During Quarantine, This Is How My Chinese Parents Say ‘I Love You’
Trying to bridge a generational and cultural gap while isolating in my childhood bedroom
“Mom, Dad, I don’t know how to make my peace with this.”
At the other end of the phone, my parents are silent. I can’t remember the last time I cried in front of them, and my tears only seem to make them feel more awkward.
It’s a Friday night, and usually, from my window overlooking Greek row, I would hear the chatter of partygoers on their way to the frats by now. Tonight, though, there’s only a subdued — almost eerie — silence.
The sudden and swift escalation of the Covid-19 crisis in the United States had caught us all by surprise. A week ago, my biggest worries as a college senior had been homework deadlines and final exams. Even as the news got scarier with every passing day, I thought campus would be my refuge. Then, a week into March, all students received an email from Stanford administration: Prepare to move out from your dorms. Just like that, my college life ended.
“This isn’t how I pictured senior year going,” I told my parents on the phone, speaking in Chinese as I broke the news.
After a brief pause, my mom abruptly asks, “How soon will you be back? You will have to self-quarantine, and we need to get your room ready.”
“Self-quarantine?” By now I shouldn’t be surprised at my parents’ practical sensibilities, but this isn’t what I wanted to hear from them at that moment. It felt like my world was ending, and I wanted — needed — someone to tell me everything was okay.
“Don’t you know what empathy is?” I ask, struggling to translate “empathy” into Chinese and settle on just using the English word for it.
For my parents, the coronavirus seemed to trigger a survival instinct.
In an inadvertently telling moment, what I intended as a rhetorical question came out sounding more like I was asking my parents for a definition. It occurred to me that the rift between us was more than a language barrier; this pandemic has highlighted how out of touch my parents and I are with each other. Just as they don’t seem to know how to respond to my emotions, I find their matter-of-fact-ness to be callous. Our experiences of this unfolding crisis are separated by an ever-increasing gap in our cultural contexts.
Ironically, perhaps more than anyone else I know, my parents understand what it’s like to lose the college experience. When Chinese universities shut down due to massive student demonstrations across the country in 1989, both of them were in their first year.
Though this incident left them and the rest of the country deeply shaken, it was far from the first upheaval my parents’ generation had lived through. Born into the paranoia of Cultural Revolution-era China, they had come of age as sweeping reforms under new party leadership promised rapid, yet unpredictable, economic change.
Once we got home, I went straight upstairs as he instructed, ducking under the plastic divider that my parents put up between my room and the rest of the house.
For my parents, the coronavirus seemed to trigger a survival instinct. The uncertainty they grew up with gave them a mental steeliness and taught them to temper their expectations. In their minds, if getting through this pandemic required several weeks spent isolating and sanitizing at home, then there was no helping it and no need to dwell on it. Normally already reserved in their emotion, my parents have become virtually unreadable during this crisis, even to me, focusing their efforts on disaster preparation with a grim determination that’s almost soldierly.
To minimize contact with the rest of my family, my dad came by himself to pick me up from the airport. Wearing a mask and gloves, he gave me a nod in greeting from 6 feet away as he opened the trunk to help me with my luggage. Once we got home, I went straight upstairs as he instructed, ducking under the plastic divider that my parents put up between my room and the rest of the house.
Part of me understood; you can never be too cautious at a time like this. Our house is only five minutes from the Kirkland hospital in Washington state where dozens of cases have been diagnosed. I knew friends of friends at school who had tested positive. The last thing I wanted was to inadvertently bring this virus back to my parents and my younger brother.
But, on the first day in quarantine, I woke up alone in my childhood bedroom feeling miserable. Looking around, nothing had changed since I’d left for college — from the pink walls to the encyclopedias on my bookshelf to the embroidered tapestry from our China trip in ’08. I’d been back a dozen times since, but this time, I felt untethered in spite of the familiarity around me.
During my four years at school, I’d grown used to the freedom that physical distance from my parents afforded. With a job waiting for me in San Francisco after graduation, these weeks might well be the last chance I ever get to spend this much time at home — and if not for this pandemic, I probably wouldn’t have come back at all.
Even though I’ve always suspected my parents wish they could keep me closer, they’ve seldom expressed this to me. Verbal affirmation doesn’t come easily for them. From their mouths, tender words (“We want to see you”) come out sounding pejorative (“You never want to see us”) — and we inevitably bicker because of this.
Yet, I had always understood the sentiment behind their curt words: “Come back to us. This is your home. We love you.”
In this moment, I wondered, when physical proximity is now a risk and words fail to get the meaning across, how do we convey our feelings to each other?
In the morning, I hear my mom shuffling downstairs to the kitchen. Then, the faint sounds of cupboards opening and closing, water running, the click-click-click of the gas stove turning on. When she comes back up the stairs half an hour later, her steps are slower and somewhat heavier as she balances a tray with oatmeal, toast, eggs, and cut fruits.
“Xinyi?” She calls me by my Chinese name as she slides the tray under the divider. “Come and eat.”
She doesn’t stay to chat — remember, we’re supposed to be minimizing contact — but instead heads straight back downstairs after handing me my food. A minute later, my phone rings, and it’s Dad on FaceTime.
“I thought we could eat together.”
When words fail to get the meaning across, these gestures speak louder, coming clearly through both the physical barrier between us now and the cultural gap that has always existed between us.
Lunch and dinner go by in the same way. My mom cooks and delivers my food before my dad calls on FaceTime to share our meal.
And so, we fall into a routine. The 14 days in quarantine multiplied by three meals a day equals 42 times we interact like this, and in these brief moments, my parents and I come to a new understanding.
The varied, tasty, and nutritionally balanced meals say, “We hope you are staying healthy and happy.”
My mom’s commitment to keeping my food mostly plant-based (I’m vegetarian), even if it involves making something entirely different for me, says, “We respect the decisions that you make for yourself.”
The subsequent call from Dad says, “We are thinking of you.”
When words fail to get the meaning across, these gestures speak louder, coming clearly through both the physical barrier between us now and the cultural gap that has always existed between us.
During my two weeks in isolation, my friends and I frequently talked on FaceTime for hours at a time, in an attempt to provide each other with the emotional support we all need to get through the next few months. For many of us at home, this unexpected and prolonged close quartering with our parents has surfaced some deep-seated themes of generational disconnect — and guilt.
“Am I the problem?” one friend wonders after yet another fight with her parents. They thought her constant depression was overdramatic. She thought they were being insensitive.
“We can’t change the way our parents are,” another says somewhat resignedly. “We can only change the way we relate to them.”
To be children — and especially the children of immigrants — is often to struggle with this disconnect. The cultural gap between me and my parents might be made more obvious during this pandemic, but it will continue to show up in innumerable significant events in the future. Debating who’s right or wrong in this entangled legacy is pointless; if I want empathy from my parents, I need to first show empathy toward them.
To think 14 days solved the problems between us would be naive. Having just come out of quarantine a few days ago, I can’t even guarantee that my parents and I won’t fight more frequently now because we’ll actually see each other around the house. However, I’m optimistic about trying to work things out.
Having spent the last four years pursuing independence, I’ve finally come back home.
And, at the very least, I will be looking for the silent ways in which my parents say, “We love you.”
