There was once a poor farmer who could afford to own just one horse. He cared well for the animal, but one summer night, the horse escaped through a weak fence and ran away.
When his neighbors discovered what had happened, they visited to offer their condolences. “What bad luck!” they exclaimed. The farmer replied,
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
A week later, the fugitive horse sauntered back to the homestead, accompanied by six wild horses. The farmer and his son managed to corral all of them. Again the neighbors descended. “What great luck!” they exclaimed.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Maybe not.”
Soon the farmer’s son began the work of taming the new arrivals. While attempting to ride the roan stallion, he was thrown to the ground and half-trampled. His leg was badly broken. The neighbors came to investigate. “What terrible luck!” they exclaimed. The farmer replied, “Maybe. Maybe not.”
The next day, soldiers visited the farmer’s village. Strife had recently broken out between two warlords, and one of them had come to conscript all the local young men. Though every other son was commandeered, the farmer’s boy was exempted because of his injury. The neighbors gathered again. “What fantastic luck!” they exclaimed.
“Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.”
~ a Chinese folk tale
We’re currently marooned in Singapore – well, marooned being too harsh a word, because we could think of many other places we could’ve been “stuck” in – unsure of what the future has in store for us, along with the rest of the world. Thankfully by now we’re accustomed to the nomadic life, to not having much besides our backpacks, to not having a job or a well-defined routine, to not knowing where we’ll be or what we’ll do afterwards. We’re still used to planning not more than two weeks at a time, though recently we’ve increased the range to 3 months. With two thirds of the world on lockdown and most borders closed to international traveler, we know where we’ll be next week, next month: we’re staying put in Singapore until our visa expires.
I remembered the first time we heard about the coronavirus. We were somewhere in Zambia, one of those rare times when we had Internet access and I was scrolling through the BBC front page. At that point it was still called the Wuhan virus and I had thought of it as a curious bit of news from China, something that most likely would be contained within the country. The border post in Malawi was the first time we saw a public health official who was checking people’s temperatures and asking for everyone’s travel history, but I thought it was a standard border procedure even when the officer told me to take the form seriously because of coronavirus. The news of the virus quickly got shelved at the back of my mind and didn’t come up again until a few weeks later when we were in Malawi. We were cooking dinner, accompanied by a Dutch couple we just met, who jokingly said, “Well, at least you don’t eat bats,” when Gabriel commented that I was an adventurous eater. We all laughed. Coronavirus was still funny then, when we still thought of it as another country’s problem.
A few weeks after that, we met a backpacker at the land border between Malawi and Tanzania. We immediately hit it off and gave her a ride from the border to the nearest town where we were also headed. As serendipity would have it, a week later we saw her again – with her sister who was visiting from the UK – in a guesthouse in Arusha, near Mount Kilimanjaro. How we ended up in the same guesthouse when there were a few dozen other options in this touristy town, after diverging itineraries, was beyond me. Sometimes life’s happy coincidence just happens.
She had told us the first time we met that locals often mistook her for Chinese, even though she’s Lebanese by heritage and had no distinguishing Asian features except for her dark hair and fair skin. Still, the locals would call out to her, “China, China!” when she passed by, an experience I knew quite well. We all laughed and shook our head. “How on earth did they mistake you for a Chinese person?,” we said incredulously. When you’ve been on the road as long as we and she had, you know how to ignore these gibes and dismiss them as ignorance rather than purposeful racist comments.
“But we got called something else today!” her sister gleefully reported. “They called out, ‘Corona! Corona!’ when we were waiting for the dalla-dalla (local minibus)!” she said. We all laughed and shook our head, again dismissing it as hilarious, not alarming. Coronavirus was still funny then, when we still thought of it as someone else’s problem.
The week after that, I started getting called “Corona” by the locals. There was nothing particularly hostile or menacing about this name-calling. Once, I was buying lunch at a roadside stall, and a man on his motorcycle double-backed and stopped outside the stall upon seeing me, so that he could call me “corona” while miming the act of putting on a face mask and sneezing. A for skill, but F for comedy. I didn’t find it funny and said to him, in English. “I, Corona.” I point at myself. “You, Corona.” I point at him. “Everyone, Corona.” I gestured to the rest of the people at the stall. Who knows if anyone actually understood what I had said since no one spoke English here and I had to order my food in sign language earlier. But I got more laughs than his initial mime, and one of the restaurant cook chased the guy off the stall with his wooden spoon. I guess I won the comedy battle?
And just like that, suddenly the disease became personal. Corona is no longer another person’s problem. Since we are “the other” around here, we represent the threat, we are corona. Suddenly we experienced more name-calling. Not just from some wisecrackers sitting on the side of the road who wanted to get laughs from their friends, but also from kids and regular people. A schoolgirl stuck her head out of the school bus once to catch my attention and as our eyes met, she mouthed ‘co-ro-na-vi-rus’ ever so slowly with perfect diction, and smiled as if she was so proud of herself. Another time I heard an audible whisper of “corona, corona” behind my back while I was waiting for the chapati lady to wrap our lunch in old newspapers. When I turned around, it was an elderly man eating with two female companions who had called me “corona.” Perhaps feeling bad for calling me names, he invited me to try out the boiled cassava he’s eating.
Which leads me to my next point: the name-calling was never hostile. It was never meant as a warning to others to avoid my potentially infectious body, or a justification for refusing entry or service. No, at that point, no one realized that there’s such a thing as asymptomatic carriers or even understood the basic of how the virus spread. It was almost as if they were playing an association game where they equated foreigner with dark hair to Asian, which was the same as ‘China’, which meant ‘corona’. I got fed up occasionally and would say “Ebola!” back to them when someone called me corona. I don’t think it was an effective reply. They just looked confused, and I never got any laughs.
Now, are we lucky that this happens at the “end” of our sabbatical year, or unlucky that this happens at the “end” of our sabbatical year when we’re supposed to figure out what to do next with our lives? I’m not sure, to be honest. Maybe, ten, twenty years from now, we’ll tell the story and only then we’ll know how this pandemic fits into the overall picture. As for the time being, we’ll try to settle into this unusual routine of staying in one place for more than a month after one year of wandering.