As an organization run by Asian youth and for Asian youth, we at AAOP have experienced the impact of the pandemic on youth each day for over three years. The pandemic has touched every part of our lives, from health, to school, to family, to work. That’s why, in this third summer of the pandemic, we’re reaching out to Asian youth to ask them to share their stories of navigating the pandemic, as well as their hopes for the coming months.
We spoke with Christy, a high school student, about her experiences on taking care of her family as they got COVID-19 and navigating her school life during the pandemic.
I feel it’s important to get vaccinated because it helps everyone at the end of the day. It doesn’t just help you, it helps everyone else and lowers the chances of getting everyone sick.
I really want to make sure my family is safe as well since I have a little sister who is one and she cannot get vaccinated yet. Everyone around her who isn’t vaccinated is a risk to her and that’s totally terrifying to think about.
I don’t really talk to my family about getting vaccinated and such. But I think it’s just common knowledge for us because we have grandparents and we have elders. At the end of the day, we want them to be healthy, we want them to stay safe throughout this whole pandemic. And with friends, I’ve also talked about being vaccinated, just not for the sake of me, but once again, for my sister as well. Because whenever they’re around me, I’m at risk of getting it if they’re not vaccinated, and therefore, that puts my sister at a risk as well. The conversation really is just, what’s the outcome going to be if we don’t do this?
The pandemic, for sure, it has helped me learn a lot about myself and has really helped me grow, per se, but it made me also realize that there’s a lot of stuff that I looked over, that I don’t value as much and thanks to the pandemic, as bad as it sounds, I’ve learned to appreciate a lot more of the tiny things in the time that I have to spend with family.
So I’ve been fortunate enough to not have COVID-19. However, my family has caught it three times. And during those three times I have never caught it at all even when my whole family has been hit. But I think it was almost terrifying. My household family members got lucky because it wasn’t too bad. My sister got it as well, but luckily she was fine. She had a fever but that’s about it. That’s all I can really think of right now.
So when that happened, it’s a funny story. So my mom was feeling sick. And then it turns out she had COVID. And my stepdad was starting to feel symptoms. And because of that, they gave my baby’s sister to me since my sister didn’t have any symptoms or didn’t develop any at the moment. So for two nights and two days, I had to take care of her and she would have to sleep with me. And then when they were finally able to get her COVID tested at a hospital. It turned out she was positive as well. And then immediately after that, they all stayed in their room. And then I was the only one that didn’t get it. So I just had to be very cautious around them and just learn how to adjust. Like, okay, I need to clean everything in the house and just do all that sort of “fun” stuff–make sure everything’s clean.
I had to give them food, water, just all the basic necessities. Otherwise, that’s about it. It wasn’t too bad. And once again, we got super lucky. I feel like we were definitely on the luckier side compared to other people.
So luckily, we always have a bag of rice stored. So that was perfectly fine. And toilet paper. I think we just learned to be very resourceful, and not just toilet paper, but with every single thing that we use. We learned to be very resourceful.
I’m learning how to be resourceful. Especially with food and stuff, we buy it for the sake of buying it and knowing that we’re going to use it, instead of buying it out of fear that we’re gonna run out of food and it just ends up bad.
For all my junior year, I was online. When I finally came back to do full in person school, I think distance learning was definitely very difficult. I’m going to be quite honest, it was really hard to learn. And I think my junior year was only super good just because of the new grading systems my school implemented. But I feel that I have a lot of opportunities taken away. For example, I was taking AP Calculus, and I was learning it so much faster. I was missing out on things that we could have gone more into depth with and because of that, I didn’t understand the class. And more than anything, I was just stressed at the end of the day. I feel like that was for sure, an opportunity that was taken away from me. Because I feel like if I were in person, I could have done so much better. And now being a senior back fully in person, it was sort of devastating. And now that I think about it, I’m a little upset because I realized that I could have had a fun junior year. And just knowing that experience was taken away from me is upsetting to say the least. But knowing that I’m able to experience what the seniors couldn’t is a highlight for me as well.