I don’t know about you, but every sneeze and cough I hear makes me shiver. Just the other day when I was sitting in a lecture, someone was sneezing with such frequency even the professor seemed a little uncomfortable. I turned to see who the person was and, not to my surprise, he was sitting all alone with a stack of tissues and a bottle of water.
SARS has become a serious concern, especially since doctors and researchers have yet to find a cure. The news and health officials have warned us to take extra safety measures such as washing our hands more often, avoiding close contact with those who have SARS symptoms and wearing masks.
What’s worse, SARS has also become a cultural disease. My friend complained that people avoided sitting beside her in lectures because she was Chinese. A non-Chinese friend said her mother avoided going to Chinese malls because she didn’t want to contract the disease. Moreover, there was a column in the Toronto Star describing how Councillor Joe Mihevc, the chair of the board of health, purposely went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch. He commented he was troubled by the fact that the restaurant was only half full and said, “I think one of our responsibilities is, this week and next week, eat Chinese food. Go to Chinese restaurants.”
I honestly don’t think avoiding Chinese people will significantly lower the chances of contracting the disease. The real problem is so many of us here at U of T have classes to go to, exams to write and people to meet, that it is impossible for us to avoid public contact. We don’t really have a choice but to carry on with our daily lives. How can we avoid contact with people when we have to borrow a book from Robarts or eat at Sidney Smith? Quite frankly, every chair we sit on, every book we touch and every doorknob we turn has thousands of germs on it. So what do we do? Do we carry a bottle of Windex (like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) everywhere we go and act totally paranoid? Can we seriously imagine our professors wearing masks while delivering lectures?
I sympathize with people’s fear and I, being Chinese myself, am aware of the risks of the disease. But when I hear my friend is isolated simply because of her ethnicity, it hurts me. SARS is not a cultural disease—true, it originated in China, which is unfortunate, but it does not mean the Chinese invented it. But my friend’s experience has made an impact on me because I have never felt the threat of discrimination until now.
Human history is full of racism and discrimination—against blacks, Jews and women. Without a doubt, my experience is nowhere near what they have experienced. But I have come to better understand and appreciate their legacy because now I know what it means to be a visible minority, to be judged and isolated. I’ve also come to appreciate the progress minorities have made over the years all over the world. These are things that I no longer take for granted because now I realize how hard minorities have fought for them.
