The Anxiety and Burden of Accepting Face Masks Sent From Home
I was overcome with guilt after my family sent me a box of 200 surgical masks from Hong Kong
The box sat on my dining table for days with the neat rows of 200 disposable surgical masks tucked away, unused. They had survived the 6,890-mile trip from Hong Kong to my apartment in San Francisco, where I had holed up since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. Going downstairs to pick up the package was the first time I had left my apartment in two weeks.
My face mask anxiety had rendered me housebound for most of March. I had a steadfast belief in the efficacy of masks, entrenched since SARS swept through my hometown when I was six years old. Like many others, I diligently masked up every flu season, graduating from pastel pink masks for children to baby blue adult-sized ones. But wading through a deadly pandemic as an Asian woman living in the United States complicated my feelings toward something so familiar and culturally intimate. The escalating number of racially motivated attacks against Asians terrorized my imagination. It seemed like only a matter of time before a face mask would out me as other, marking me as a target for the screams: “Take the corona back, you chink!”
