Because of COVID-19 descending upon us and forcing us to socially distance, all of our usual activities, from dining out, hanging out with friends, exploring different neighborhoods, going to theater, and travel have come to an abrupt halt. With all this extra time on my hands, not only am I cooking, filming, and video editing more, but I’m also doing a lot more reading. Given the recent instances of racial injustice in the last few weeks along with the protests and ongoing conversations of racial injustice at work, I thought it would be a fitting time to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to be an Anti-Racist to the top of my list. I finished reading that a few days ago on my Kindle. To balance all these serious topics that require a lot of re-reading and contemplation, I nestled Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel mystery/drama novel in here, especially since it has unlimited borrows on the Libby app via the New York Public Library since it’s the Book of the Month. It’s been good to get absorbed into a fun novel that has a dramatic story line that doesn’t require a lot of self-introspection. But on my walks, I’ve saved Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility for listening.

One of the things I had to noodle over for a while, which I guess I have not been very analytical in breaking down, is that she suggests that the current day denial that racism exists, the insistence that we live in a “color-blind” world where people “do not see color,” actually originates from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he said that he hoped that one day, he and his children could live in world where they could be judged for their actions and not based on the color of their skin. White people basically took this part of his speech, twisted it, and transformed it into, “I no longer see color. Therefore, I am not racist and cannot be accused of being racist.” Wow, that was an incredible and screwed up interpretation and turn of events! These same people carry “white fragility” and insist that the people who bring up race or talk about race “think everything is about race, the people who bring up race “are actually the ones who are racist.”

So, I didn’t know MLK, and I obviously never had a conversation with him, but I have a strong feeling that he didn’t advocate for people lying to themselves and the world that they are colorblind and thus BLIND to the differences of people and do not understand socialization. Nor do I think he advocated for the denial of racism or inequality existing. Why are people so terrible?

As of last month, I officially finished editing and uploading all my travel videos through Indonesia. Looking back, I never thought I’d get them all done by May given work and other work and personal travel, but with COVID-19 taking away all “normal” life, including socializing and travel, I’ve had a lot more time to be on a computer editing and producing more material for my YouTube channel. I still have a decent backlog of cooking videos I’ve filmed before and during this period, but other than that, we have no travel content to work with anymore. The San Francisco burrito comparison video was really the last “not here in New York or in my kitchen” video, and we uploaded that on Friday.

So we started with a new type of video, which is about takeout you can get right here in New York. We chose one of our favorite and much loved neighborhood spots, Pure Thai Cookhouse, and filmed the takeout we got from there and what you can expect it to taste like. Is this going to be the future of “travel and eating” videos — filming takeaway food we’re eating at home? When will be we able to really eat out again… travel again?

“What are we going to do this weekend?” Chris asked aloud. It was more a rhetorical question because literally every single weekend since shelter-in-place began, we’ve been doing the exact same things: cooking, cleaning, watching different shows/movies on Netflix/Showtime/HBO/YouTube, reading, shooting and editing videos, taking walks, buying groceries. The most exciting thing that ever happens on the weekends now is if we have a video call with a friend or family member, or if our handyman decides to come buy for a drink if he’s free.

I realized that given how poorly the federal government has handled COVID-19 that for the very first time, our lives, as in our two lives, have been directly impacted by the the idiot in the White House. President Dipshit has done a lot of terrible things over the course of the last 3.5 years, but our lives were never directly impacted. Our ability to work, travel, live our usual lives, has never been impacted.. until now. First, he denied the virus was an issue. Then, he constantly called it the “Chinese virus” and blamed China. Then, he encouraged people to NOT shelter in place and to ignore their state governments. The entire country was a complete cluster, a laughing stock of the world. If our government actually had a handle of this virus and handled it correctly, perhaps we’d actually be able to enter a travel bubble with other countries. But nope. The entire world sees our country has dirty and has travel bans for everyone with a U.S. passport. Thanks, President Dipshit, for ruining our ability to travel and be free.

This past week, I started reading Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. It’s required a lot of focus, a lot of re-reading of sentences and paragraphs to give myself time to absorb and take in information, and a lot of stopping to think. What Kendi makes clear throughout the first 40 percent of the book that I’ve gotten through is that racism is something that is learned, taught to us by everyone from our parents, families, friends, textbooks, schools, media — you name it, and they’re teaching racism to you in some shape or form. Some people think that it’s impossible for a Black or Asian or other “person of color” to be racist, and this could not be further from the truth. Racism against anyone is possible by anyone. Black people can be racist against White people. Asian people can be racist against Latinx people. Darker skinned Latinx people can be racist against lighter skinned Latinx people, and Black people can be racist against Black people. But I think one of the concepts he points out in the book that really made me think was that the term “racist” is oftentimes seen as a pejorative word rather than a descriptive word, and that is actually part of the problem. Someone who is striving to be an antiracist can say or do a racist thing, but that does not necessarily make the person racist because they are (we’d hope) still learning, still evolving). Being racist vs. antiracist is not static. We can evolve and change for the better (sadly, for the worst). So, we should be able to accept “racist” as a descriptive word for a specific action or statement said by an individual and not just pejoratively write them off as a “racist” forever and always.

