The plague: We are all exiles now

Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile,” wrote the French existentialist Albert Camus in his novel “The Plague” (1947), which painfully narrates how an epidemic gradually debilitates a sleepy town on the shores of the Mediterranean. Widespread fear and panic snuffs out hope and love in a place where previously “for lack of time and thinking, people [had] to love one another without knowing much about it.”At first, with rats retching blood and random folk falling into fatal delirium, there is nothing but obstinate denial, especially among those in power. The narrator laments how

“[e]verybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

But as suspicions of a new plague sink in among the townspeople, the heroic and tortured protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, begins to remember the horrors of the bubonic plague, which ravaged the medieval world with terrifying speed and ruthlessness. He remembered “the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day.” Stoically, Bernard submits himself to destiny, racing to save a besieged people against an invisible enemy. “Never had Rieux known his profession to weigh on him so heavily,” wrote Camus.

Over time, the plague transforms the souls of its residents, with “Husbands who had had [once] complete faith in their wives found, to their surprise, that they were jealous; and lovers had the same experience.” Suddenly, children, “who had lived beside their mothers hardly giving them a glance [now] fell to picturing with poignant regret each wrinkle in the absent face that memory cast upon the screen.”

The once self-satisfied commercial town and its residents gradually rediscover a sense of solidarity, realizing they’re “in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life… The ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and, together with fear, the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead.”

Crossing oceans and continents in recent weeks, I have seen how the latest plague has upended our world, turning all of us into desperate exiles. Once bustling airports are now reduced to ghost towns. Dread lurks among supposedly carefree casino dwellers in Las Vegas.

Anti-Asian racism is gripping southern California. Uncertainty is gnawing at masters of the universe in Palo Alto, And Washington, gripped by political polarization, is nervously anticipating an impending epidemic amid historic elections.

I have seen Indian immigration officers paranoid over anyone with a Chinese visa on their passports, ordinary Vietnamese nonchalantly swinging between confidence in their state institutions and the fear of the unknown, and Filipinos desperately hoping that the tropical heat will serve as a fortress against the deadly virus.

Ancient grievances are shadowing northeast Asian spats over travel bans, while reports have emerged of a few infected people deliberately spreading the plague in a pure act of nihilism.

I am worried and torn. The other night, I couldn’t hold back tears and a profound sense of helplessness. My family and loved ones are now stuck, or close to, among the worst-hit places on earth, spread from the golden shores of the Mediterranean and the dark sands of the Caspian Sea all the way to the breezy beaches of California.

I wonder about Chinese colleagues I met in Hainan last year. I wonder if they’re all right. The other night, my mom told me how a colleague, a brilliant doctor who worked himself to the pinnacle of scientific success despite poverty and physical infirmities, is now struggling for his life. I wonder about all the doctors, nurses, and friends fighting on the front lines of this disease.

First they shut down Wuhan, and now Milan. Major cities in southern Europe and West Asia are set to follow. As my sister, currently located in a major city teetering toward full quarantine, lamented: “It doesn’t feel real, it’s like a (horror) movie.”

The best I can do is to call my parents every night, showing my love and infinite gratefulness for theirs throughout the decades. We are all now exiles—and to love, fully and sincerely, is our greatest act of defiance.

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