38 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
headed out to the street. Then my phone
rang. It was Ying, telling me that she
was no longer permitted to cross the hall
to the kitchen. As I stood on the side-
walk, I heard a man say, “Fucking Chi-
nese.” Only after he’d gone did I realize
I was holding the garbage-can lid like
a shield. That night, I tweeted about the
incident. It was an act of exposure that
my mother would have frowned upon.
“Where’s your bruise?” she would say, if
I complained about being mocked at
school: if an incident does not physi-
cally harm you, it shouldn’t register. But
why had I felt pinned to that tableau in
which the man’s words seemed more
real than my body? To assert that it had
happened was the only way I could wrest
the moment away from the stranger.
A few days after family members were
shut out of Carter, I called the Patient
Relations Department to ask if the virus
had entered the facility and what mea-
sures could be taken to protect patients.
When no one answered, I contacted the
C.E.O. at the time, David Weinstein.
There wasn’t much he could tell me, but
he gave me his cell number, and, a cou-
ple of days later, we took a walk in a park
next to the hospital. Weinstein, who is
in his sixties, said that he had been in
the nursing-home business for three de-
cades and that his mother lived in one.
Terrible timing, he told me from behind
two layers of masks. The health-care sys-
tem was broken, and both our mothers
were caught up in it.
When I tweeted about my mother ’s
predicament, various friends in the
health-care industry weighed in. Some
said that I should consider removing her
from the facility. Part of being a regular
at hospitals is always to have a Plan B,
so I started to think about what this
would involve. I got the numbers of re-
spiratory specialists, respiratory-equip-
ment companies, hospital-equipment
companies. The dearth of ventilators
alarmed me. Even if I managed to pro-
cure one, I would need to be trained to
use it. I would have to find health aides
and respiratory aides, who would be al-
most impossible to recruit at a time like
this. And, on the off chance that I did
accomplish all this, where would I put
her? My apartment barely accommo-
dated my meagre furnishings.
Plan A, meanwhile, was to make sure
that Carter would do its absolute best
for my mother. I’d offered to arrange a
food delivery for the staff, around four
hundred people, in order to save them
trips to the market. Now I called Wein-
stein, who listed some food staples that
would be useful. I contacted grocery
stores, but most had set quotas on items
like milk and bread. Others wouldn’t de-
liver. I finally found a wholesaler who
could provide what we needed, and
launched a bare-bones online funding
drive to support the hospital. When the
shipment arrived—a hundred and fifty-
six loaves of bread, twelve hundred eggs,
fifty quarts of milk, a hundred pounds
of peanut butter, six hundred and twenty-
five apples, a hundred and sixty pounds
of bananas—Weinstein sent me pictures,
and some of the nurses thanked me.
It felt good to help, and it was sanity-
preserving for me to have a task to focus
on, but I was aware of what I was doing:
ingratiating myself with the institution,
in the hope that my mother, if it came
to it, might receive some sort of prefer-
ential treatment. I thought of my moth-
er’s gifts of medicine to my teachers in
Chongqing, and the embarrassing results
when she tried to wheedle my Ameri-
can teachers into giving me more home-
work. (I was sent home with an admon-
ishing letter.) America was an entirely
different system, with its own levers and
gears, and I was better placed to oper-
ate them than she had been.
I was about thirteen when I hatched
a plan to save us. I would divide myself
into a Chinese self and an American one:
at home, I was the dutiful, Confucian
daughter; at school, a dedicated student
of clenched politesse and Wasp pieties.
I sincerely thought that I could slip in
and out of these different versions of my-
self; they were like costumes, and, if sewn
and crafted with sufficient skill, they
would help us keep going, my mother
and me. There was only one problem: I
didn’t know that a person capable of en-
gineering multiple identities was not nec-
essarily a person who could control the
borders between them. In my diary from
that time, a present from my mother’s
employer, which had a Degas ballerina
on the cover, I gave voice to emotions
powered by all the impostors who took
up residence inside me. My deepest emo-
tions—a crush on a boy I met at the li-
brary, the hatred for the spoiled children
my mother served, my irritation with mymother, my secret ambition one day to
write the great American novel centered
on the itinerant lives of a Chinese mother
and daughter—were buried in fictional
characters that grew out of an inability
to reconcile myself to myself.I
n early April, David Weinstein and I
were planning a second round of gro-
ceries when I saw a missed call from Car-
ter. When I managed to reach Patient
Relations, the next morning, a woman
cordially informed me that some Carter
patients had contracted COVID.
“How many?” I asked.
“A f e w. ”
“Do we know how it was contracted?”
“No.”
“Are the patients on my mother’s
floor?”
I was told that I could not be privy
to this information, but that, in the event
that my mother tested positive, I would
be informed.
“Well, has she been tested?”
“No.”
“Will she be?”
Rather than answer my question, the
woman said that all companions of pa-
tients would have to leave by 4 P.M. that
day. I explained my mother’s condition
and her dependence on her aides; I asked
if an exception could be made. No, not
possible. “Even if she is not safe with-
out a companion?” I asked. That would
be for the doctor to decide. I tried one
more tack: could I withdraw her from
the hospital? She hesitated. Technically,
yes, she said, but, given how much equip-
ment my mother needed, it was unlikely
that I’d be able to get her out of Carter
in less than two weeks.
So much for Plan B. And I had an-
other realization: losing the aide might
be no less disastrous for my mother than
contracting the virus. She has survived
nearly a decade since her diagnosis—
the average is three to five years—and
the care that the aides provide, turning
and suctioning her, is almost certainly
integral to this longevity.
The next hours were spent on the
phone, calling everyone I could think of.
It was going on 4 P.M. when I found my-
self talking with a nurse who had occa-
sionally been the object of my mother’s
stern, blinked-out criticism.
“Jiayang, listen to me,” she said. I ex-
pected her to chastise me for my inces-