That sounds like a growth mindset, right?

I took a walk around the Upper West Side late afternoon yesterday, which was the first official day that low-risk businesses could begin reopening. This meant that a number of coffee shops and Starbucks locations had reopened, even allowing a handful of customers inside their stores depending on the space. Restaurants that had previously been closed have reopened for takeout and delivery. Even a handful of clothing shops along Columbus Avenue have reopened, along with a stationery store on Broadway. There was far more life at 72nd and Broadway, considered the central hub, of the Upper West Side, than I’d seen in months. Street performers were scattered throughout. A random man collecting donations had about a dozen different parakeets, cockatiels, and lovebirds sitting around him, along with two bunnies in the center, just steps away from the Upper West Side Trader Joe’s. It actually feels like we’re slowly but surely getting back to regular street and sidewalk traffic.

It still felt weird, though. We’re not at ideal testing levels. There’s tension all around not just because of COVID-19, but because of police brutality, racial injustice, and the protests that we’ve seen around the world in the last two weeks. My mind and even my body are just exhausted. Walking only about 30 blocks, I felt so drained afterwards. The world is just so tiring, and our nation’s leadership is only exacerbating the problems that exist instead of offering comfort or tangible solutions. This is 2020.

It’s been over three months of being on lockdown here in New York for us. We’ve gotten restaurant and groceries delivered. We’ve made weekly trips to different grocery stores. We’ve walked north, south, east, and west. We’ve walked all the way down to Manhattan Chinatown. We’ve taken the subway only twice with our groceries from lower Manhattan to be good citizens and stay off the subway. We walked in Central Park today, which Chris bemoaned since he runs there every weekday morning and is sick of it.

“You can just tell that people are walking around here aimlessly,” he grumbled.

That’s probably true. People are walking for the sake of walking, to get out of their cramped apartments and to get some fresh outdoor air. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to walk aimlessly, though. It could allow us to think more freely, to think without distractions. My daily weekly days have been done while catching up with colleagues and friends over the phone, listening to different podcasts and audio books. It’s been a lot of productive activity, but even though it’s different content and different people, it’s been a bit redundant. Who knows what “normal” even looks like anymore, and how that will be redefined in the coming weeks. But it still just feels so bleak.

New York City will begin opening up again in the next week, and the reopening of the city will take place in phases. People who work in white-collar professions such as myself are likely part of the very last phases to return to work, so I may not be “allowed” to go back to the office until the end of this month. But this reopening also means that restaurants who felt unsafe to open for delivery/takeout during this pandemic finally feel like they can open now, even if it’s just delivery/takeout. One of these restaurants was Ba Xuyen, who reopened for takeout earlier this week. They are a cash-only, independently owned establishment with owners who speak little to no English. It’s one of my most favorite spots in New York given that it has the most authentic banh mi in New York City when compared to the ones all over Vietnam. One of the fears we had at the beginning of the pandemic was: what restaurants are still going to be financially sound enough to reopen at the time of re-opening, or will many of them just close forever? The more of these businesses that close, the more New York will not retain what makes it such a great place to live and eat. I hope Ba Xuyen will be okay.

The news has been disheartening, to put it mildly, in the last few weeks, from the release of the video recording of Ahmaud Arbery being chased while jogging by two white men and shot to death to Christian Cooper, birding in the Ramble and having a white woman call 911, threatening to falsely report that “an African American man is threatening me and my dog,” to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota at the hands of a group of cops, one of whom put his knee down on Floyd’s neck, which eventually killed him. All of these incidents were caught on video. Two of them led to murders. One of them went without arrest or indictment for two months due to unclear circumstances (I suppose black deaths don’t matter unless the public knows about them to those in charge in Georgia?).

I read this story by a black woman about raising a black son today. The title of it is “When my beautiful black boy grows from cute to a threat.” She talks about all the compliments she gets about how cute her little son is, but she worries for his future when one day, he will have to watch his back literally everywhere he goes because his body will be seen as a weapon simply because of his skin color. I cried reading about her constant worry about her son. Would he come home? If he didn’t call, could he possibly have been shot and killed for zero wrongdoing other than being born with darker skin? A black colleague of mine, who did his undergrad work at Harvard, talked about the need he had to wear his Harvard sweatshirt in neighborhoods that were predominantly white or of a higher socioeconomic class because he felt that this would ensure that people would see him as “legitimate,” as “not one of those” black people who could potentially be a threat.

