I Always Want to Wear Spring
On February 3rd, 2020, I received a text from my Mandarin tutor, Ming, an international student at Salem State University, where I teach. In our two years of tutoring, Ming and I had become unlikely friends; she a 20-year-old from Suzhou, China, and I, a Professor of English in my mid-50s.
Ming was spunky, outgoing, amusing. Just the week before, in a class discussion about how actors had to speak their words with passion, her professor had called on her and asked her to say something with emotion. Ming took a moment and then blurted, “I have coronavirus!” The class cracked up. The virus was still abstract for most Americans, though for Ming, and the other international students from China, it was starting to feel quite real.
When Ming had told me this story, I said, “You probably shouldn’t go around saying that.” Ming seemed to appreciate my advice, and the fact that I would answer questions about Americans and American culture frankly. I suspect that she also got satisfaction out of watching me learn—baby step by baby step—a little Mandarin.
Ming’s text had a link to “Global Safety Company,” which was selling masks. “Emergency.” Ming wrote. “Can you take a look at this website? Do you think it’s a real shop?…My uncle is representing some of my town’s doctors asking me to help them buy N95 masks. It’s in short demand in my town’s hospitals.”
I knew nothing about heath care supplies, but the site looked a little sketchy. I wrote to my sister, who runs a health care communications company, and asked her opinion.
“The call from my uncle is pretty desperate…,” Ming had texted, “the virus is so close to me tonight.”
For the next few days I helped Ming try to locate masks, calling places in the Boston area. Her plan was to get them shipped to her dorm, and then mail them to Suzhou herself. She came into my office between her classes, and we called around, including trying a 3M distributor just half an hour away.
But after leaving several messages, when I finally spoke to someone, there were no masks to be had. “That’s because there are a lot of Chinese around Boston!” Ming said.
My sister had looked into masks, too, but wasn’t having any luck. She also offered to donate 1000 dollars to their purchase.
“Fuck,” texted Ming when I told her about the offer. She was expressing gratitude.
*
As it turned out, the offer was never taken up. Ming got a few masks, but by the time they arrived, they were probably too late to be of use by her uncle, and she kept them for herself. The virus was becoming real in the U.S. I sensed that any masks made in the U.S. wouldn’t be leaving the country, even though, in those early days, Fauci and others were telling the public that we didn’t need them.
Molly, another Chinese student, said to me at this time that she was worried for Americans, that Covid would be really bad in the U.S.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Americans will not wear masks.”
“You think that masks are important?”
“Yes.”
Molly, like Ming, was part of a cohort of 13 Chinese students participating a 1-2-1 program between Nanjing Normal University and Salem State. The students, all English Majors, spent their middle two years in Salem, their first and last in Nanjing, and received degrees from both institutions. I had met the cohort in the summer of 2018 in Nanjing, when I taught a three-week introductory poetry class to them before they came to Salem.
Molly was sweet. She had always helped me hook up my computer in the Nanjing classroom, and one day she brought me a small delicious loaf of bread. What I remember most about her, though, was the evening I was waiting at a bus stop, half an hour after our class ended, and she and another student came by, animatedly talking about Elizabeth’s Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room,” which we had been analyzing in class. They stopped and stood with me until the bus came, discussing the poem and swatting away mosquitoes in the humid Nanjing night.
When Molly, Ming, and the rest of the cohort came to Salem in the fall of 2018, I took them under my wing, and I had gotten accustomed to falling into a fatherly role with them. So now, in response to Molly’s concerns about masks, I explained how they really weren’t important in preventing Covid, and that we needed to save them for the first responders. Molly nodded politely.
*
Just before spring break, Salem State announced that it would be extending the break an extra week. This was both a precaution to limit possible virus spread and a chance to give faculty a little preparation time to move their classes online, should that be necessary. It was necessary, and though we were given possible return dates in April, it seemed more and more clear that we would remain remote.
Before Salem State’s initial announcement, I had planned to have a few of the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting regularly to translate some poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture. I was hoping to watch the documentary American Factory with them. The movie explored a Chinese company’s takeover of a glass-making plant in Ohio and the clash of work cultures.
