Joan Is Okay(39)

He showed me these articles that he was referencing, all fact-checked, he said, by reputable sources. I scrolled through them and saw only words, predictions. Much of medicine is built on hindsight, but hindsight usually means that in exchange for knowledge a lot of people first have to die. I said whatever happened, demand could not exceed supply. I thought I was speaking calmly, until Mark pointed out that I was not.

Hey, he said.

Hey what?

Our health systems are built for this stuff.

I said they really weren’t.

Let’s agree to disagree, for now. And remember—he paused for some sort of effect.

Remember what?

It’s on the other side of the world.



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NO FORMAL ANTONYM FOR catastrophizing exists, but why did it seem that more people had this trait than not? Isn’t it more evolutionary favorable to catastrophize? Does fortune truly favor the bold?



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FOR OVER A WEEK, I didn’t hear from my mother in a significant way. She had ignored my texts about why she was ignoring my calls with one-sentence replies that all was fine, and since January 23 I’d tried to call every day. I had become that daughter, the overprotective and possibly annoying kind, the daughter who believes she is also the parent to a parent who doesn’t like being the child.

I could picture my mother glancing at her phone. Who’s texting and calling me so much? Who’s blowing up my phone? Oh, it’s just Joan-na. Then turning the phone down, facedown, and resuming whatever it was that she was doing, like finishing a hot beverage. She wasn’t bound to me, and besides being my mother, she was free to do other things. I’d come to realize long ago that my parents didn’t fit parental norms and whether that was a result of their own personalities, genetics, or the slow grind of immigration, who could say. A normal parent calls too much, wants to be there every step of the way, and can never leave their kids alone. But that my parents could leave me alone, and separate themselves from me, did not necessarily mean that I was uncared for. We know what you’re made out of, daughter, because we know ourselves. We won’t always be there for you, but we trust ourselves to have raised you well.

As I gazed out the window, it started to snow.

Maybe my mother has learned to ski, I thought. Far-fetched but not impossible. A near seventy-year-old woman skiing, peacefully and idyllically, with just the sounds of her blades cutting white powder underfoot, and casually checking her ringing phone on the downhill, then putting the phone back in her coat and skiing on. But then this serene image turned scary. What if she fell and fractured her knee? She didn’t have health insurance here, nor did she know the hospital system. I would need to find her a good surgeon and then convince this surgeon to let me scrub in. But because I wouldn’t be able to shut my mouth while I watched, I would constantly be questioning the good surgeon and his technique until he eventually asked me to leave. With all due respect, and we appreciate you being here for your mom, but please get out of my OR.

On January 27, two days into the year of the rat, she finally picked up.

Yes? What is it? she asked. She seemed agitated and announced that their monthlong trip had come to an end, and she was trying to pack. But where were her reading glasses, passport, green card, and plastic box of pills? They were set to leave in a few hours, and no one was helping her—why wasn’t anyone helping her?

I asked if she had learned to ski.

Ski? She’d hardly left the lodge.

Was the lodge fun?

Why would sitting all day in a lodge with Tami be fun? Why would being watched by her hawk of a daughter-in-law and followed from place to place like prey be fun?

I sensed that my mother needed to vent and that I could be that for her, a blank wall against which she could throw things, as I’d seen in some movies when, to talk about something stressful, two people will play that game of aggressively hitting a tiny, hard ball indoors, side by side, with fuzzy sweatbands around their heads. I could be that game for my mother. I could be squash.

How’s the scenery?

Predictable.

And the food? The hot chocolate?

Nanny makes it better.

Anything else?

What would you do in this hypothetical situation? she asked. Say hypothetically her February flight from JFK to Shanghai had been canceled because the American airline that she’d booked with had enacted a temporary China ban; pilots and flight staff were refusing to fly to that country until the Wuhan situation had been managed. She was upset about the cancellation, but Fang saw this as a chance for her to stay longer with them, maybe even through the summer months, when they could all go glamping.

She asked if I knew what that was.

I did not.

Glamorous camping. Notwithstanding how absurd that sounded, she couldn’t stay here until then, she needed to get back. She had her own summer plans. Reunions with college friends, a trip to Wuxi, to Tai Lake, planned with her sisters.

Fang brought you into it, she said. He told me to ask you whether there was any real danger to this virus or if it was the media again, scaring everyone about China. The reasoning behind the China ban had been safety precautions, and with ten thousand cases there now, two hundred deaths, she could recognize the hazard as well. But she too suspected bias. If the U.S. had this many cases or more, would they expect other countries’ airlines to ban them, or would they demand to keep on traveling? Just as my brother did, she believed that if there was ever a chance to ostracize China, America would take it.