My stomach has churned and my eyes have burned this week, watching these horrific videos, remembering that somehow, we are actually in the year 2020, but it certainly does not feel like much progress has been made. Every day feels like a dystopia, with the terrible leadership of this country to COVID-19 to racism being a consistent, persistent threat that so many people, even some people of color, refuse to admit is an issue. How can anyone possibly think we are in a post-racist world, particularly with a president who outright calls black protestors “thugs,” which is essentially a code word for “(bad) black person”?

It doesn’t seem to matter what people of color do, but they are always seen as doing wrong. Protest by kneeling? Then you can always leave this country. Protest by going in the streets? They’re thugs. This is what President Dipshit has said. Yet somehow, when white people do it, whether it’s after major sporting events, at state capitols to protest wearing masks with their machine guns in hand, they need to be listened to and empathized with. What kind of a “leader” do we have here?

I didn’t think this period could get worse, but I feel like we are at our lowest of lows now. I can’t stop thinking about all the injustices that people of color face and the sheer ignorance and stupidity of so many in this country who either actively or passively allow it continue happening. Silence benefits the oppressor. You are either actively against racism, or you are for it.

Since yesterday, the news has been buzzing around a Memorial Day incident that happened in the Ramble, a protected part of Central Park here in New York City that is known for its vast and diverse array of flora and fauna, particularly birds that you would never quite imagine in the middle of a concrete jungle. That early morning, a white woman had allowed her dog to go unleashed in this area, which is against the rules of this section of Central Park. An avid birder, who happened to be a black man, was also in the area and noticed that this dog was running around unleashed, and asked the woman to leash her dog. They started to argue, and a debate ensued, which ended with the birder recording the woman on his phone, as she not only nearly strangled her dog but said she would call 911, asserting that an “African American man was threatening my and my dog’s life.” She called them, insisting they come immediately, and the birder also yelled and said they should come, too. There are a lot of terrible and ridiculous aspects to discuss about this from white female privilege to abuse of power to racism to subconscious racism masked as “fear” as this woman called it, but I’m not going to go into the details here.

My cousin sent me an updated article this morning, noting that the woman had been fired from her job after her employer initially put her on forced leave. He said, “Black man calls racism and the whole world listens. An Asian person calls racism and no one listens.”

While my initial knee-jerk response was to tell him that he was being pathetic, that he has no idea what it’s like to be a black man in a world where a black man cannot even jog on a road safely without fear of being shot and killed (and, having the perpetrators get away with it unnoticed for over two months, for that matter), that his problems are nothing compared to that of a black person growing up in this country, I didn’t say that and thought about it for a bit. And I realized that there actually is some element of truth to what he said.

Why do I say this? Well, since COVID-19 broke out in China and literally made its way across the globe, countless racist incidents, from slurs to graffiti to vandalizing of Asian-owned businesses to outright shootings and stabbings, have been committed against Asians everywhere. And you know what? I learned about the majority of these incidents not through CNN or the New York Times or Fox News, but through local media sources, Asian social media groups I belong to, and even Asian personalities in the arts and food world I follow on Instagram. It never made any major headlines when an entire Asian family was stabbed at a grocery store in Texas by a racist, enraged man. When I learned of the Asians who were stabbed in Melbourne, Australia a month ago, no one was really talking about it. And then there’s the most recent incident in San Leandro, California, where a white woman physically went door to door to every house she knew had Asian people inhabiting it and posted a letter telling the families to “go back where you came from.” She eventually got arrested with a basket of these racist letters in hand. “If you are a woman or man and was born in other country, return, go back to your land immediately, fast, with urgency,” the note said. It ended with “One American, white, brave, that serves the Nation or USA is going to live here.”

There’s no major headlines about this in The New York Times, in CNN, and like Breitbart really cares. It’s like the model minority stereotype of Asians has truly hurt Asians in the long run here because we’re supposed to persevere, be silent, and just work hard and shut up to become successful and have “good lives.” The media do not care about Asians, and they won’t cover them in news because society doesn’t seem to care. It’s sad, but it’s pretty true.

So, I didn’t tell my cousin he was being pathetic. I just said that there was some truth to it. However, it’s not like black people have it better AT ALL than Asians because while these headlines may make the news, what laws and actual enforcement are happening to improve the lives of black people here….?!