The StOries Project has sought to ‘contaminate’ the academic discourse with personal stories. Any dictionary will tell you that when a substance or place is contaminated, it is suffused with dirty or otherwise harmful chemicals. We invoke the verb contaminate for two purposes. First, we want readers to keep in mind that the stories in this anthology emerged in a period in which hygiene is paramount, and viral contamination has proved to be difficult to contain despite border closures globally, bans on social gatherings, and stringent rules about isolation. Secondly, we would like to point at a divergence from the hygienic language of social scientific research. Rather, the contributions to this volume come through and share the lived experiences of immigrants to Canada. Inspired by evocative narratives such as The Wounded Storyteller (2013) by Arthur W. Frank and Narrative Power (2019) by Ken Plummer, the COVID-19 experience section of the anthology foregrounds the StOries Project participants` reflections on the early days of global pandemic. The authentic voice of the “I” claims the central stage in many of these contributions. The authors, our colleagues from the StOries Project, regard creative writing as a mode of inquiry into the lived experience.

As previously clarified in this edited collection, the StOries Project invited a group of graduate students and recent alumni of different disciplinary backgrounds, and with interest in exploring their personal and family stories of migration, to share their experiences through storytelling and creative writing. Furthermore, ten of us also shared their pandemic stories. Each of these pandemic stories will appear after this introduction.

While there is no dearth of literature on migration and immigration, this project proposes a unique contribution to the migration literature because it foregrounds the voices of immigrants and their lived experiences in Canada. Some of us arrived in Canada as adults; a few others came as children or in teenage years. In this sense, some of us are 1.5 generation (Rumbaut, 2004). We intertwine memories of lived experience in the home country with those accumulated in Canada. The rest of us are second-generation immigrants who were born to immigrant parents in Canada. Our identities are shaped by both our respective home countries. We pick some aspects of each culture we associate ourselves with depending on the social context and our emotional needs to continuously (re)construct our identities, in a manner reminiscent of Nagel’s (1994) “shopping cart metaphor.”

The StOries Project has enabled us to write our own stories from our own perspectives contrary to the mainstream top to down approach in academic discourse. In other words, we have had the opportunity to “recover our own stories” instead of looking for traces of our lives and stories in discourses written for us by populist researchers, demographers, and academics (Smith, 2021, p. 43). Agreeing with Said (1979) that knowledge is power, we stand against representations and discourses about us which are constructed by mainstream society, the media, and other institutions.

In the StOries Project, our voices are a tool of resistance against mainstream representations of us through talking back, writing back and storying back (hooks, 1989; Smith, 2021). We deconstructed dominant narratives about us in our weekly discussions and in our writings. Nevertheless, this is not a total rejection of all scholarly research. Rather, as Smith (2021) notes in her ground-breaking Decolonizing Methodologies, “it is about centering our concerns and world views” (p. 43). The process of writing our stories is a part of the decolonization process, which has empowered us and freed our stories from the dominant narratives. Manipulation of knowledge is one of the central sites of colonisation as well as the appropriation of lands and resources (Mayblin & Tuner, 2021, p. 3). Hence, decolonization in this context refers to a renewed process of knowledge production by the owners of stories in this book.

Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also illuminate our methodological path by their collaborative storytelling and moving away from the sanitised language of academic writing in Rehearsals for Living (Maynard & Simpson, 2022). Through the intimate voice in letter writing, Black activist, writer, and scholar Maynard and Indigenous activist, artist, and writer Simpson confront the most pressing topics ranging from climate change to colonialism and its global aftermaths to the pandemic. They blur the generic line of epistolary writing with intensive sociological inquiry to not only register, but also offer a staunch critique of, ongoing inequities; their accounts of the lived experience and cogent argumentation are backed up with extensive research.

Speaking as two non-Black and non-Indigeneous scholars, as allies, we are taking the responsibility of reading, listening to, and learning (from) their stories and standing against oppressive systems. We admit that we may not perceive anti-Black and anti-Indigenous power structures as clearly as they do. We can only aspire to remain critical thinkers and benefit from their insights in our everyday lives. We are grateful to live as two uninvited guests upon the traditional territories of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Îyârhe Nakoda, Tsuut’ina and Métis Nations (Esra) and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Anishinabek Nation (Ozlem). However, we are writing with deep gratitude, interlaced with a certain degree of trepidation, to those who enabled our being here and writing ourselves into existence on these pages. We also sit uncomfortably at the border of the Black/White binary for we are considered neither entirely white nor ‘proper’ Black or Brown persons according to Canada’s stratified racial identity system. Therefore, the insights we gleam from Rehearsals for Living bear traces of hesitation. We aim to progress with care.

The StOries Project was very timely. During the peak of the global pandemic, we built a virtual community. We were invited to break our silence and share our stories in a safe space. Although each story in this compilation is an individual entry, they cannot be defined solely as individual pieces. These stories were written during our weekly discussions, and they contain ideas and comments from our ongoing conversations. These stories would be different had we written them without our collaborative storytelling. In an environment like that, not only did we write about our immigration stories but also our pandemic experiences.

Participants in the StOries Project are cognizant that the COVID-19 pandemic has had differential impacts on different groups, both highlighting and exacerbating deep pre-existing social inequities. Two groups which have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic are racialized persons and recent immigrants. Acknowledging the fact that we are among the privileged in a sense that we were able to isolate during the first phases of the pandemic, we feel part of the immigrant and racialized communities.