I’d felt bad because Molly and another student had lost thousands of dollars on an ambitious spring break trip that they had planned to Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto. Hearing about the virus spreading, they had decided not to go at the last minute. I couldn’t bring myself to ask how much money they’d lost.
And I decided to cancel the movie night, too. “We should probably wait,” I told Ming at our last Mandarin lesson, right before the break, “just to be safe.”
“Don’t you think we won’t be able to see each other for a long time?” she asked.
I paused. The future seemed so uncertain. It still seemed possible we could be returning to classes in two weeks, that in two months, thousands of graduates and their families would pack the Salem State hockey arena, that I might even meet a few of the families of these Chinese students, including Ming’s mother, who had bought a plane ticket. But we were starting to hear disturbing forecasts that the virus could be with us not just through spring semester, but throughout the fall.
“You may be right,” I said.
*
Yicheng, the only male in the cohort, was an intellectual, obsessed with film, literature, and cultural theory. He quoted Pessoa from memory in a class of mine, and he thought that Frederick Wiseman’s four-and-a-half-hour documentary, City Hall, about the municipal workings of the city of Boston, was the best movie of 2020. I loved talking with him about books or film, and I admired his passion for knowledge. When our class read Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, he was moved by a moment that I had never noticed in which young Richard starts to deliver a local paper that runs short stories. Another delivery boy asks Richard to read the latest short story so the two of them can talk about it, a rare flicker of human connection in the bleak Jim Crow South.
Yicheng had been following the story of the virus intensely since its beginnings in Wuhan, and he had told me before the first case in the U.S. of predictions that more than three million people would die. According to the World Health Organization, the number of reported deaths is now over seven million.
Back in 2020, on March 14th, the first day of spring break, I wrote a few brief paragraphs in my journal, beginning with, “A terrible beauty is born. We will be staying home, staying still. Covid-19 is upon us.” I normally do an entry every week or so, but that was the last entry until the end of July, save for one sentence on April 11th: “We’re in a new world. Coronavirus has taken over.”
But I actually did keep a kind of journal during those early months. To practice my Mandarin, I wrote little diary entries in Chinese, sharing them in a google doc with the translation group. They turned into poems of sorts. Several mentioned banana bread, which I had made and shared with the translation group, and which they loved.
I have little idea how the entries read in Chinese. I suspect they felt like when a non-native English speaker speaks English, unaware of connotation and diction. I think of the plaques in front of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial that I saw when I was in the city. The English translations of small Chinese expressions of the horror:
Family Ruined
Never returns the son killed
Never returns the husband buried alive
Miseries drowns the wife raped
Good heavens!
When I emailed Yicheng to see how he had been holding up in the isolation of the empty dorms, he said he was doing okay, and had been reading and enjoying my diary poems, “although they are simple,” he made sure to add.
One poem I wrote on my birthday. Here’s the English translation:
May 3rd
Today. My birthday.
Morning. My wife is sleeping.
My son is sleeping.
I ate a donut.
I had my coffee.
Now I write a few Chinese characters.
The sun says: Hello, little man,
how have you been?
Sun, I say, every year is good,
every year is not so good. I know a little more,
I forget a little more.
Every year you say: Hello, little man,
and when I hear you,
I feel big.
After I’d written the poems, I started working on them over Zoom with Ming, revising the Chinese. I think that Ming helped me edit out most of the glaringly awkward phrases, like that “Good Heavens!” on the Memorial, but I suspect that the poems have more potency in English than Chinese. In the above poem, Ming pointed out that my last line, which I’d written originally as 我觉得很大 (literally, I feel big), would be read in Chinese as “I have an erection.” Actually, I guess that would have a certain potency.
*
I felt sorry for the Chinese students. They were in a foreign country, and they were hearing about, if not experiencing first hand, anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. As the other Salem State students had left the dorms for Spring Break and only returned for a day in mid-April to remove their belongings, the cohort became more and more isolated in their rooms, though they probably appreciated the disappearance of the weed odor in the hallways.
