Submitted by LT

1. What is your job?

I’m retired and is now helping to care for a 6 years-old grandchild.

2. How long have you been in this job?

Caring for my grandchild, Z, became necessary only when her school closed for in-person teaching in 4/2020 as a response to the COVID pandemic. Her school began to hold virtual classes. Managing online learning was a challenge for a 6 years-old. Her parents both have to be online for their jobs. Her father would use the bedroom as his office. Her mother would share the dining table with Z’s older sister. Z is in her bedroom with a new in-home school set up: low table, low chair, a large tablet with touch-screen, and a box full of books and learning material that were picked up weekly from school.

3. What motivated you to be in this work?

Online learning is a big challenge for any six-year-old and her family. The family has to check frequent emails from the school and from the individual teachers for schedule changes and teaching curriculum. This was also a completely new experience for the school as well as the teachers. One can sense the ad hoc nature at the beginning. Each school and each teacher have to design their own virtual curriculum. There was no central or national recommendation or model to follow. For many families similar to my daughter’s family, each person in the household has job or school responsibilities. They needed an infusion of help or have to quit their employment. Under such circumstance, I was happy to help. However, the challenge was the risk of spreading or contracting COVID in the household during the months before the vaccine was available. To avoid the spread of COVID, I was wearing a double mask and hunkering down in Z’s bedroom.

4. How would you describe yourself: age, generation, first language…

I turned 70 during the COVID pandemic. I’m technically a first generation Chinese American born in Hong Kong; but, in fact, two generations of my family before me have already settled in the United States. However, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory immigration policies, my grandfather who came to the U.S. in 1911, was not allowed to bring my grandmother to the United States. Therefore, both my uncle and my father were born in China. My uncle had to immigrate to the U.S. as a “paper son” – claiming to be the son of a U.S. citizen. Sons of US citizens were allowed to immigrate into the US but not the wife of a US citizen who is Chinese American. My uncle had to endure the experience of being locked up on Angel Island while waiting for his interrogation to prove his paper identity.

5. What is the ONE thing that stood out to you about COVID? Or, one experience that you would like to describe in detail. (Remember: what is mundane to you now may be fascinating to someone 100 years from now.)

The one unique experience for me during COVID was the opportunity to sit next to my first-grade granddaughter and to observe intimately the first-grade environment from an adult perspective. In no other circumstances, would I be sitting next to her in class day in and day out for several months. What did that experience show me? It showed me sexism is well established by the first grade. I observed how male students hogged the unmonitored on-screen “recess” time. They would bragged to each other their latest toys and would denigrate any female students who tried to join that space. The language the boys used were dismissive and unkind.

6. In what ways did COVID change your daily routine? Were there good changes?

I’m involved with several volunteer projects. COVID mandated the meetings to be all virtual. Surprisingly, this increased my productivity. By not having to travel to in-person meetings, I can schedule meetings “back-to-back”. To have 3 in-person meetings in one afternoon is unheard of for me. During COVID, it was a frequent occurrence.

7. What would you like future generation to know about what you’ve learned living through the COVID pandemic?

A challenge of this proportion requires a nationally (and internationally) coordinated and well analyzed strategy. In 2020, we had none of that in the US. To equate not wearing a mask as an expression of "freedom" was childish. Would one argue not wanting to look both ways while crossing the street is an exercise in individual freedom? Yet, that was the level of the national debate. Sad.