COVID Dreams in Toronto
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Tinky, our granddaughter, walking to summer camp with her Lolo, in West Lake, Hanoi, Vietnam.
There she is, my sister Mel, the general practitioner from Brisbane, getting off her tiny car, a cream Austin Mini, swiftly folding it in two parts ready to be taken somewhere—more like a foldable picnic chair—as she nonchalantly leaves the tiny motor still purring on the ground.
Before I can ask where she was off to, I take a quick glance at the ornately painted, huge tins of cheap amaretti (Premiatta Dolciaria Gadeschi) that she has left on a relative’s cupboard. “Why them, not me?” I’m too flabbergasted to ask, she knowing fully well how I collect tins not for the crunchy-buttery cookies but for the gaudy rococo flourishes on the containers.
“I have to see my patients!” she takes off on another route, leaving me and my beloved stranded in a nameless neck-of-the-woods somewhere close to Manila; because in my dream we are visiting relatives, finding ourselves lost and clueless in some faraway journey.
And then there is Vladimir Nabokov sitting at round table in the office of the director of a small provincial museum. He listens as the director explains something about the collections, only to find that the while the latter is speaking, he is absentmindedly eating exhibits on the table—bricks of crumbly stuff which he mistakes as some “kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils in the compartments (of which most are now empty) of a tray-like wooden affair in which <verso> geological specimens are kept.”
And off Nabokov wonders not so much about “the effects of those (very slightly sugary) samples of soils, but about the method of restoring them and what exactly they were.”
Dreams go off-tangent, as our thoughts and cookies do, and in these times of the coronavirus pandemic, into places which we never contemplated we would find ourselves.
An article by Drs. Anna Seale and Maryirene Ibeto of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said that by end of December 2019 and the beginning of January this year, 44 people were identified with pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China.
And since containing the outbreak requires coordination at all levels, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council launched a national emergency response. On the international level, the following day, January 2, the incident management system (IMS) of the World Health Organization was activated.
After Christmas, my husband, Joe, and I were itching to see our granddaughter, Tinky, after an absence of some months. We had bonded with her for two months—July and August—by visiting our daughter’s family in Hanoi, Vietnam, where my daughter was working on cross-posting assignment from her UNICEF Geneva headquarters.
Suddenly, our Skype and Facebook Messenger reunions were not enough: We decided to book a flight to see them for six weeks in the beginning of 2020.
At home in Hanoi: Tinky tests her Lolo's memory.
This was before Taal Volcano erupted early in the year. Against our friends’ warnings about future eruptions and possible outcomes, we decided we could hightail it to Manila for a week or two to visit relatives and friends and then proceed to Bangkok, hoping that there would be no more volcanic and seismic mishaps along the way.
On January 7, the Chinese authorities identified a novel type of coronavirus (subsequently named SARS CoV-2) as a cause of the pneumonia outbreak.
On January 12, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus.
We flew out of wintry Toronto to Manila on January 27, with a stopover in Shanghai, China. We wore masks, which a kind Filipina working with China Eastern Airlines in Toronto gave us. I would never forget how she sought us out from the crowd waiting to board to provide us two extra pairs that a colleague had given her. By then COVID-19 and coronavirus were just scientific terms that did not really register in our fraught minds. We were avid to see our granddaughter, but we took precautions, always using a hand sanitizer or washing our hands whenever there was an opportunity.
“By this time, with COVID-19 hugging the news, we decided to cut our trip short and fly out of Bangkok a week sooner than planned.”
We landed in Manila. Met with relatives and friends. Stayed in an Airbnb in Mandaluyong. Filmed long shots of Metropolitan Manila’s before-and-after sunsets and sunrises from our balcony: Taguig; Marikina; Makati; Taytay; Antipolo; Teresa; Paranaque; Pandacan; Las Pinas. We took numerous Pasig Ferry Boat rides (it had been offered for free for the whole month of January) from the Hulo Station.
Who would think that we could do as the early settlers in the 1800s did, ride on a huge banca to and from various parts of the city? To Escolta and Binondo, to buy the famous hopia from Eng Bee Tin, which my brother Roy, a retired fiscal in Manila, pointed out to us when he picked us up from the Escolta ferry station to show us around old Manila. This included the Post Office where his wife Emily worked, and the Manila Hotel where they took us for dinner. Manila with its tiny million lights glowed in the dark, welcoming us home.
As well, we will remember going to and from Makati on the other side of the river by boat (seven pesos) to meet friends at Rockwell Station. And to eat turon (fried and crunchy saba banana in eggroll wrapping) from a vendor who tended her small bilao (a flat woven bamboo tray) at the foot of the Makati ferry station. Small slivers of bliss! In comparison, the turon at the University of the Philippines grounds (where we met old friends from the ’70s for lunch) was sweeter, as was the company.
We had booked flights from Manila to Bangkok via Singapore, so we thought we had it covered. But to allay our daughter’s fears about the long wait to get to Bangkok—the stopover would take seven hours—we booked a straight flight. I boarded an earlier flight on February 7 to have a week’s reunion with my sisters Mel and Cindy in Bangkok while Joe would take his flight a week later to give us time for bonding.
Fortuitously, my brother, Roy, and his wife Emily had booked for a weekend in Bangkok the same week. This allowed us to meet with my siblings and Mel’s children for a few days.
Although seeing the sights, shopping and eating at restaurants helped us renew familial ties—this was the first time we had occasion to stay up close outside of Manila since we were children in the 1960s—there were the ubiquitous bottles of hand sanitizers in mall entrances and galleries and guards with their temperature scanners that put us always on the alert.
Danger was in the air.
As our four-year-old granddaughter would say matter-of-factly: “Covid is in the air, Lola.”
Our granddaughter Tinky visits the zoo with her Lolo in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.
Within days after that January 13th news, Japan and the Republic of Korea also reported imported cases of novel coronavirus from Wuhan. Other cases farther from the site followed.
The outbreak was also closely monitored internationally, and cases in other regions were identified. Strict flight traffic restrictions were put in place.
On January 30th, the WHO Director-General declared the 2019 nCoV (former name of COVID-19) outbreak a public health emergency.
On February 11, the virus, and the disease it causes, were officially named. The novel coronavirus was named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it causes, COVID-19.
By this time, with COVID-19 hugging the news, we decided to cut our trip short and fly out of Bangkok a week sooner than planned. We flew back on the long-haul flight to Toronto on February 23, with our face masks on, via Incheon, South Korea. The following day, all flights from South Korea were canceled.
Although there were no alerts about self-isolation when we got back, we tried to self-quarantine and to monitor ourselves to make sure we were not asymptomatic.
On March 11, the WHO Director-General declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
Last night when I saw my sister Mel’s FB page go green on FB Messenger, I sent her link about a COVID-19 update. She messaged me back: “Ditse, I am on an online medical seminar now. Will get back to you later.”
I could not share my foldable car dream with her. It can wait for more auspicious times. Or I can share it with my sister, Cindy, who is a retired ICU nurse in Texas, but she would be busy taking care of her two grandkids and keeping them safe from the pandemic. I will just have to learn to wait and be patient.
—With information from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 2020.
Patria Rivera
Patty Rivera is a poet and writer in Toronto
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