Statistical data show that racialized groups from lower income backgrounds have been hit harder by the pandemic (Ahmed et al., 2021; Cheung, 2020; Choi et al., 2021; Government of Canada, 2021; Hawthorn, 2021). They are more prone to infection because they are heavily concentrated in low-income and precarious jobs, where they are likely to encounter others (Government of Canada, 2021). For instance, whereas people of colour comprise half of Toronto’s population, they made up 83% of the total COVID-19 cases as of July 30, 2020 (Cheung, 2020). Similar to the United States and United Kingdom, Black people in urban settings are more likely to be infected by COVID-19 (Choi et al., 2021). To illustrate, while they make up only 9% of Toronto’s population, 21% of the total reported COVID-19 cases constituted Black Torontians (Cheung, 2020). Black women are one of the most affected groups because they are heavily concentrated in the care industry as personal support workers (Ahmed et al., 2021). The early data make clear that the slogan “We are in this together” does not encompass the racially and socioeconomically underprivileged segments of society.

Furthermore, reports have shown that recent immigrants are under a relatively high risk of COVID-19 related mortality because they predominantly work in essential industries and live in overcrowded dwellings (Neusteater, 2021). To illustrate, Yasin Dabeh, a Syrian refugee working as a cleaner in a long-term care centre, died soon after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 (Lamberink, 2021). Obviously, some groups do not have the luxury to work from home and isolate themselves during the pandemic.

Some, including politicians, explain higher viral infection levels among immigrants with reference to their culture. When London mayor, Ed Holder, argued that elevated viral spread in immigrant communities are a result of large social gatherings in certain ethnic communities, his culturalist explanations overlooked systemic barriers; as a result, he got caught into a simplistic, superficial explanation instead of highlighting systemic problems (Dubinski, 2020). Evidence suggests that vulnerabilities particular groups face under the pandemic are indeed grounded in systemic issues, which have to be addressed by public policies. For instance, if some structural problems including the ongoing affordable housing crisis were addressed and the working conditions of precarious workers were improved, these kinds of disasters would harm these groups significantly less. Obviously, this global crisis is not the first and will not be the last. These disasters are predicted to repeat more often under intensifying climate change and increased enmeshment in the global capital economy.

Another group that is particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, largely neglected in discussions which prioritise protecting Canadians, is the seasonal agricultural workers. Migrant farmworkers have faced increased risks of susceptibility to the virus not because they are frailer as a group but because they live in overcrowded living conditions with limited access to proper sanitation, healthcare services, and vaccines when they became available to the other segments of society (Haley et al., 2020). We have to be aware that seasonal agricultural workers are essential for sustainable food production in Canada. The Canadian agricultural industry heavily relies on migrant workers. Their lives are put under risk to put food on our tables when we have a luxury to isolate. Caxaj et al. (2022) reported that nine migrant workers lost their lives after contracting with the COVID-19 in Ontario between January 2020 and June 2021. The same study found that there was no standard oversight in health monitoring, quarantine, and case isolation processes on Canadian farms. In addition, the researchers noted that there was no training for migrant workers who did not know how to access health services. Therefore, the COVID-19 outbreaks at on-farm worksites were hardly surprising: these outbreaks, along with the general health and safety risks among migrant farm labourers, were an indication of their tenuous links to Canada through temporary foreign worker status (Vosko & Spring, 2021). Their deportability, that is, the actual and threatened removal from the territory, has always disempowered migrant farmworkers (Basok et al., 2014; De Genova, 2019; Nyers, 2018). However, the recent pandemic has further exacerbated their situation.

Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has posed aggravated threats to persons in poorly ventilated carceral spaces including immigration detention centres. While managing to maintain its more benevolent image in contrast to its southern neighbour, Canada is dotted with immigration detention centres and carceral environments used as detention centres, sometimes confronting migrants with indeterminate incarceration periods due to Canada’s failure to adopt maximum time limit (Chak, 2014; Silverman & Molnar, 2016). Since early 2020, the policies aiming to curb the spread of the virus within carceral institutions resulted in considerable distress and harm for the incarcerated and their loved ones. Migrant detainees in a Montreal detention centre went on hunger strike for fear of the COVID-19 (Serebrin, 2021). Likewise, detainee women at the Leclerc detention centre in Laval, Quebec, complained that being in isolation for the COVID-19 meant that they were “in lockdown 24/7, deprived of showers, medication and changes of clothing for days on end, despite assurances from the Public Security Ministry that inmates’ needs are being met’‘ (MacLellan, 2022). All these data confirm that the early perception that the COVID-19 would have a uniform impact on everyone, as echoed in “We are in this together,” has proved itself wrong. Racialized low-income essential workers, recent immigrants, migrant workers, and persons in detention knew all along that we most certainly are not in the same boat.

What about our colleagues in the StOries Project? This section introduces some of our friends’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The texts they share with readers here respond to a set of questions: “How did we take the global pandemic?” “How did it affect our everyday lives?” “How did we cope with the restrictions?” The submissions demonstrate a generic variety ranging from poems to short stories, to journal entries and critical reflections.

The narratives spotlight the strategies for reflexivity on both the experience of being in enclosed spaces with virtual windows to the exterior of our immediate familial social bubble and the compromised productivity under these circumstances. Overall, these snippets are personal accounts of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected us; they are also bold conversations about our personal desires to continue amid fears for our own health and that of the loved ones. These stories emerged in our weekly virtual gatherings, where we revealed pieces of our lives, fears, and hopes for the future. The section below may best be approached as documents of life in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We embrace storied lives and lived experience as research (Adams et al., 2015). We invite you, readers, to immerse yourselves in the ecology of personal narratives that both experiment with various literary genres and are of sociological importance.

