Heather A. Diamond's Blog, page 2

The Absence of Color

I hope you are all staying safe and sane. I am fortunate to be holed up on beautiful Whidbey Island. I’m here with my 94-year-old mother and my sister who is going through chemo, and while peeling myself away from the news and finding time and energy to write is challenging, Spring has arrived and nature is glorious. Everything is in bloom, and we have chipmunks, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, harbor seals, and killer whales to remind us that we are part of a web.

Because words are my refuge in good times and bad, I wanted to share a bit of personal good news. My CNF essay about whiteness, called “The Absence of Color,” appeared today in issue #12 of Sky Island Journal. You can view the issue here: https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-12-spring-2020/

I hope you can use this time of separation to reflect, bake, walk, read, create, and appreciate small things unfurling until our world turns right side up again.

Love and light,

Heather

Bodies, Covid-19, and Cancer

I live in my head, as do many writers, but I’ve been thinking about bodies lately. This is partly because this month I am in a writing workshop where we are writing essays on what the body remembers. Not much, if I ask mine. My head knows that there were triumphs and traumas, but my body prefers to stay mum. The truth is, I’ve spent way too much of my life paying attention to how my body looks and very little to how it works and what it knows.

It often takes danger to make us pay attention to our own bodies. The threat of Covid-19 has turned handshakes to elbow bumps, distanced us from others by six feet if we follow health alerts, and made us flinch from the slightest cough, the quietest sneeze. For some of us, wanting to protect our bodies is keeping us home and away from other bodies. Some of us who think the body is infallible are conducting business as usual, daring the virus to break through, the body to break down. Possibly endangering others.

Two weeks ago, I flew from Hong Kong to mychildhood home in Washington State. Used to wearing face masks in Hong Kong, Iwore one on the plane. Vancouver was the first place I had been in over a monthwhere no one was covering their noses and mouths. I thought being free of thecultural compulsion to cover my face would be liberating. Instead, I feltvulnerable, unprotected. In Hong Kong, we were collectively masked, protecting thebody politic and not just our own immune systems. So far America feels like afree-for-all of self-protection.  

In any contest of the body and mind, the body has the edge. It’s capable of mutiny. I’m here at my mother’s house because my sister, who lives next door, was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Stage 3C. When I saw her at Christmas, she looked fine. When I got here at the beginning of March, her abdomen was so swollen she found it hard to bend. Now that she has started chemo, the swelling is going down. It helps that in that old joke about an optimist and a pessimist getting a box of horse shit for Christmas, my sister would be the one looking for the pony. (I’d be saying it figures). She makes me believe that modern medicine and optimism can restore her body to balance.

Since I got here, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking to feed our bodies. My mother is ninety-four, and still living in her own house and driving. She is proof that the body can go on even as our muscles and bones wear out. Much shorter than she used to be and depending on a handful of pills every morning and night to regulate her aging body, she’s still in there. As my sister is still in hers. We need our bodies to live, and we are willing to go to great lengths to keep them working as long as possible.

The virus warnings categorize my sister and my mother as high risk for infection from Covid-19: my sister because of her compromised immune system as she goes through chemo, and my mother due to her advanced age. Technically, I am in that group as well because I live in a body that has been around for sixty-seven years. Sometimes, I forget that my body is aging.  Then I look in a mirror, and I am disappointed by its sagging and softening. My vanity sighs over gray hairs and wrinkles, the extra padding around my waist. Focusing on the surface, I forget my body’s wisdom, that bodies are not separate from whoever it is we think we are in our heads. We live in our bodies. They need us to take care, pay attention, listen up, say thank you every day. 

In this moment of danger, they also need us to wash our hands and keep our distance, so all of us can all be safe together.

Off to a Ratty Start

I’m a bit late with this greeting, but Gung Hei Fat Choy!  This is a Golden Rat year, and although it has started out with bad politics and a public health crisis, I’m holding out hope. Rats are often considered sly and dangerous, but in the Chinese zodiac, the rat is number one because he is clever, tough, and adaptable. These are qualities we will all need in the weeks and months ahead.

In the past month, Hong Kong has moved from public spaces clogged with protesters to streets and malls emptied by fears of the coronavirus. People that enter Hong Kong from the mainland are blocked or screened, and flights in and out are canceled. Rumors are contagious. Panicked shoppers are emptying grocery stores of rice and toilet paper, schools and many banks are closed, and the mail arrives irregularly. Handshakes have reverted to the “five ancestor fist” greeting familiar from Kung Fu films.

In a densely populated city, bodies of strangers are regularly compressed together. In trains and busses, sometimes we stand so close we are gouged by backpacks and able to read each other’s phones. Now it’s surreal to encounter empty pockets in previously crowded places. It’s as if air-bags, made of only air, suddenly deployed amongst us.

About those masks: Yesterday, an estimated 10,000 people lined up for many hours to buy masks. As anyone who has traveled in Japan, Hong Kong, or Korea knows, wearing face masks in public isn’t new in Asia.  Many people wear masks on planes. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing occasional masks in public places and appreciative of how people who are sick voluntarily put up a barrier from others. I have never seen more than the eyes and foreheads of my doctors and dentist. What is new is that everyone is masked. Everywhere. Whatever scientists say about the efficacy of masks, this is a city that lived through the SARS epidemic that killed 300 people in 2003. No one is taking chances.

So here we are. Tourism is down. Local businesses are suffering. People are worried and angry, and they want someone to blame. At the same time that many of us would like to muzzle politicians in both Hong Kong and the USA, we are suiting up in ways that make us look like Hello Kitty, the famous Japanese cat without a mouth. When we take off our masks, in private, we complain and speculate and entreat the rat to turn this year from inauspicious to gold. Hong Kong could use a break. I wish that for all of us. Here’s to happy families, shared prosperity, good health, good leaders, good friends, and global goodwill.

