Month: March 2020

So this happened this afternoon at home:

It turns out that the toilet flush handle wasn’t a single metal piece, but two metal pieces held together with a plastic core. It appears that the quality of toilet parts has really — ahem — gone down the toilet:

This qualified as a good enough reason to break the social distancing protocol and make a trip to Home Depot to buy a proper handle in the “rubbed bronze” style. There’s one reasonably close to my place, so I decided to combine the trip with today’s exercise and biked there.

In order to get the context of the next part of the story, you should know what I look like. Here’s a photo from today:

After Home Depot, I decided to make a quick stop at the local Latino grocery store to get some cans of beans. They have an amazing selection:

Tap the photo to see it at full size.

Many people were keeping their distance. One kid — maybe 13 or 14 years old — saw me and immediately pulled up the neck of his t-shirt over his nose and mouth, like so:

Really? I thought. I suppose that this could have been a “teachable moment,” where I would talk to him about racism and since he himself was Latino, about intersectionality. Instead, I decided just to meet him where he was.

I simply said:

“Unclench, ese. Soy Filipino.”

This got a laugh out of him, and he pulled the t-shirt off his nose and mouth and walked off.

So when some jackhole tells you this lie…

…or if some shitlords try to sell you this hot garbage:

…call them out on it, because it’s a bigger deal than you might think.

Worth checking out

The March 4, 2020 episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast (a podcast on race and identity) is titled When Xenophobia Spreads Like a Virus:

The global response to COVID-19 has made clear that the fear of contracting disease has an ugly cousin: xenophobia. As the coronavirus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind, manifesting in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.

We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age.

A common theme across our responses: Public transit has been really hostile. Roger Chiang, who works in San Francisco, recalled a white woman glaring at him on the train to work, covering her nose and mouth. When he told her in a joking tone that he didn’t have the coronavirus, she replied that she “wasn’t racist — she just didn’t want to get sick.”

I bought this postcard at a funky café in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago and just found it now, tucked into an envelope of other things I’d been saving.

Given the amplitude of the seething and whining about having to social distance for two weeks from a couple of my “south-pointing compass” friends and acquaintances online, it seemed appropriate. C’mon, guys — and yes, they’re all guys — Anne Frank was tougher than you. Hell, the eggplant I had for lunch was tougher than you.

Thanks to Tracy Ingram for the find!

I get lots of kind words from both friends and strangers from my former hometown of Toronto about my sister, Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health. She leads Toronto Public Health, Canada’s largest public health agency and which provides public health programs for Canada’s largest city and economic capital. As you might expect, she’s been working very long days for the past weeks, as COVID-19 has grown from mystery illness to epidemic to full-blown pandemic, while maintaining a level of chill required to manage a crisis of this magnitude.

Here’s she is at a news conference in March 12th, courtesy of CP24, Toronto’s 24-hour local news channel…

…and here she is on March 13th:

Her birthday was last week, and I was able to FaceTime with her for only a few minutes. She didn’t have any time to celebrate, as it’s been super-long days seven days a week for her, as she and her team manage Toronto’s response to this crisis. It’s a difficult, high-stakes challenge, but I’m glad that she’s on the case.

Once this is over, be sure to send her your thanks.

Worth checking out

Here’s Eileen speaking about the opioid crisis:

And here’s some reading material from the Toronto media:

• Toronto Star: How Toronto’s chief medical officer became the people’s doctor
• Toronto Life: Q&A: Toronto’s chief medical officer on supervised injection sites, and why drug leniency may be good policy
• Toronto Life: Q&A: Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, on dealing with Doug Ford’s cuts

This photo has only just begun to make the internet rounds, but it’s pretty powerful. Share it far and wide!