It’s not just for personal safety. Staying home reduces the risk to others, especially the most vulnerable: “your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time,” as Zeynep Tufekci put it in Scientific American.

We spoke to people in five different countries: from China, where people in Wuhan have been living largely inside their homes for more than a month, to Singapore, where people are required to take their temperature before and after they leave school or work. People around the globe are taking the threat of this disease seriously. Here are their stories of enduring the outbreak.

Cheng Li, 65, retired librarian in Wuhan, China

We first heard the term “pneumonia of unknown cause” around December 30. There was chatter on WeChat of the number of people that had been infected, and I immediately thought “SARS.” But my heart sank even further when I learned that it wasn’t SARS, but a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that can be transmitted from person to person, with high infection and lethality rates. I knew that this was going to be something big.

After the Wuhan municipal government decided to shut down all transportation on January 23, a mere two days before the Lunar New Year, my husband and I canceled all of our celebratory plans. This was the first year in all my 65 years that I didn’t spend the New Year with family. Not long after the holiday, daily necessities like masks and disinfectants started becoming scarce in stores. Soon, stores were closed altogether. As more people became infected, government measures became stricter. I was no longer able to go out and walk our mini schnauzer. We abided and stayed inside.

We have been at home for more than 40 days now. At first, I vacillated between worried and bored. But then I gradually adapted to our new life of isolation and learned to entertain myself. I wrote in my journal, I sketched pictures, and I learned to make a whole array of pastries, like rose-shaped steamed buns and scallion pancakes with beef.

Although life is a bit more inconvenient than normal, we no longer worry about the day-to-day. Our community leader coordinates with local supermarkets to ensure every household has enough food and supplies. When the coronavirus outbreak first started, our community faced each other with panic and fear; now we are calm, encouraging each other to stay positive through WeChat.

Wuhan is a gem, known for its economy, culture, science, and technology, and it is also where I have lived my entire life. Sadly, it may take a while for the city to bounce back. But I know that as soon as the lockdown is lifted, I’ll return to enjoying all it has to offer — strolling the streets and shops, and eating re gan mian, doupi, and lotus dishes sourced straight from East Lake.

Every day, I watch the news and feel increasingly hopeful as the number of cases decreases. In a time of such uncertainty, it’s comforting to know that we have done everything we can to help control the epidemic. It even makes being quarantined at home feel worth it.

—As told to and translated by Alicia Lu. Li’s name was changed to protect her privacy.

Luciana Grosso, 39, journalist in Lodi, Italy

I wake up on the fifth day of my isolation, and my first thought is the thing I would like most in the world is to have breakfast in my favorite bar. Immediately, I remember that I cannot. It is closed — almost all the bars are. I get up, make coffee by myself, and wonder when I’ll finally get to go back.

The city where I live, Lodi, is in the “yellow zone” for coronavirus risk, an area of alert but not of complete isolation. The streets are open, but nobody is outside: Schools and offices are closed, streets are deserted, and there is a curfew at 6 pm. The silence out here feels unreal.

Meanwhile, the “red zone,” 10 kilometers from here, is completely quarantined: 10 small country villages — 50,000 inhabitants overall, in the deep Lombardian countryside — have been closed by the army that inhibit entrance and exit. Nobody can move from there, and every activity has been suspended: no schools, no meetings, no carnival, no public events. Also, Sunday Mass has been banned, the bishop arranging to livestream it on the internet.

At first, I have to admit that the coronavirus story felt sort of amusing to many of us. A tiny part of my brain thought it was like playing The Walking Dead (“Can I be Negan?” I would say to my friends). But then the hours have passed, the alert has grown, the cases multiplied, and The Walking Dead fantasy stopped being fun. The real fear and the paranoia started to spread around: All of us know someone who has been put in medical quarantine, who has been hospitalized, or who has been tested and is waiting for the results. Now we are just looking for a way to pass the time. Those who can work from home; those who cannot are simply doing nothing.

I call Gianfranco, a friend of mine who lives in Bertonico, which is inside the red zone. He sounds calm, but he tells me that things inside the red zone are surreal: “They have closed us here and just told us to wait. We feel bored, but we try not to get caught up in hysteria. The ones who can go out to take a walk or to the grocery store, even if it is not easy, because no more than 40 people at a time are allowed to enter, to avoid gatherings. Some pharmacies have started to ban the access and to serve the customers by a small window. The sooner it ends, the better it is.”