Many of the texts are autoethnographic. Such narratives consider the speaking subject’s life experience in relation to and within the context of sociocultural institutions and networks. As Green (Flemons & Green, 2002, p. 166) notes, writing autoethnography is, in essence, “an outing process” where the teller outs themselves knowingly and unwittingly. Paraphrasing Jones, Adams, and Ellis (2013), Denzin (2014, n.p.) defines the genre as follows:

Autoethnography is the use of personal experience and personal writing to (1) purposefully comment on/critique cultural practices; (2) make contributions to existing research; (3) embrace vulnerability with purpose; and (4) create a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response.

The narrative self in autoethnography boasts, hesitates, stutters. Writing out oneself can be interpreted as a heroic activity or a therapeutic/healing practice. Nevertheless, this performative research enquiry/method asks one—the observer and the observed at the same time—to embrace vulnerability because it requires weaving in and out of one’s real life more than one does in traditional research writing, which might be very uncomfortable (Custer, 2014). Public airing of life events may also have implications for professional identity and personal relationships as demonstrated in Jago’s (2002) account of her depression as a junior academic. The teller needs to decide not only what stories to tell and how to represent the self in those narratives but also what to withhold from the reader.

Telling intimate personal, and often emotional, tales of lived experience can be wounding (Chatham-Carpenter, 2010; Ellis, 1999). The “systematic sociological introspection and emotional recall” entails “enter[ing] and document[ing] the moment-to-moment, concrete details of life” (Ellis, 1999, p. 671). Such self-examination is bound to reveal emotional pain, personal fears, and self-doubts, thereby making the researcher/storyteller vulnerable on at least two levels. The vulnerability of consciously dealing with a painful experience while one is probing it deeper accompanies the dangers of opening the self to readers` scrutiny and criticism (Ellis, 2007, 2020; Jago, 2002). Behar (1997) warns against unnecessary exposure of the self when she writes, “Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes” (p. 13). The decision to expose the self (and the significant others) “has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative exposure for its own sake” (pp. 13–14). Allen-Collinson (2013) agrees that self-disclosure must accompany “some degree of self-discipline or self-monitoring, and … careful premeditation” in order to circumvent potential tangible costs of revealing too much of oneself (p. 284).

Physical and social distancing during the multiple COVID-19 pandemic-related stay-at-home orders exacerbated the feelings of loneliness and heightened the need for a listener. On the one hand, we felt the urge to share, or else reckon with the experience. The participants of the StOries Project knew the “hunger for human affection” (Jago, 2002, p. 737). On the other hand, the fear of being dismissed or judged was overwhelming because stories have the power to define and constrain the storied self. The “I” on the paper becomes “the one who…” in listeners` and readers` regard. The contributors had to reconcile the questions such as “Who would be interested in hearing about the fearful self?” “To what end am I telling this story?” “Am I too self-indulgent to take the pen and recount how I feel?” and “Am I exposing my listeners—fellow participants in the StOries Project and now readers—to too much of my life?” The accounts below are intimate tales by junior or emerging researchers, so they carry a degree of hesitance that Kennedy (2020) shares in their article as a doctoral candidate and emerging scholar. There were moments when some of us were at a loss as to what stories to share and how, worrying that the stories we yearn to part with may not be worthwhile or that they may tap into our inner selves and reveal too much about us, rendering the speaking “I” vulnerable not only while telling the story but also when the shared story becomes public.

Personal narratives may also be the stories of others who figure in the stories we tell about ourselves. In autoethnography, ‘my’ story becomes also the story of family members and friends, thus bringing about ethical concerns. The narratives about ‘my’ COVID-19 experience are interwoven with others` stories. Ellis (2007) introduces the notion of “relational ethics’‘to capture the importance of due diligence when representing others in one’s own story. Therefore, during our weekly meetings and the drafting stages of these entries for the anthology, we needed to consider how we may represent others within our personal narratives without causing harm to these represented others. The central question has never been how to use others` stories to be able to tell our own (Wall, 2008); it has been a narrative construction of interpersonal relationships within less sociable times (Bochner & Ellis, 1995). Allen-Collinson (2013) recommends two strategies to better address ethical concerns stemming from relationality in autoethnographic writing: to not finalise the stories of others and to converse with the others, including the audience, instead of saying the last word. Bearing this astute advice in mind, we also want to adopt a relational language by addressing the reader, you, in the second person and hope to create an ongoing author-reader dialogue. Hence, we insist that each entry represents a perspective not the definitive word. We hope that our collaborative pool of autoethnographic voices illustrates ways of ethical storytelling that overcomes some of the limitations inherent in placing the relational self at the centre stage (Lapadat, 2017). 

At the beginning of the pandemic, the confinement imposed by the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders pushed everyone to be more creative. Inventive social projects ranged from physically distanced communal dance sessions (Murray, 2020) to collaborative creative projects such as “the Pandemic Journaling Project” co-founded by Willen and Mason (2020) and research writing over WhatsApp and Google docs (Bolander & Smith, 2021), turning the distressing time of uncertainty into “boom times” for qualitative inquiry (Rosenwald, 2020). Bolander and Smith (2021) praised the indirect benefits of virtual collaboration. The gains Willen and Mason (2020) listed included insights into how different people experienced the pandemic and the positive impact of weekly journaling on the participants` mental health. It seemed that each of us was developing their own versions of coping mechanisms in the face of the pandemic. These endeavours were expressions of our craving for the social and physical presence of others. In addition, many researchers explored the potentials of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) in these methodologically challenging times (e.g., Godber & Atkins, 2021; Guy & Brittany, 2020; Lupu, 2021; Roy & Uekusa, 2020). Whereas autoethnography entails the inquiry of the self and reflective interpretations of the self’s feelings and thoughts within the context of family, work, and other societal institutions, CAE focuses on shared experiences, prioritises learning from one another (Blalock & Akehi, 2018), and entails engaging in collective research and writing in pairs or teams (Chang, 2008, 2013; Chang et al., 2016; Ellis, 2007; Hernandez et al., 2017; Ngunjiri et al., 2010). Whether written individually or collectively, autoethnography intimately connects life to research.

