A Reflective Memorial Wall on NYT
Author: Joey Yang-Li (UCA member)
May 24th, 2020
Today’s cover page of the New York Times became a memorial wall, inscripted with names of 1000 victims to the coronavirus. But that is only 1% of the nearly 100,000 people who we lost to the deadly epidemic; it would take 100 cover pages like that to print their names. On the dedicated web page, it takes forever to scroll to the bottom of a very, very, very long list of human figures.
They are not simply statistics. We didn’t just have an epidemic that claimed nearly 100,000 lives; what we witnessed was the tragic event called “death of a beloved human being” happened nearly 100,000 times in the past 4 months. “They are us”, as the editorial said.
The practice of focusing on individual people may have begun 40 years ago, when Maya Lin, a Chinese American architect, then a 21-year-old junior at Yale, designed the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. The V-shaped wall contains 58,000 names on its reflective surface of black slates, extending over 500 feet. Each name belongs to someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s husband, someone’s love. As you walk along the wall, it gradually sinks into the ground, while a sense of solemnness gradually rises up from the bottom of heart.
Her design forever changed how people perceive the statistics of large scale. As numbers create numbness in people’s mind, it is the names that wake up their feeling. The wall is reflective, physically and figuratively.
Memorial Day is a day of patriotism. Traditionally, people come together to mourn over the men and women fallen during the wars, in defence of the country and the people. People would leave flowers and flags in front of the memorials and white crosses, the government buildings would lower their flags, and the President would address the nation at the Arlington Cemetery and lay wreaths. Yet this time, people can only attend virtually.
Patriotism is not an abstract concept. It is towards the people. As Maya explained the meaning about her design, the memorial wall is apolitical: it is a memory of the individuals, rather than a mere event. As you read the names and touch the inscriptions, you can feel the pain, which is undeniably real. We must accept the reality of pain and loss, and then heal and prevent.
On one hand, the pandemic is a war. It is a war faced not just by the United States, but by the entire human race. Our common enemy is the invisible enemy called SARS-Cov-2 that does not distinguish nationality, race, age, and belief. It is a war on species level.
But on the other hand, when we resort to wartime terminology, we subconsciously project the energy of doubt, division, and defence towards each other. Our quarrels along arbitrary borders of all kinds have been detrimental to the desperately needed collaboration and consolation. The loss of the lives is indeed “incalculable”, as the NYT cover’s title line states. It is apolitical.
Other numbers are also surreal: the nearly 40,000,000 job losses, the creation of new world “trillionaire”, the national debt of 25 trillion, and the number of retail stores and small businesses that went out of business…
Our society runs on the back of the essential workers, a fact that is conspicuous during this current COVID-19 epidemic: the delivery drivers, the supermarket workers, the nurses and caregivers, and people working in daycare centers and vegetable farms… Not everyone can enjoy the safety and luxury of working from home and getting things done in Zoom meetings. These are the people that brave the risks to work and provide. Not only do they have no other choice but to face the challenge, but they also contribute to the society in doing so. They are patriots and warriors during this epidemic.
It makes sense that the society takes care of these members among us. Stimulus policies have been proposed and adopted, and more are still being debated. The concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI), recently advocated by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s platform, has been deemed rational, practical, and humanistic — so as the distribution of shared wealth as the result of industrial evolution.
As fellow citizens, we should also do our own part to take care of each other: keep social distancing, patron local business, support the financially challenged, and promote facts over fantasy. This is not political; this is out of empathy of humanity. Let us accept the reality of pain and loss, and let the energy of bravery, compassion, and tolerance be the guiding voice, as we reflect upon this virtual Wall of Memorial.
United Chinese American (UCA) is a nationwide nonprofit and nonpartisan federation and a community civic movement, inspired and dedicated to enriching and empowering Chinese American communities.