I decide to take the car and go to the “border” of a red zone country town called Castiglione d’Adda, which has 4,600 inhabitants and is surrounded by cultivated fields. I see an elderly couple taking a walk. We talk to each other yelling across the border, under the surveillance of police, who are posted up at checkpoints. “To us, quarantine or non-quarantine, nothing changes,” they tell me.

The youngest, on the contrary, are the ones in real trouble, says Sara, a 15-year-old girl I met near the border. Kept home from school, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, they are left alone with Netflix, social networks, and some extra homework. “Me and my friends have created a new WhatsApp group,” Sarah told me. “We have called it ‘Fuck Covid.’ It is a good name, don’t you think?”

Yes, I tell her. It’s a great name.

Mac Schwerin, 31, writer in Singapore

My workday begins with a temperature check to the forehead using one of those infrared sensor guns that beep when you pull the trigger. I’m told anything above 37.5 degrees Celsius means trouble.

I live in Singapore, where coronavirus surfaced soon after escaping China. We had our first confirmed case in late January and our first case by local transmission a couple weeks later; after that, the government declared Code Orange and began implementing more serious containment measures.

It sounds like martial law, but it wasn’t a big deal. Some ministers went on Channel 5 to calm people down, and the Straits Times, another unofficial organ of the state, ran considered, anti-sensationalist coverage. The guidelines put into effect were modest. My office, like all offices, was encouraged (or perhaps required; it can be hard to tell in Singapore) to screen employees at the start and close of business. So now every day, I beep myself and record the temperature on a hard copy list, which may or may not find its way to some bottomless spreadsheet in the cloud.

In public, thermal readers have been placed at checkpoints to high-traffic areas. They feature fixed cameras that pick up your heat signature and display it on monitors manned by bored-looking bureaucrats. It is impossible to walk past one of these stations, as I do several times a day, without worrying an alarm will go off and a cage will suddenly drop from above, like in that game Mouse Trap.

Bigger institutions lean more cautious. An acquaintance who’s doing a semester abroad at a local university has had most of her classes made remote. When she does go in, the school instructs everyone to sit at least one desk apart.

Singapore has mounted an effective response to the virus in much the same way it tackles every issue of governance: behind closed doors, with a blend of brilliant technocratic precision and blunt authoritarian resolve. One of the government’s strongest tools has been a sophisticated method of contact tracing, whereby Ministry of Health members work with police to identify likely cases before they emerge.

Investigators comb through records, cue up CCTV footage, and generally focus the lens of state surveillance on individuals who may (or may not) be unwitting vectors of the illness. Their approach has made Singapore among the safest ports in this storm. It sounds great — but then again, I’ve never gotten a phone call.

Daniel Oh, 17, high school student in Seoul, South Korea

I am a high school senior living in Seoul, South Korea. As a response to coronavirus, the Korean government has shut down my school. Events I was looking forward to have also been canceled, including music festivals, debate competitions, and sporting events. I take classes online on voice chat platforms with my teachers and peers. Teachers have been assigning more homework online due to the limitations of not having a physical classroom in place of proper lessons.

My church has also closed in-person services and moved to online streaming. Every Sunday morning, our family casts the YouTube stream onto our TV. It’s been a strange feeling to worship at home, but I’ve been trying vigilantly to keep my spirits up.

I spend most of my days at home completing schoolwork, watching YouTube, and sleeping. My life has always been driven by habit, and without the rhythm of school and church to bring me out of the house, I often feel lethargic or restless. Thankfully, our district hasn’t had enough cases to warrant total closure or self-quarantine, so I try to head outside a few times a week to play basketball or buy a drink. I’ve begun to pick up some old hobbies, such as coding and writing, to break up my gray, monotonous existence.

When I do head outside, the effect of the virus is immediately felt even in this small district. All of the shops and restaurants are eerily quiet. People stare and try to pass you quickly if you don’t wear a mask. The subway and buses are empty even during rush hour. Combined with the upcoming elections, the atmosphere of the nation is so heavy, I feel I will suffocate.

I have faith that coronavirus will come to pass, as all epidemics do. I’m proud of my nation for being so active in trying to contain and cure the virus. I’ve also started to adjust well to my life at home. But I won’t lie and pretend that life is easier being at home all of the time. I would much rather be going to school, enjoying my last year of high school and creating wonderful memories, than be holed up in my room watching unhealthy amounts of YouTube.

Ali Mollasalehi, 26, entertainment journalist in Tehran, Iran

There is no official quarantine in Tehran or any major city in Iran, but the government is doing almost anything to limit people from leaving their homes. All movie theaters, schools, and universities are closed. The rising number of infected and dead people is making everybody worried, and therefore a lot of families (including mine) have imposed self-quarantine.