The StOries Project was one of those innovative endeavours that aimed to reverse the adverse impacts of the pandemic on research through collective thinking and producing. The participants responded to a set of questions provided by the facilitator group during each meeting. Once the weekly sessions came to an end, we (Esra and Ozlem) invited our colleagues to share their COVID-19 entries with us, ten of whom responded to our calls with enthusiasm. We made the writing process of this introduction very transparent through sharing drafts in a folder open to everyone’s comments, empowering each other by sharing thoughts and sources, posing questions, and offering suggestions. In addition, in perfect alignment with the central tenet of CAE, our introduction is the product of collaboration and openness that pivoted towards community building, power-sharing, and the enrichment of the research (Chang et al., 2016).

The personal contributions in the following pages also show that autoethnography most definitely allows one to move beyond personal accounts of one’s immediate familial circle. They are proof that this method builds a bridge between the personal accounts and the socio-political context (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). In his ground-breaking book, The Sociological Imagination, Mills (2000) says, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (p. x). Hence, in each personal story of this collection, there are some public issues of concern. The themes emerge in these stories are motherhood, transnationalism, globalisation, immigration, belonging, the Covid-19 and academic lives, crisis management and reckoning with deep inequalities during the pandemic.

Motherhood emerges as a central theme in various works. Some of the stories in this section can be read through the intensive mothering ideology which was developed by feminist theory in North America. As Arendell (2000, p. 1194) observes, the intensive mothering ideology dictates mothering to be exclusively child-centred, emotionally involving and time-consuming” and to build their identities around their children. In this view, “The mother is devoted to the care of others; she is self-sacrificing and “not a subject with her own needs and interests” (Bassin et al., 1994, p. 2). Mothers are called upon to be the first in meeting their children’s needs, including comforting them emotionally. Furthermore, the pandemic has certainly exacerbated the expectations put on mothers’ shoulders. Working mothers have juggled work and family during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although their workload has not been reduced, their care activities have intensified at home. Children’s staying at home has brought about additional responsibilities. Some mothers have felt the burden even more because of their intersecting identities. It was first Crenshaw (1991) who highlighted the intersections of race and gender to grasp the unique experiences of Black women. Neither race nor gender has explanatory power on its own to account for the marginalisation of racialized women (Andersen & Hill-Collins, 2010). In this vein, multiple aspects of identities interlock and inform the everyday experiences of most women.

Esra Ari, addresses the challenges that came with becoming a new mother under lockdown circumstances. “My 2020 Pandemic Summer: Long Days of Mothering” features an immigrant mother who is also a junior academic. Ari feels that the pandemic compounded the insurmountable task of caring for the youngest member of her immigrant household under lockdown conditions. She expresses her helplessness and frustration by pointing at the absence of institutional support mechanisms in place due to the closure of daycares as well as the lack of familial support through grandparents` visits, which came to a halt for her due to border closures for non-urgent international travel. Ari confesses: “I could not soothe my son. I could not put him to sleep, and I was agitated all the time. I felt like I was a failure at mothering.” Ari’s reflection also holds a mirror to being a junior academic with a temporary job contract. Research has shown that having children has a negative impact on women’s academic careers (Minello et al., 2021; Parlak et al., 2021). Ari undercores that the pandemic has compounded the difficulties for women academics, especially the ones who hold a precarious position in a competitive job market. The reflection conveys its author’s existential terror about losing one’s job (Blustein & Paige, 2020). Spending a day with your baby is considered “unproductive” in the academic world. This has created a constant anxiety for Ari about her future career trajectories, similar to other female scholars during the pandemic (Blithe et al., 2022; Minello et al., 2021; Buckinx et al., 2022). Intersectional approach, thus, becomes fundamental to have a deeper grasp of the pandemic on women academics, whose social class, gender, immigration, and race intersect to exacerbate the impact of the global pandemic. Similar to Guy and Brittany (2020), who reflect on their dual roles as mothers to newborns and academics at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, Ari writes that the much-sought-after time to do research was elusive with the arrival of her son. Ari’s reflection reminds us that even boredom was a luxury for some of us when the pandemic quarantine forced everyone to shelter home with babies and teaching duties.

Natasha Damiano’s poem “Believe Me, I had Covid” touches on being sick as a single mother. The speaking subject in the poem is with her sick daughter. While she is expected to care for and soothe her daughter, there is no one around to reassure the mother. The woman is standing with “limbs as heavy as death” in the corridors of a COVID-19 emergency clinic. A paramedic’s “make sure you sleep in separate bedrooms” advice meets with the woman’s class-conscious retort: “that is, if you have them.” Damiano points at a bald fact: many single mothers cannot afford sufficient accommodation; some are forced to ‘choose’ cohabitation with other mothers to share childcare duties and accommodation costs (Edin & Lein, 1997; Canadian Women’s Association, n.d.). The mother in Damiano’s poem feels abandoned by the system. She addresses our need for reassurance in times of sickness and uncertainty. The doctor is dismissive of her pain. “It sounds like you want reassurance” insists she, unmoved by the patient’s recount of pain. Damiano’s question “who cares for the caregiver?” reminds that perennial puzzle: who looks after the caregiver? Who reassures the single mother, who is indispensable for the material and psychological wellbeing of the child when the mother herself is sick? Being called on to provide primary care to their sick children brings individuals high emotional burdens. By foregrounding a single mother’s voice, Damiano insists that a comprehensive response to the COVID-19 pandemic must encompass the basic social needs of caregivers.

