The Life under the Covid in Milan 1/3

    It's been about two years since the Corona outbreak. I feel like I need to write about what I felt before those memories pass away completely because I experienced it in Italy and that makes it more precious.

　I think it was around December 8, 2019, when the corona outbreak was reported, or it is the time when I was eating Indonesian noodles for breakfast everyday remembering Japan, but one of my friends told me not to eat them every day, so I stopped it. On the time, I thought that the coronavirus was just a seasonal influenza that would soon subside. The common name for coronavirus was Wuhan pneumonia.

            Indomie, the Indonesian noodle

　The fact that it happened in a country far away from Milan did not mean that it had nothing to do with me but it had a great impact. It was a problem related to racist behavior toward Asians. From the time I found out that the source of the corona was China, there were reports of incidents related to racist issues in the West, but I thought such problems would not happen to me because Corona was called Wuhan pneumonia, and Chinese people were the targets of discrimination. However, this perception was a mistake. 

   I rarely ignore the distinction between Chinese and Japanese and think of them as a single group but for many people, especially those who lack a sense of internationalism, the term Chinese refers to a group of people who have faces like Chinese people whether they are Japanese, Korean, other people from Asia or not. It is easy to imagine that for Japanese people, the word "Western" lumps together people in the Americas and people in Europe. As if to remind me of this Western understandings about Asia , I was often called Chinese in Italian, cursed, and felt as if I was being kept at a distance on the subway. I wasn't aware of the distance between me and others on the subway before the Corona outbreak, so I didn't have any way to compare the two accurately. Even it was safer and more comfortable to be kept at a distance not to be infected

　In addition to these external factors, some people, including myself, were overly sensitive to the issue of racial discrimination because it was frequently covered in the news and on social medias, and this internal factor may have made us more likely perceive other people's attitudes as discriminatory. At any case, this kind of racial discrimination was the most important concern in the immediate aftermath of the Corona outbreak.

　By the way, at the same time, I saw the news that there was a racist problem against Chinese people in Japan. It is interesting to note that although there are many cultural differences between Europe, the US and Japan, they all share the same unfortunate tendency to act in a racist manner in emergency situations to cope with fears of the unknown, or to find acceptable reasons for such occurrences.

　It's not that Corona established the racism, it's that these feelings have existed in people's minds, but they didn't usually express themselves so overtly. However, as soon as the reason which sounds plausible for them was established, many people unconsciously thought that they could start it openly.

Ref:https://indomie.com.au/products