It’s just 15 days to Persian New Year (Nowruz). At this time of the year, everybody is usually shopping and getting ready to celebrate. All of that is now under a huge shadow of fear of coronavirus. Shops are nearly empty, making the bad economy even worse.

A lot of people don’t trust the government’s statements. Conversation, videos, and the reported numbers coming out of social media just make us more worried. On Twitter, people claim that Iranian officials don’t have enough resources to quarantine any city, even the religious city of Qom, where the outbreak started in Iran.

The boredom makes you overthink, and the distrust between people and government isn’t helping. Nobody can say that the outbreak is under control. Meanwhile, it’s spreading to New York, Belarus, and New Zealand! There are shortages of test kits, especially in smaller cities, which makes the situation worse. Like all around the world, there is a shortage of masks and hand sanitizers in pharmacies. My hand sanitizer was one of the few left in that pharmacy.

But in quarantine, everybody is trying to keep the morale up. My father is reading history books, particularly about past plagues. I, on other hand, am trying to take it easy, watching films like The Big Lebowski. Stay away from watching Contagion, dude!

Although social networks are the source of many fake claims, others are using it to try to cheer each other up. One of my friends last night posted a photo of her singing beautifully on Instagram. Doctors and nurses are making viral videos of themselves dancing in their hazmat suits. We are trying to make light of the horror that is upon us.

As we try to avoid contact as much as we can, we pray and hope that the warmer weather will destroy the virus.

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6 myths about the history of Black people in America

2020-02-21T13:25:35-05:00

People gather in Harlem to listen to Malcolm X speak on June 29, 1963. | Bettmann/Getty Images

To study American history is often an exercise in learning partial truths and patriotic fables. Textbooks and curricula throughout the country continue to center the white experience, with Black people often quarantined to a short section about slavery and quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. Many walk away from their high school history class — and through the world — with a severe lack of understanding of the history and perspective of Black people in America.

Last summer, the New York Times’s 1619 Project burst open a long-overdue conversation about how stories of Black Americans need to be told through the lens of Black Americans themselves. In this tradition, and in celebration of Black History Month, Vox has asked six Black scholars and historians about myths that perpetuate about Black history. Ultimately, understanding Black history is more than learning about the brutality and oppression Black people have endured — it’s about the ways they have fought to survive and thrive in America.

Myth 1: That enslaved people didn’t have money

Enslaved people were money. Their bodies and labor were the capital that fueled the country’s founding and wealth.

But many also had money. Enslaved people actively participated in the informal and formal market economy. They saved money earned from overwork, from hiring themselves out, and through independent economic activities with banks, local merchants, and their enslavers. Elizabeth Keckley, a skilled seamstress whose dresses for Abraham Lincoln’s wife are displayed in Smithsonian museums, supported her enslaver’s entire family and still earned enough to pay for her freedom.

Free and enslaved market women dominated local marketplaces, including in Savannah and Charleston, controlling networks that crisscrossed the countryside. They ensured fresh supplies of fruits, vegetables, and eggs for the markets, as well as a steady flow of cash to enslaved people. Whites described these women as “loose” and “disorderly” to criticize their actions as unacceptable behavior for women, but white people of all classes depended on them for survival.

In fact, enslaved people also created financial institutions, especially mutual aid societies. Eliza Allen helped form at least three secret societies for women on her own and nearby plantations in Petersburg, Virginia. One of her societies, Sisters of Usefulness, could have had as many as two to three dozen members. Cities like Baltimore even passed laws against these societies — a sure sign of their popularity. Other cities reluctantly tolerated them, requiring that a white person be present at meetings. Enslaved people, however, found creative ways to conduct their societies under white people’s noses. Often, the treasurer’s ledger listed members by numbers so that, in case of discovery, members’ identities remained protected.

During the tumult of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Black people sought refuge behind Union lines. Most were impoverished, but a few managed to bring with them wealth they had stashed under beds, in private chests, and in other hiding places. After the war, Black people fought through the Southern Claims Commission for the return of the wealth Union and Confederate soldiers impounded or outright stole.

Given the resurgence of attention on reparations for slavery and the racial wealth gap, it is important to recall the long history of black people’s engagement with the US economy — not just as property, but as savers, spenders, and small businesspeople.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and the author of Banking on Freedom: Black Women in US Finance Before the New Deal.

