I didn’t really go to high school during my junior year. I studied.
It was the height of the covid pandemic, and the boy I liked didn’t talk to me anymore because I was a Chinese immigrant. My neighbors called it the Kung Flu, people on the internet called it my fault. My lockdown was lonely. Social distancing kept me from my friends, but the fear-fueled racism meant I wasn’t just isolated from my schoolmates. I was driven away.
My senior year of college started sickeningly similar. As Operation Metro Surge descended on the Twin Cities, I was once again in lockdown, only to leave my apartment when strictly necessary, and never alone. I made copies of my legal papers and distributed them to my boyfriend, my job and my backpack. I quit my job working with high school dance teams. I did not go to school. I joined Zoom meetings. I studied.
Across the country, my parents asked me to come home. I felt lifeless and alone in my cheap college apartment. My friends went back to class, someone else took my spot on the sidelines of sports games, and my school’s newspaper continued to publish without my name on the bylines. The community I’d forged so eagerly after the isolation of my high school years kept going, even as I was driven away.
Now it is nearly midterms. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is migrating away and I will have my first day of school weeks into the semester. I will apply to newsrooms post graduation with no published stories about ICE except my own, and tour apartments with tighter security. Things are normal at my mid-sized liberal arts university, as if nothing happened. As if it will never happen again, and as if this is not the second time being Asian has been a liability.
I will graduate having attended some of my senior year of college. Mostly I will have studied.
Evan Neubauer can be reached at neub6662@stthomas.edu
