![]() Was I O.K.? “This moment has taught us that the West we’ve so admired isn’t as logical and reasonable as we thought,” the then mayor of Seoul said at a press conference. They had seen footage of overwhelmed city hospitals and morgue-like nursing homes on the Korean news. We never lost touch with our relatives there, though, and several of them sent fretful text messages when COVID-19 hit New York. Still, I envied the effectiveness of the country’s public-health system. And there were serious privacy concerns: phone alerts detailed the locations and travel records of COVID-positive individuals in the community, making them easy to identify. Korea saw large COVID outbreaks in churches and night clubs nevertheless. Some of these tactics were borrowed from Taiwan, which, like South Korea, had learned from an outbreak of SARS in the early two-thousands and planned for the worst. Cell phones were used to monitor social distancing and conduct contact tracing in real time. The central government oversaw the production of masks, which neighborhood pharmacists and public servants distributed at low cost. Travel, especially across an ocean, seemed indulgent, even callous.įrom Brooklyn, I reported on the South Korean response by phone. South Korea chose to keep foreigners away with strict quarantine rules. My younger brother was in Philadelphia, where he had his restaurant hours cut back, then eliminated. I was in Brooklyn, sleeping with earplugs to muffle the sound of ambulance sirens. But, as the virus spread worldwide, Mom and Dad were stuck in Tacoma, Washington, where I grew up, just south of the first nursing-home outbreak in the U.S. We had meant to come earlier, in the spring of 2020. I would imagine an older version of me remembering this time of inseparability. Some nights, I would look over at her and think, My face, but not my face. Mom and I resorted to dragging the bedding downstairs and sleeping next to one another, rigid as planks, arms touching, on the two cushion cubes that served as a modular sofa. The bedroom loft, up a twisty flight of wood-block stairs, never got below eighty degrees. In quarantine, there was no rush to get over jet lag, as there was no one to see and no place to go. Level-five traffic restrictions over the weekend.” ![]() Limit outings, wear a mask, take individual care. Wear a mask, wash your hands, ventilate indoor settings, and observe all disease-prevention rules.” Or “Pyeongtaek city: Today, 6am to 9pm, emergency air-pollution measures. Keep outings, travel, and gatherings to a minimum. ![]() “Pyeongtaek city: 49 COVID-positive people. Our phones screamed in unison every few hours with “extreme” emergency alerts from the local government. We would spend most of our waking hours at a round, plastic table (a flimsy Saarinen-tulip knockoff) that served as dining room and desk. An uncle in Seoul had dropped off a care package of rice, banchan, eggs, gochugaru, and produce. We unpacked the snacks, tea, coffee, and instant meals we’d brought from the U.S. He said that the authorities sometimes check CCTV footage to catch quarantine escapees,” Mom said with a sly look. “The landlord said not to leave, not even to enter the hallway. It had very little floor space but all the basics: a galley kitchenette with an under-counter washing machine, a bathroom, a tiny living-dining room, and a lofted bedroom. Our quarantine rental was a cheap, dorm-size efficiency-a brand-new apartment in a brand-new building in a brand-new neighborhood. “When I left, I only knew Korea as a place of hardship,” she told me. The pandemic response proved how much the country had changed since she immigrated to the U.S. A “disease prevention” bus outfitted in plexiglass and plastic seat covers took us straight to our rental apartment, in Pyeongtaek city, about an hour south of Seoul, for a small fee. A polite young man from South Korea’s national health corps inspected our stack of documents, took our temperatures, and explained the conditions of our imminent ten-day quarantine. There seemed to be more workers in face shields and white Tyvek suits than travellers. When my mom and I arrived at Incheon Airport in November, after twenty uncomfortable hours in K94 masks, I was shocked by its emptiness.
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