Myth 2: That Black revolutionary soldiers were patriots

Much is made about how colonial Black Americans — some free, some enslaved — fought during the American Revolution. Black revolutionary soldiers are usually called Black Patriots. But the term Patriot is reserved within revolutionary discourse to refer to the men of the 13 colonies who believed in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence: that America should be an independent country, free from Britain. These persons were willing to fight for this cause, join the Continental Army, and, for their sacrifice, are forever considered Patriots. That’s why the term Black Patriot is a myth — it infers that Black and white revolutionary soldiers fought for the same reasons.

First off, Black revolutionary soldiers did not fight out of love for a country that enslaved and oppressed them. Black revolutionary soldiers were fighting for freedom — not for America, but for themselves and the race as a whole. In fact, the American Revolution is a case study of interest convergence. Interest convergence denotes that within racial states such as the 13 colonies, any progress made for Black people can only be made if that progress also benefits the dominant culture — in this case the liberation of the white colonists of America. In other words, colonists’ enlistment of Black people was not out of some moral mandate, but based on manpower needs to win the war.

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia who wanted to quickly end the war, issued a proclamation to free enslaved Black people if they defected from the colonies and fought for the British army. In response, George Washington revised the policy that restricted Black persons (free or enslaved) from joining his Continental Army. His reversal was based in a convergence of his interests: competing with a growing British military, securing the slave economy, and increasing labor needs for the Continental Army. When enslaved persons left the plantation, this caused serious social and economic unrest in the colonies. These defections were encouragement for many white plantation owners to join the Patriotic cause even if they previously held reservations.

Washington also saw other benefits in Black enlistment: White revolutionary soldiers only fought in three- to four-month increments and returned to their farms or plantation, but many Black soldiers could serve longer terms. The need for the Black soldier was essential for the war effort, and the need to win the war became greater than racial or racist ideology.

Interests converged with those of Black revolutionary soldiers as well. Once the American colonies promised freedom, about a quarter of the Continental Army became Black; before that, more Black people defected to the British military for a chance to be free. Black revolutionary soldiers understood the stakes of the war and realized that they could also benefit and leave bondage. As historian Gary Nash has said, the Black revolutionary soldier “can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place, not to a people, but to a principle.”

Black people played a dual role — service with the American forces and fleeing to the British — both for freedom. The notion of the Black Patriot is a misused term. In many ways, while the majority of the whites were fighting in the American Revolution, Black revolutionary soldiers were fighting the “African Americans’ Revolution.”

LaGarrett King is an education professor at the University of Missouri Columbia and the founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education.

Myth 3: That Black men were injected with syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment

A dangerous myth that continues to haunt Black Americans is the belief that the government infected 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, with syphilis. This myth has created generations of African Americans with a healthy distrust of the American medical profession. While these men weren’t injected with syphilis, their story does illuminate an important truth: America’s medical past is steeped in racialized terror and the exploitation of Black bodies.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male emerged from a study group formed in 1932 connected with the venereal disease section of the US Public Health Service. The purpose of the experiment was to test the impact of syphilis untreated and was conducted at what is now Tuskegee University, a historically Black university in Macon County, Alabama.

The 600 Black men in the experiment were not given syphilis. Instead, 399 men already had stages of the disease, and the 201 who did not served as a control group. Both groups were withheld from treatment of any kind for the 40 years they were observed. The men were subjected to humiliating and often painfully invasive tests and experiments including spinal taps.

Deemed uneducated and impoverished sharecroppers, these men were lured by free medical examinations, hot meals, free treatment for minor injuries, rides to and from the hospital, and guaranteed burial stipends (up to $50) to be paid to their survivors. The study also did not occur in total secret, and several African American health workers and educators associated with the Tuskegee Institute assisted in the study.

By the end of the study in the summer of 1972, after a whistleblower exposed the story in national headlines, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. From the original 399 infected men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 others from related complications. Forty of the men’s wives had been infected, and an estimated 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

As a result of the case, the US Department of Health and Human Services established the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) in 1974 to oversee clinical trials. The case also solidified the idea of African Americans being cast and used as medical guinea pigs.

An unfortunate side effect of both the truth of medical racism and the myth of syphilis injection, however, is it tangibly reinforces the inability to place trust in the medical system for some African Americans who may not choose to seek out assistance, and as a result put themselves in danger.

