April 9, 2020
I interviewed my family on how their lives have changed since COVID-19 and what they’re doing in quarantine to cope.
After getting off the phone with my mother, I started packing the biggest suitcase I had with all the clothes I thought would last me five months. She had booked me a flight home that left Boston in 12 hours. Somehow she found out that in-person classes at my university were cancelled for the rest of the semester before I did.
Only a few days earlier, I had come back from spring break in California where my friends were fearful of going into public places because of COVID-19. Talk about shelter in place was becoming a reality. I was not particularly excited to get on another airplane.
Because of my habit of overpacking and overall panic from this situation, my suitcase was extremely overweight. You could easily fit a human body (or two) in it so I wasn’t surprised. I paid an extra $100 and boarded my flight.
The plane was at half-capacity, probably even less. I had a whole row to myself before I landed in Dallas and met up with my siblings for our connecting flight to Texarkana, Texas.
When we landed in our small hometown airport, my parents were waiting for us. I overheard another parent lightheartedly ask her sunburnt son, “How was the beach?”
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It’s been about three weeks since my siblings and I have been home. After the first few days, one of my sisters and I had gotten into an arguing match which resulted in an uncomfortable silent treatment that lasted almost a week. Family… Am I right?
Walking downstairs, my dad is reclining on the sofa watching the news. Although this is commonplace for him, the coronavirus outbreak has caused his news consumption to be, in the words of my mother, “very excessive.” From the time he comes home from work until the time he goes to bed, my dad is flipping through various news channels, trying to gather all the new information he can before he gravely recites it back to us at dinner.
Although most non-essential clinics and family practices are closed, my dad is still going to work because his practice deals with cancer treatments that can’t be postponed. Because of this, he made a strict rule that my siblings and I can’t leave the house, even to get food from drive-throughs. If we need groceries, we have to ask my mom or dad to get them. His reasoning for this is to limit the amount of people we come in contact with so he has a lower chance of becoming sick and not being able to work.
When asked about why she wanted my siblings and me to come home instead of staying in our respective college towns, my mother said that it was much safer to be home incase of a lockdown or any other sort of emergency. Our rural town was less populated with very few COVID-19 cases compared to Boston and Berkeley, which are hotspots for international travel.
My mother’s life hasn’t changed drastically since the pandemic ensued. She works from home which made the stay-at-home mandate easy for her. She expresses her concern about people not being able to pay rent and how that could affect landlords’ ability to pay for their property tax, mortgages, and other responsibilities. On a positive side, she’s happy to have everyone home. “After my kids went to college I started missing them and we never have everyone together at once except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it’s nice,” she said.
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My younger brother Adrian was in the midst of his freshman year at UConn when students were told not to return to campus, even to pack up their dorms. He and a few of his friends had to sneak back into the dorms (I didn’t ask how) to retrieve all their clothes and belongings. Adrian expressed how he had finally started to understand how college worked when the remainder of his freshman year was taken from him.
“It sucks because we thought we could enjoy our second semester after making new friends and getting settled, but there’s really no one you can blame for this,” he said.
Adrian finds the switch to online school distressing because of the heavy workload combined with his inability to pay attention to lectures on a computer screen. He complained about how his professors weren’t really teaching them and were only “regurgitating information.” Despite all this, Adrian has been in high spirits and hasn’t let the pandemic sour his mood.
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Alanna, a senior at UC Berkeley, was arguably the most impacted by the school shutdowns out of all my siblings. She talked about how senior spring was when she was supposed to do all the fun college traditions she had put off during her past three years of college because she was so focused on school and studying. Because she recently turned 21, she planned on finally going to bars with her friends and enjoying the rest of her senior year until students were instructed to not return to campus.
Although Alanna is disappointed that she missed out on some once in a lifetime traditions, she believes that UC Berkeley handled the situation pretty well. Before the shutdown, the school corresponded with students and gave them updates on what information they were working with, even if they had not come to a definite decision yet. Alanna said this helped reassure her classmates that they were in the loop. Berkeley also had students fill out surveys so they could be a part of the decision making process for graduation rescheduling.
The uncertainty of getting a job after graduation is stressful for any college senior, but Alanna believes that the coronavirus pandemic will make it even more difficult for her graduating class to find jobs. All she can do in the meantime is wait to hear back from employers.
For now, her graduation will likely be in late summer, which Alanna is okay with. “I’m just happy they’re not doing a virtual ceremony,” she said.
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My oldest sister Aimee is studying medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and she had some strong opinions about the U.S. healthcare system and how the government handled the coronavirus. When I called her over FaceTime, her first complaint was the priority the government had placed on money instead of public health safety and human lives.
Aimee believes that the medical community is being exploited by the government, with very little protection. “Residents and medical students who have not adequately finished their education are being sent to the frontlines without proper gear and equipment, and a lot of them are dying,” she said.
The switch to remote learning has been a big change for Aimee because many topics that require hands on learning, like brain dissection, are being replaced with diagrams on a computer screen. She says that this makes it more difficult to visualize and absorb information. Even though she is in Little Rock by herself, Aimee hasn’t been lonely because studying consumes her time from the moment she wakes up until she goes to bed.
When she’s not studying or thinking about all the faults in the healthcare system, Aimee passes the time drinking full bottles of wine, painting, or baking cinnamon rolls from scratch. Because Little Rock is two hours away from home, she has been visiting us on the weekends – something she hardly did before the pandemic.
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As for me, being quarantined at home hasn’t been too bad. I spend my days staying up until 4am and sleeping in until 2pm, a habit most of my college friends can also identify with. I have yet to read a book for leisure or learn how to play the guitar, but maybe in the next coming months (probably not.)
Because of my inability to study anywhere except for a library, schoolwork has been exponentially more difficult due to the fact that my house has nowhere quiet to work. Aside from this, I’m grateful to be able to spend time with my family and for home cooked meals that I don’t have to pay for.
Aileen Tran 