Empty train in the middle of the day.

Travel Re-Entry and the Seige of CUHK

Returning home from internationaltraveling, I often wish for an airlock between coming and going. I envision adecompression chamber that looks something like the double sets of doors onfancy hotels. There would be a comfy sofa for the in-between, no transit rush,and monitors to make sure I was good and ready for re-entry. It’s my lifewaiting on the other side, but it’s on a moving track. Between jetlag andculture gaps, acclimation often takes me a week. Returning to Hong Kong from myrecent travels, I felt like I’d transited more than time zones. It’s taken methis long to get a grip.

Re-entry happens at many levels. When we lived in Hawaii, I inhaled the scent of plumeria on returning and thought how lucky I was to live in the islands. Coming home to Hong Kong’s pollution, traffic, and density after 6 weeks in the US was like being shoved onto a hurtling treadmill. My hard won cultural adaptation peeled away and Hong Kong was once again too loud, too bright, too polluted, too crowded, too fast, too crazy for my introverted, American sensibilities.  I had to catch up to rocket speed.

Re-entry applies to marriage as well as country and culture. Fred and I have been coming and going for the entire twenty years we’ve known each other, and we’re pretty good at it. Not that we don’t travel together, we love to, but just as often, one of us travels and the other holds down the fort. There are cats to consider, and we lost our wonderful cat-sitters when we left Hawaii. He has a job and work obligations, so it is usually me staying home.

When it was my turn, I planned an extendedtrip to see family and friends in Texas and Arkansas. My journey took me downwinding country roads and through deep conversations and layers of memory. Alongthe way, I remembered how much I love to drive and keep my own hours, how muchI love Rueben sandwiches, un-crowded coffee shops and sidewalks, Fall weather, thewide aisles and selection in American grocery stores, talking with old friends,greetings from porch-sitters, southern hospitality, seeing the stars, laughingwith my daughter, good Mexican food.

One of the ways we navigate our times apartis by sharing tales when we return. As I stored up my inner and outerexperiences to share with Fred, I looked forward to the kind of conversationsI’d been savoring with old and new friends. Instead, we were out of synch.

Reconnecting is easier when one person waits for the other to return. Fred was gone to a conference in Hawaii when I arrived. I—the introverted half of this partnership—had been steeping in a combination of reflective solitude and one-on-one encounters for 6 weeks. Mr. Extrovert had been party hopping from one reunion gathering to the next. He came home wired on group energy, and my spindly narratives had to wait for his exuberance to subside. I was missing slow and quiet and belonging while he was recounting potlucks and lobster dinners. We could both have used a monitored time-out in the airlock.

Successful re-entry after time apart requires time together. Just as I was getting over my What am I doing in Asia? blues, Fred left again. He was off for a conference in Taiwan right when Hong Kong’s months of weekend protests flared to new intensity.

During my entire trip I fielded questionsabout the protests in Hong Kong. I did my best to dispel the fears of my familyand friends. I assured them we were not in the conflict zones and that themedia was showing the actions of a radical few. I told them to worry about thefuture of Hong Kong but not about us.

When you can’t leave, you batten down. The night before Fred left for Taiwan, protestors barricaded the entrances of the CUHK campus where we live. We assumed the confrontation wouldn’t last long. Early the next morning, Fred hiked to an exit and got a ride to the airport with his grad student. I nervously watched televised news coverage of a standoff between police and protesters on the other side of campus. In Cantonese. I recognized various locations on the live feeds, but couldn’t understand the commentators. I watched protesters hurl petrol bombs and police fire round after round of tear gas. The No. 2 bridge, where we regularly walk from campus to Science Park, had become a war zone.

No information breeds misinformation. That night and the following two days, I was deluged with text messages from family and friends checking up on me. I was grateful for their concern. Several offered to help me get out despite the blocked entrances. All I had to do was hike out. I explained over and over that with no car and buses, I had no way of transporting 2 cats in carriers from our residence to a break in the barriers. And where was I going to go with cats? One kind FB friend offered to take them, but she lived miles away.

Over the next forty-eight hours, the information gap welled up with partial information and rumors. The police were going to invade the campus. The campus had been taken over by paramilitary outsiders. The protesters had hidden explosives everywhere. The PLA was coming. The government was after the CUHK server so they could control the internet. A complete evacuation was being ordered. The bridge had been blown up. The air was unfit to breathe. I should sleep with a wet towel near my bed in case of fire.

Rumors may or may not contain a grain of truth. Trying to stay calm, I remembered what I knew from teaching a unit on rumor in a folklore course, that they speak to social anxieties and fears. Some of these reports would turn out to be partly true and others unfounded.

I watched my neighbors, none of whom I know, pack up their cars and leave. I guessed they were driving to the barricades and walking out. Relying on secondhand information and trying to decode the rumor mill, I felt more foreign and helpless than I have in a long time. Finally, solid information started to trickle in. My brother-in-law called to say a letter urging evacuation had been posted on the CUHK website. In Chinese. Fred called to say he was coming home a day early. My sister-in-law in New York called to tell me the Chinese language news said the protesters had left during the night. I was glad I had stayed put.

Crisis changes perspective. In the days that followed, we surveyed the damages on campus: graffiti and burned vehicles, catapults and torn up sidewalks, piles of discarded umbrellas, cans of flammables, shattered windows, mountains of donated clothes and instant noodles. Our relief at being back together spilled into mutual sadness at seeing our beautiful campus vandalized.

I marveled at how in the space of a week my resistance to coming home had, under duress, turned into resistance to leaving. It’s hard not to love this vibrant city where people are fighting for the right to remain a geographical and ideological transit zone.

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