Another theme explored in the COVID-19 stories section is transnationalism. Basch et al. (1994) define transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (p. 7). Some argue that transnationalism can be liberatory for immigrants (Faist & Bilecen, 2019; Portes, 2003; Vertovec, 2009; Viruell-Fuentes, 2006). Immigrants marginalised by the rest of the society because of the physical and cultural differences turn to their collective memories of home, which creates a refuge to soothe their insecurities in a new land (Allahar, 2001). Transmigrants thus never break their ties with their home, whether real or imagined, through their transnational activities such as regular contact with their friends and relatives and visits to their origin country (Kemppainen et al., 2020). In this sense, these transnational activities are strategic tools to adapt to their new homes (Viruell-Fuentes, 2006).

Sadaf Khajeh tells how the pandemic has hit her in “Putting My Longing into Perspective.” Khajeh is an immigrant in Canada and she longs for her country. This longing for Iran was already there before the COVID-19, but the global disease made it worse, bringing borders closures and ban on international travel except for emergencies. Khajeh is one of millions who cannot go back home and spend time with the beloved. She puts her thoughts eloquently when she writes, “Before the pandemic, acknowledging my longing for Iran meant saving and planning for a trip back home; during the pandemic acknowledging my longing meant dwelling with the thought of possibly not seeing my beloved for another month, year, or even years.” Khajeh’s story reveals how the pandemic has disrupted some of immigrants` coping strategies.

Also indexing transnational existence, Ozlem Atar’s “One Cup at a Time” focuses on familial bonding and responsibilities across national borders during the pandemic. Atar’s obsessive scanning of Turkish media outlets for the COVID-19 news in the early days of the pandemic and her critical appraisal of the Turkish state’s harsh response to whistleblowers can be explained by the term “migrant transnationalism” (Vertovec, 2009). Her academic calendar urges Atar to fulfil the requirements of her responsibilities as a graduate student in Canada, yet Atar’s thoughts and feelings anchor her firmly in her transcontinental country. The personal, the familial, and the societal are interlocked with the global in her chronicle of 2020.

Atar is a female member of what is termed transnational family. While transnational families are not a new formation, the term is proposed to capture kinship relations among family members who are separated by national borders (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002/2020; Baldassar et al., 2007a, b). Contemporary transnational families continue to be virtually present in each other’s lives and retain a sense of belonging and familyhood through audiovisual technology (Baldassar, 2008; Baldassar et al., 2014, 2016). In Atar’s contribution, the fear of losing her mother emerges as a central theme. She mentions emotionally challenging conversations with her mother in the first few months of the pandemic. Each day during the daughter’s lunch hour, the two women sit at the opposite ends of the line. Atar’s mother is not in the best of health. Her daughter wishes to improve the mother’s emotional well-being, yet she finds the familial obligations of caregiving taxing on her psychological health. The pandemic claims the sick woman’s friends and leads to a fear of not being able to see her daughter again. This fear, however, opens up some unexplored opportunities for them to reconnect and converse about intimate familial topics.

Caregiving for elderly and frail parents is often investigated in national contexts. In rural Türkiye, daughters and daughters-in-law are expected to take on a stereotypically feminine caregiving role for ageing parents and physical proximity is assumed to be a precondition for effective caregiving (Bora, 2021; Özateş, 2015). Atar’s desire to address her mother’s increasing care needs from an insurmountable physical and emotional distance urges us to carefully consider transnational caregiving practices during the pandemic (Baldassar et al., 2016). Atar’s efforts, through contacting a journalist and a hotline, to confront subpar caregiving services in a medical institution despite the distance between Canada and Türkiye reminds us that physical borders are increasingly irrelevant when it comes to reciprocity and familial obligations. Lastly, Atar implies that one way to overcome personal mental distress during the first year of the pandemic was possible for her by nourishing her body and soul with the familiar: Turkish folk music and tea seem like Atar’s chosen remedies.

Arun’s Rajavel’s “My COVID Diary” provides readers with sharp criticism of capitalism and global inequality in relation to the pandemic. The global capitalist system offers limited opportunities to wage earning masses across the world (Sklair, 2003). The COVID-19 exacerbated existing class inequities alongside its gendered and racialized characteristics. Working class people who do not have the luxury to isolate themselves are hit hardest by the pandemic. Frontline workers such as personal support workers and cashiers at the groceries have been more likely to contract the virus. There have been efforts to disguise the unequal system when many happily marched under the banner of “We are all in this together” during the first days of the pandemic (Harvey, 2020). As a response to this rhetoric, Arun says:

We quickly realised how naïve we were and how poorly informed our thinking was, fed on a plethora of cheesy Hollywood movies, where, during alien invasions, the entire world comes together, and love, the one element that aliens supposedly lack, ultimately triumphs. We came to an understanding that those were just movies. Fiction. In real life, however, we are a species who thrive by othering our neighbours.

