Submitted by Sarah Xu, a fourth year Environmental Economics and Policy student at UC Berkeley

The following images were curated and created for a zine that my friends and I made. After an exhausting year, I had embarked on the creation of the zine that I call “One Year” to mark the one year anniversary of COVID-19’s impact on our lives. As young college students, there has been a feeling of mourning and uncertainty as we get ready to go onto the job market. Many of us have lost family members, friends, and milestones like graduation ceremonies and birthdays. I had invited my friends to contribute as a way to process these losses, no matter how “insignificant” they might have felt. The full virtual version of this zine is 100 pages long with 26 contributors. In this submission, I have included the content that I created for this time.

The foreward for the zine reads as follows “a note: COVID-19 has been so fucking challenging this is our attempt to historicize these times, capture our emotions, for a moment, to exist together. If only for ourselves, this collecting is to say our feelings matter. we were here. LOVE”

Image 1: FEAR

As a young adult, I felt caught between trying my best to sit at home all day without interacting and the fear of transmitting COVID-19 and the desire to interact with my peers and be youthful. I spent almost the entirety of my 21st year in my high school bedroom. I felt that my senior year of college was a regression of what I had hoped to be. I love my family but it was jarring to go completely surrounded by other young adults to interacting with only my family. While living near campus, I felt a freedom to be my own person and choose what I did daily. It was an experience that was always marked with fear and anxiety but it was a certain type of freedom. After moving back home, I felt completely in fear for the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The photo was taken when I went to Napa Valley for the first time in September, 2020. It was my first time eating outside since mid-March 2020. I was riddled with fear of what my actions might mean and, despite the smile, going through a bit of an existential crisis.

Image 2: HOPE

When classes were first canceled in March 2020, I was full of hope and optimism that the San Francisco Bay Area community could keep down overall COVID-19 infection rates and that I would be attending my senior year of college back in person. In this hope, I was hosting almost daily online events for the Student Environmental Resource Center, a campus department at UC Berkeley. These events were a way for me to feel connected with other students and an excuse to create a landing page for online events and resources for my peers. These events included movie nights, How to Mend Clothes parties, and bake-alongs. It did not become apparent that the Fall 2020 semester would be online at that time.

In August 2020, I had come to terms that the fall semester of my senior year was going to be online. At that time, my family took a weekend trip to the Sierras to camp and go hiking. During the trip, I had written a couple of diary entries telling myself “I know you were excited about the fall semester of your senior year, but it is okay. You will power through and in the spring you will be able to hug your friends and hang out with them. You are doing this for your parents and grandparents.” It was not until a couple months later that it would become obvious that my entire senior year would be spent online.

Image 3: QUIET

In December 2020 during UC Berkeley’s finals week I took a solo trip up the California coast through Sonoma and Mendocino County on the Pacific Coast Highway. For the first time, none of my finals were live tests and I submitted all of my essays a week early in order to take this trip. While I did read and listen to music during this trip. I spent most of it in silence, trying to find the quiet of the coast. This meditative trip at empty beaches and tourist sites felt almost apocalyptic and a fitting end to 2020.
During this trip, I created a video set to Lana Del Ray’s Bare Feet on Linoleum.

Image 4: LOSS

2020 was marked with so much loss. I personally lost my maternal grandmother (外婆) in October 2020 not to COVID-19 but to a sudden and aggressive cancer. Due to visa and travel barriers during this time, my mother was unable to be at my grandmother’s side. We always knew that the distance between California and Shanghai was vast but did not expect to have no contact since even our family members in Shanghai were not allowed into the hospital. For weeks, we lived in fear without many updates. We have burned millions in joss paper but there is so much pain to not be there for 外婆 in her last days. From afar, my mother has also been helping my maternal grandfather (外公) whose health has rapidly declined during this time. There is so much loss.

Image 5: REPETITION

To combat loneliness and to continue to be surrounded by community during these times, I have maintained a single Google Hangouts link that my friends and I refer to as the “serc space.” I spend time on this link daily when I am just doing work, reading, cleaning my room, and my close friends have an open invitation to also drop into this space and do whatever works for them. I have sat in silence on this Google Hangouts with friends for hours but the knowledge that we are all still here for each other was enough. Without this online space and community, I do not think I would have been able to make it through this online year.