Several booked flights back to China as soon as possible once it was determined that the school would remain online. Others who already had return tickets decided to just wait for their flights that were scheduled after graduation in mid-May. But then those flights started getting canceled. Most students, fearing that they might get stuck in the U.S., booked alternate flights if they could, often paying 5000 dollars or more for a ticket that normally would cost 1000. The Chinese embassy began offering students the opportunity to put their name into a lottery to get a flight back soon, but the students needed to be ready to leave at 48-hours notice. The handful of students who put their names in ended up getting flights, all except for Ming. Again, these were expensive, costing over 5000 dollars.
On top of the flight costs, the students were expected to pay for two weeks of quarantine once they landed in China. Those on flights arranged by the embassy quarantined in a hotel in a random Chinese city. “You’re going to Chongqing? I asked Yicheng, “where is that exactly?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
And Emma Zhu, a visiting scholar at Salem State and Chair of the Nanjing Normal English Department, returned in early July and ended up in Shenyang, a city near the North Korean border, where she had to stay for two weeks, anxious to get home to see her terminally ill father.
Given that she was stuck in a hotel in Shenyang, I emailed her a copy of my diary. Her reply was perfect:
JD wrote poems.
He wrote in English.
He wrote in Chinese.
He wrote banana bread.
He wrote his friends.
They didn’t make me sad.
They made me laugh,
When I’m in quarantine.
*
When the students arrived in the various cities, they were assigned to hotels of varying quality. Molly, who had also been sent to Chongqing, was in one that sounded unpleasant; it had “bugs.” Yicheng, meanwhile, was in a pricey 4-star hotel. Regardless of the quality, all the hotels had one thing in common—no air conditioning. It was feared that an air conditioning system could spread Covid, so the students sweltered.
Another student, Grace, found herself in Xiamen, in southeastern China. In the translation group google doc, she posted a playful “vacation recommendation” describing her hotel room. “THINGS TO DO: Due to the local high temperature and the poor ventilation (there is only one window) of Room 808, one thing you will enjoy a lot is to take a shower. Another thing you will find wonderful to do in Room 808 is to sleep.”
Her walls were thin, and every day she could hear the boy next door reciting pre-Tang dynasty poems.
When Ming finally returned in mid-July, she stayed in a fancy hotel in Shanghai. “The best hotel in Shanghai, and I can’t do anything,” she texted, and she sent a video of her getting a Covid test, her little jump backward when the swab was inserted by the space-suit wearing nurse, and then her covering her face and wiping away a tear. “I hope you enjoy,” she wrote, “I certainly don’t.”
I also learned that even “poop was monitored.” Apparently, in the hotel quarantine, people had to put a chemical tablet in the toilet bowl, and then wait an hour before flushing.
*
Yicheng and Molly got booked on a flight two days after graduation. Salem State held a graduation ceremony of sorts with masked students receiving diplomas outside while people sat in parked cars. It sounded too complicated, too much traffic, so I didn’t attend, instead arranging to meet Yicheng, Molly, and Ming in the dorm parking lot to take photos after the ceremony. I dug my graduation gown out of the plastic bag in the bottom of my closet, gave it a quick ironing, and drove over. Molly and Ming were decked out in their gowns. Yicheng wore a black t-shirt with “Jesus died for somebody’s sins” on the front, “but not mine,” on the back. The day was cloudy, sky a bumpy grey and white comforter.
Two administrators from the Center for International Education, and two American poets from our translation group were there, too. We stood around the cars and ate ice cream bars. We were all still deciding our own levels of comfort with the distancing and masks. Some of us ended up removing masks for quick photos, then separating and hurridly putting them back on. I hugged them—the first time I’d done so. They gave me lots of packaged Asian food and some masks.
*
A week earlier, we’d had a special graduation ceremony on Zoom for the international students. The college president and provost made an appearance. Parents from China and elsewhere tuned in. Peitong, a student with an astonishing voice, sang a song, and Ming made a short speech.
Having practiced pronunciation all week, recording myself and sending my efforts to Ming for critique, I recited one of my diary poems in Chinese, then read it in English.
April 3
I see spring.
I see you.
Do you see me?
I am wearing rain.
I am wearing your hope.
It looks good on me.
It shines.
I need to wear others’ hope.
Sometimes I don’t want
to wear other people’s things,
but in spring,
there are always other people,
and I always want
to wear spring.