Rajavel’s disillusionment is met with deliberate optimism in Alka Kumar’s “When a Hug Could be a Death Sentence: Living in the Age of COVID-19.” Kumar opens her memory with a ‘sidenote’ to her earlier observations of the 2020 pandemic days. “Unprecedented times” was one expression deployed to define those early moments. Unprecedented in the sense that we had never gone into all-in lockdowns globally, making our streets look like post-apocalyptic empty spaces, the likes of which one sees in post-apocalyptic Hollywood movies. Kumar conveys this sense of the unprecedented when she writes “as though a completely new template were in use” and “We are much less grounded in certainties.” Kumar’s synchronous account (in the sense writing is happening when the pandemic is taking place rather than recollections of the early pandemic days we read in Atar’s piece) can be read with reference to Beck’s notion of “risk society.” Beck (1992) argues that modernity and the new technologies embedded in the production processes have backfired on societies and produced uncertainties and uncontrollable consequences. Communities in different parts of the world are now united by “an increasing vulnerability to risk” (Ekberg, 2007, p. 343). We are much more exposed to human made, and sadly uncontrollable, catastrophes such as health risks and environmental disasters than ever. While it is dubious how the COVID-19 emerged, it has traversed the globe so quickly. No country could prevent its spread among their populations and according to the World Health Organisation, COVID-19 related death tolls exceeded six and a half million as of 30 September 2022. Our lives have transformed incredibly under the lockdowns although this does not change the fact that certain groups are more privileged: they can afford to stay and work from home, thus evading the risks associated with crowded public transport and workspaces where essential workers find themselves on a daily basis. Kumar does not communicate a disillusionment with the system; she communicates the perplexity of the early days. However, she does not lose her hope in humanity. On the contrary, she sees the positive:

while we’re socially apart from our family and friends, terrified of human contact for fear of contracting this deadly virus, we have never felt closer to each other in the acute awareness we now have of our shared humanity, and the vulnerabilities that come with that. Neighbours who lived on the same street for years but barely knew each other; and complete strangers too, are taking initiative, shopping for groceries and delivering cooked food to the elderly and those less able to take care of themselves.

Kumar embraces the newfound comradery among neighbours nourishing on our “shared humanity” and common vulnerability to the virus. She underlines that solidarity emerges in moments of crisis to sustain us.

Chelsea Nyomi Richards’s “In a Way, We’re All Connected” showcases the global aspect of pandemics. Earlier experiences have already shown how pandemics spread fast across the globe, which is one of the results of globalisation (Harvey, 2020; Carmona-Gonzales & Sanchez-Martin, 2021). Despite the different genres through which they chose to express their thoughts about the pandemic, Rajavel, Kumar, and Richards converse eloquently with each other. While Arun and Alka deconstruct the slogan “We are all in this together” and indeed reveal how the pandemic has unveiled and exacerbated inequalities between the haves and have nots as well as the disparities among wealthy and poor nations, Richards’s perspective of “us” and “them” gradually becomes the collective “we” as the pandemic became a global problem. At first, the pandemic seems so far away from Chelsea looking out the world from a window. She observes the destruction from a sheltered place. Later on, the realisation that there is nowhere to run away seeps in. This is a global problem. The singular “I” gradually becomes the collective “we” in the poem. The “us” versus “them” divide fades. The poet urges a reckoning with our global entanglements and interconnectedness even with the persons in remote corners of the world. Richards embraces the inescapable we-ness of human beings. In a similar tone, maintaining her critical approach, Kumar still keeps her optimism, investing in the idea of “our common humanity.” Conversely, Arun ends his reflection in a pessimist tone and engages in a self-critique for not taking action for change. The speaking ‘I’ in Rajavel’s self-reflection chooses to stay in their comfort zone.

We could not help but feel the sense of urgency in the reflective I’s voice upon reading Bibi Baksh’s memory of the COVID-19 pandemic moment: “2020: The Year of Stormy Stillness.” Baksh reflects on grief over the loss of her elderly family members but also over decreased contact with the younger generations in her immediate circle. Moreover, Baksh writes herself into the temporal space of the COVID-19 as an emerging scholar who lost meaningful contact with colleagues at her university due to hasty decisions regarding immediate and long-term campus closures. Baksh’s description of the yellow tape circling the playground and the danger sign reminded us of a post-apocalyptic action film in which the male hero is charged with saving the world. But in the apocalyptic months Baksh vividly reconstructs, there is no such self-driven hero to save the world. The female protagonist looks at her immediate circle to interpret what the pandemic brought about. Baksh recounts the experience of contracting the COVID-19. What remains is “the grey fog” that covered her vision for 2 weeks. Isolation, a notorious term associated with the pandemic and precautions, takes the central stage in Baksh’s reflection. She and her partner spend time in isolation. Baksh underlies that social isolation or the involuntary loss of social contact with family and friends over an extended period has had repercussions for her productivity in a similar manner predicted by Mortazavi and colleagues (Mortazavi et al., 2020). Her account aligns well with research that links mental health, sleep disruption due to stress to concerns about the future, being away from family, and reduced social support (Agha, 2021). The remedy, Baksh suggests, was to make conscious efforts to seek contact. The StOries Project with its over 20 participants and flexible structure provided just that.

Owen Guo’s “The COVID-19 Sidebar” balances the despair we observe in Baksh’s reflection. Guo zooms in on a specific night during the early days of the pandemic. The former journalist takes us to a ‘blurry’ day in Toronto. The analogy between the breaking of his glasses and the fracture in the ordinary running of our lives is obvious. Guo, however, underlines our interdependence and optimism in the face of adversities. His humorous impressions of the day without glasses chimes well with social scientific research on the contributions of optimism to the overall well-being during the COVID-19 lockdowns (Reizer et al., 2022; Saricali et al., 2020; Umucu & Lee, 2020). Guo’s humorous account waves at research findings on stress reducing behaviour in the face of adverse incidents. Subtle in its manifestations, humour in Guo’s voice is both self-enhancing and affiliative (Martin et al., 2003). He eases his stress by turning to friends, his favourite radio show, and music; through affiliative humour, he builds rapport with the reader by detailing an incident anyone may have. He amuses his readers by consciously holding a humorous perspective on life after a momentary panic. His story presents us with two strategies to cope with adverse life events: seeking friends` support and having an optimistic outlook on life. His story of fractured glasses is both a “sidebar” and a window to understand the overall picture of the global pandemic moment.

