Dr. Sonia Wong
Coming together when nothing is back to normal
by Dr. Sonia Wong
When I was first approached by DNS research developer Tobias Zuser for a possible collaboration, I didn’t realize it was the first of many connections that would set all the subsequent re-connections in motion. In a way, it all started – so appropriately – with the very theme of the workshop series on narrative change; that is: coming together.
In this blog entry, I would like to focus on connections, and the process of coming together, or putting people, ourselves, and our communities back together again. The pandemic divided us, because of practical medical needs and public health concerns, which spun off into measures of controlling populations, as well as their mobility, access, resources, and connections. This division, separation, disconnection and isolation, were as much physical as they were psychological, as much political and communal as they were cultural and familial. And the impacts are lasting. Many of us, I believe, struggled to connect, burdened by each of our own pandemic experiences, anxiety, anger, fear, grief, uncertainty, loss, and powerlessness, all of which we kept to ourselves, while keeping us away from each other.
Where to begin? When Tobias, my former classmate during our PhD years, came up to me with the task of connecting this project to stakeholders from local communities in Hong Kong, I was not sure how to approach it. The topic he presented was about changes that have occurred during the pandemic, and their implication on the future of organizing.
But organizing has become such a loaded word, even before the pandemic hit. It is only then that it became apparent that when we address the pandemic, we are not only addressing the physical and medical pandemic, but also a wider network of other happenings. From there we moved from addressing the idea of coming together in the narrow sense as something that happens on organizational or communal level, to one that is both personal and collective.
Tobias asked me the question: What has been the effect of the pandemic on coming together, and who have been the most affected communities under these conditions? Who should we bring to the table if we want to understand what the connecting and disconnecting forces of the pandemic were like in Hong Kong?
Looking back to our workshop, the first word that comes to mind is amnesia. I had a hard time rediscovering the many things I willingly forgot about the pandemic years. It may sound strange, but it was the first occasion where I was invited, as I was inviting stakeholders from my communities, to come together and to recall, individually and collectively, what happened. How life was like before the pandemic, what has the pandemic been like, and how will it be like in the future? During our discussions about how to identify the relevant communities, the pandemic experience gradually unwrapped itself and I was finally able to look it in the face, perhaps for the first time.
A snapshot of the workshop
I thought about the actual control on mobility, access, space, and hence connection, the very possibility of coming together and being together, and thus, organizing. But so much has been lost in the process that coming together – or the now rapidly diminishing space for it – may just have become an after-thought.
Working women were disproportionally affected because many were forced to choose between caretaking duties and their families’ livelihoods. With schools and care centers for children, elderly, and disabled persons being closed, authorities assumed that those duties would be readily taken up by family carers, who are predominantly women, in a city where the cost of living is so high that dual income is a necessity for survival.
Meanwhile, migrant domestic workers were disproportionally affected because they were forced into isolation. With just one rest day per week, coming together with friends and migrant sisters across the city, is where their sense of humanity and connection lies. But dominant narratives leveraged the existing racism to pinpoint domestic workers as the spreaders of COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic, when the science was not yet established, and even their home countries were quick to abandon them, often excluding them from any national emergency support programs.
Similarly, also LGBTQ+ persons were disproportionally affected because they rely on commercial spaces to come together and live their identities in community settings, which have become scarce – not only because of the pandemic, but other external factors.
Involving all the above communities, the coming-together that took place during the workshop was eventually one of humans. The community consisted of organizers, change-makers, advocates, and simply people that care, yet, we also took a step back from those identities to care for ourselves as humans that struggled to exist during the pandemic and now, when we were all encouraged to live as if “everything is back to normal” – to work as we used to, to live as we used to, and to help others the way we used to.
But thankfully, the workshop wasn’t merely wishful, pessimistic, or nostalgic. Coming together made many of us realize the deep sense of isolation we felt as a continuous fact that lasted much longer than the social distancing measures. We were not only isolated as individuals but also as communities, and this has creeped its way into every aspect of our lives, jobs, and relationships. To be able to look at the pandemic straight and to take up the burdensome labor to unravel the layers of oppression and pain was in a way, refreshing, liberating, and empowering.
It is by understanding the experience – our individual experience but also that of others, as individuals, and as a community – that we can know the new landscape for every community and location, and find the tools in our pockets (courage and allies) to go on.