Sowande Mustakeem is an associate professor of History and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Myth 4: That Black people in early Jim Crow America didn’t fight back

It is well-known that African Americans faced the constant threat of ritualistic public executions by white mobs, unpunished attacks by individuals, and police brutality in Jim Crow America. But how they responded to this is a myth that persists. In an effort to find lawful ways to address such events, some Black people made legalistic appeals to convince police and civic leaders their rights and lives should be protected. Yet the crushing weight of a hostile criminal justice system and the rigidity of the color line often muted those petitions, leaving Black people vulnerable to more mistreatment and murder.

In the face of this violence, some African Americans prepared themselves physically and psychologically for the abuse they expected — and they fought back. Distressed by public racial violence and unwilling to accept it, many adhered to emerging ideologies of outright rebellion, particularly after the turn of the 20th century and the emergence of the “New Negro.” Urban, more educated than their parents, and often trained militarily, a generation coming of age following World War I sought to secure themselves in the only ways left. Many believed, as Marcus Garvey once told a Harlem audience, that Black folks would never gain freedom “by praying for it.”

For New Negroes, the comparatively tame efforts of groups like the NAACP were not urgent enough. Most notably, they defended themselves fiercely nationwide during the bloodshed of the Red Summer of 1919 when whites attacked African Americans in multiple cities across the country. Whites may have initiated most race riots in the early Jim Crow era, but some also happened as Black people rejected the limitations placed on their life, leisure, and labor, and when they refused to fold under the weight of white supremacy. The magnitude of racial and state violence often came down upon Black people who defended themselves from police and citizens, but that did not stop some from sparking personal and collective insurrections.

Douglas J. Flowe is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.

Myth 5: That crack in the “ghetto” was the largest drug crisis of the 1980s

The bodies of people of color have a pernicious history of total exploitation and criminalization in the US. Like total war, total exploitation enlists and mobilizes the resources of mainstream society to obliterate the resources and infrastructure of the vulnerable. This has been done to Black people through a robust prison industrial complex that feeds on their vilification, incarceration, disenfranchisement, and erasure. And the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ’90s is a clear example of this cycle.

Even though more white people reported using crack more than Black people in a 1991 National Institute on Drug Abuse survey, Black people were sentenced for crack offenses eight times more than whites. Meanwhile, there was a corresponding cocaine epidemic in white suburbs and college campuses that compelled the US to install harsher penalties for crack than for cocaine. For example, in 1986, before the enactment of federal mandatory minimum sentencing for crack cocaine offenses, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites. Four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 49 percent higher.

Even through the ’90s and beyond, the media and supposed liberal allies, like Hillary Clinton, designated Black children and teens as drug-dealing “superpredators” to mostly white audiences. The criminalization of people of color during the crack epidemic made mainstream white Americans comfortable knowing that this was a contained black-on-black problem.

It also left white America unprepared to deal with the approach of the opioid epidemic, which is often a white-on-white crime whose dealers will evade prison (see: the Sacklers, the billionaire family behind Oxycontin who has served no jail time; and Johnson & Johnson, which got a $107 million break in fines when it was found liable for marketing practices that led to thousands of overdose deaths). Unlike Black Americans who are sent to prison, these white dealers retain their right to vote, lobby, and hold on to their wealth.

Jason Allen is a public historian and facilitator at xCHANGEs, a cultural diversity and inclusion training consultancy.

Myth 6: That all Black people were enslaved until emancipation

One of the biggest myths about the history of Black people in America is that all were enslaved until the Emancipation Proclamation, or Juneteenth Day.

In reality, free Black and Black-white biracial communities existed in states such as Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio well before abolition. For example, Anthony Johnson, named Antonio the Negro on the 1625 census, was listed on this document as a servant. By 1640, he and his wife owned and managed a large plot of land in Virginia.

Some enslaved Africans were able to sell their labor or craftsmanship to others, thereby earning enough money to purchase their freedom. Such was the case for Richard Allen, who paid for his freedom in 1786 and co-founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church less than a decade later. After the American Revolutionary War, Robert Carter III committed the largest manumission — or freeing of slaves — before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing his 100 enslaved Africans.

Not all emancipations were large. Individuals or families were sometimes freed upon the death of their enslaver and his family. And many escaped and lived free in the North or in Canada. Finally, there were generations of children born in free Black and biracial communities, many who never knew slavery.

Eventually, slave states established expulsion laws making residency there for free Black people illegal. Some filed petitions to remain near enslaved family members, while others moved West or North. And in the Northeast, many free Blacks formed benevolent organizations such as the Free African Union Society for support and in some cases repatriation.

The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — and the announcement of emancipation in Texas two years later — allowed millions of enslaved people to join the ranks of already free Black Americans.

Dale Allender is an associate professor at California State University Sacramento.