Jenny Osorio’s short story “Five Words, or the Story of How We Lived Through 2020” maintains the upbeat tone we observe in Guo’s ‘sidebar’ musings. Osorio highlights the role of play and playfulness in crisis management. Following Proyer (2017), we understand play to be an observable behaviour which entails creativity and fun. Playfulness is understood to be a personality trait and associated with creativity (Lieberman, 1977). Play and playfulness are linked with social connectedness, which contributes to overall well-being by reducing the detrimental impact of stressful life events on physical and mental health. Strict physical distancing rules enforced globally during COVID-19 lockdown have challenged our primal instinct to socialise (Clifford et al., 2022). Play and playfulness are not only important touchstones of child development; adult play and playfulness are also recognized as a coping strategy (Tonkin & Whitaker, 2021). Humans require an intense degree of social interaction. By underlining the importance of doing activities as part of family, Osorio taps into our innate ability. She invites us to join her playful household. “The story of how we lived through 2020” is an account of the early days of the pandemic from the perspective of a toddler. “Once upon a time, when I was two years old, there was a virus,” chants our minor storyteller. Still bewildered, Juju does not seem to regret that “When the virus came to Canada and started to make people ill, they closed [his] daycare.” Instead, he rejoices at the quality time he gets to spend with his parents. Juju is generous in sharing their/his family photos. Osorio’s creative account gives voice to her son. Children’s voices are often omitted as they are not seen as mature enough to make sense of their lives (Crump & Phipps, 2013; Drummond et al., 2009). Very few studies capture children’s views on matters of importance (Alter, 2022; Lundy et al., 2021). This is even more valid when it comes to discussing serious issues such as migration and health emergencies. Juju’s perception of the pandemic shows the resilience of children in the face of the destructive effects of the pandemic. Even though it is a narrative play the author deploys to capture the first year of the pandemic, the medium Osorio has chosen reminds us that youngsters are powerful. Also, it demonstrates that Juju is too young to express an awareness of the coronavirus, its threats, and consequences. Juju, the protagonist, invites us to notice the positivity even when a disastrous wind is blowing outside his house. Osorio’s contribution also foregrounds proactive parenting during the lockdowns.

As we are bringing this introduction to an end, we desire to initiate a dialogue. We want to reiterate that our collaboration through the StOries Project and collective storying made the COVID-19 pandemic days breathable. It is our hope that the individual voices will resonate with many readers. Ellis (1999) articulates well what narratives are about, and what they are capable of doing, when she explains that:

The truth is that we can never capture experience. Narrative is a story about the past, and that’s really all fiend notes are: one story about what happened written from a particular point of view at a particular point in time for a particular purpose. …[E]very story is partial and situated. (Ellis, 1999, p. 674)

In conveying the meanings, we have attached to our COVID-19 experience, our goal was to tell a plurivocal story that readers could feel part of. In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank (2013) recommends thinking with a story instead of thinking about one. Thinking with a story. This is what we tried to achieve. The stories we tell through poetry, fiction, personal essays, and fragmented writing constructed scenes, some recalled weeks and months after the described incidents took place, emotions evoked retrospectively; others record moments as those incidents were taking place. Some deploy repetitions and fragmented narration. The authors` reliance on repetition reflects the intensity of feeling and experience and helps build that intensity textually.

Our narratives do not form a unified or coherent whole. They do not have to. They record the moment when the COVID-19 ceased to be the latest CNN news report we barely glanced at. They report when and how the pandemic entered our personal lives. They detail how we continued conducting research while physically and socially distancing from research participants, colleagues, and supervisors. They attest to an academically and methodologically challenging time. In this sense, they function like literary ethnographies. Appreciated together, they form a “a composite portrait of social and historical phenomena” (Van de Poel-Knottnerus & Knottnerus, 1994, p. 67). They reveal that days flowed into weeks; months stretched to become more than two taxing years at the time of writing this chapter introduction. We insisted that storytelling even in the time of COVID-19 must be collaborative. We would like you to think about your stories in relation to ours. We will know these personal interpretations are valid and valuable when parts of our narratives speak to and cohere with yours. We will enjoy a sense of achievement when they inspire you to converse with others about your experience.

1 My 2020 Pandemic Summer: Long Days of Mothering

By Esra Ari

When my mum came to Canada in February 2020 to help me look after my son, he was six months old. He never liked sleeping, so I felt fatigued all the time. I was back to work part-time when he was one and a half months old, and the days I was out for work were keeping me alive. I always liked to be connected with the world, which became harder after my son was born.

My mum managed to go back to Türkiye in April 2020 amidst the pandemic on a flight sent by the Turkish government. After her return, I became a full-time mother. Things got out of control. Daycares were shut down. I could not soothe my son. I could not put him to sleep. I was sleep deprived, and I was agitated all the time. I felt like I was a failure in mothering.

I was listening to comments about how people spent their time during the pandemic. Some were bored or did not know what to do. Some were happy because the pandemic slowed down their life. Some were back to nature. The bicycles were out of stock! And others were so productive without all the distractions in normal life. Whenever I listened to these comments, I felt frustrated because they had the luxury of being bored or relaxing during the pandemic. I constantly felt nervous because I was not sure when I would get back to work. My partner both worked and studied almost fifteen hours in a day, so I felt lonely and imprisoned at home. I had this constant feeling of disappointment and frustration. Not being able to work, not being able to read, not being able even to sleep…

I decided to give my son sleep training because I was so close to losing my sanity, especially after my mum returned home. It worked. There was too much crying, but it worked. My son started sleeping on his own from 7:30 pm to 6 am. It was the first time I felt like I was not that bad at mothering. Later on, at some point, I started going for long walks with my son (in his stroller). That helped us a lot. I also remember that summer 2020 was hot. Sweltering hot. And I still have sunspots on my face from those long walks under the heat.

Finally, the daycares reopened, and my son was in daycare in September 2020. I went back to work. I remember my son’s tears in his first two weeks at the daycare. Whenever I remember those moments, I feel the pain in my heart. The feeling of guilt…

2 Believe Me, I Had Covid

By Natasha Damiano Verse

Verse the doctor does her best to convince me it’s normal exhausted and breathless limbs as heavy as death “you tested negative, is that correct?” sick but not sick enough I guess “maybe you had a panic attack” yah, that happens to women panic attacks and being told it’s just a panic attack

Verse

Verse nurses assure me it’s all “perfectly normal” as though that’s a good thing still, I cannot shake it nor the god-awful memory of the cold sting the swab protruding up my nasal passage piercing my thoughts and any hope of an answer “you should have the negative results within two days” they don’t believe me

Verse

Verse I leave with my disappointment and a pamphlet, like a sacred bible with instructions for close contacts the voice of Public Health reminding me we have all the tools but none of the power

Verse

Verse at home I separate masking my face and the pain of not knowing from the sick child I must protect both silenced by fear and discomfort and the paramedic’s forewarning “make sure you sleep in separate bedrooms” that is, if you have them and if your child will sleep alone

Verse

Verse while you’re at it make sure you haul that sack of virulated bedsheets back to the laundry again if you breathe fiercely enough you might just make it back to bed before the dinner you still have to make out of a can when you parent alone and sick there are no protocols

Verse

Verse only the haunting realization that you are in this alone without witness to your grief the ear of one who might relieve your anxiety does anyone even care who cares for the caregiver? no-one, if you’re not dying you can take care of yourself

Verse

Verse until you cannot and you find yourself waiting again for the doctor whose voice betrays their mounting impatience your questions irritating the ‘one problem per visit’ mantra as you wait for something more than diagnostic assessments can provide confirming only what you already know “you did test negative, so we can cross that off the list” they still don’t believe me

Verse

Verse I feel the nameless germ roving within like a shapeshifting creature migrating through blood-swelled veins to find its new home a place to reproduce its sickly self from throat to guts to head until at last it rests in silence squeezing the world tight before my eyes with fear that this may never end or that perhaps it will, only badly unspeakable words demanding that someone else be with the suffering that I alone must bear “It sounds like you like you want reassurance” yah, you don’t say

3 Putting My Longing Into Perspective

By Sadaf Khajeh

I wonder if anyone else has felt this; I’m sure some have. Being an immigrant means having loved ones halfway across the world. I shouldn’t just say “loved ones;’ they are more than that. They are of my flesh and bones, the reason for my beating heart … my parents, cousins and best friends. I wake up every morning expecting to see a text message from my best friend, and not a single day starts for me without talking on the phone with my parents. Though the distance is hard to bear, there has always been the subtle reassurance that at any given time I can book a flight back home if I feel the distance is becoming too much to bear. This has always been the case, or I should say this was always the case until the pandemic took over the world.

With COVID-19, came limitations: airports closed and almost all countries restricted entry, and that subtle reassurance in the back of my mind disappeared altogether. Oh, how different it feels hearing your mother’s voice but not knowing when you’ll be able to see her face in person. Or planning your next visit back home but not having a single clue when it could take place or if it could ever take place. For as long as I remember, being in Canada meant longing for Iran, but the “longing” I had known all throughout my life was nothing like the one I experienced through the pandemic. Before the pandemic, acknowledging my longing for Iran meant saving and planning for a trip back home; during the pandemic acknowledging my longing meant dwelling with the thought of possibly not seeing my beloved for another month, year, or even years.

We forget what a privilege it is to know or be able to plan for the future. To go online and check ticket prices. To open our calendars and pick the perfect dates to travel back home. To talk to our loved ones about the weather and what it will be like when we come to visit, so that we can plan road trips while we’re back home. It truly is a privilege to know your family, your home and your roots are just a flight away. The pandemic, however, took that privilege away and, for a while, I felt really helpless being an immigrant with half my heart on the other side of the world, out of my reach.

4 One Cup at a Time

By Ozlem Atar

My 2020 was a long, lonely blink. When I noticed a few Asian students wearing masks late February, I thought the maskers must be exceptionally anxious folks. A new virus was bothering strangers in remote places. It hardly made any sense to be sporting a face covering when strolling downtown Kingston.

On March 13, Queen’s University suspended undergraduate classes for the week of March 16–20. I welcomed this break as a gift. The kind they call a blessing in disguise: I wanted to continue polishing my annotated bibliography. I was going to have my field exam in April, which got postponed quite a few times in the following weeks. As my supervisor put it in one of her many emails those days, “Everyone [was] figuring out what [was] happening.”

On March 19, watching the footage of a military fleet carrying coffins out of an overwhelmed Italian town froze me for a brief while. The scene was reminiscent of a war. Still not enough to make me realise that life would be in hiatus for over 2 years.

An amateur video from Türkiye was a turning point in my comprehension of the situation. Dr. Güle Çınar, an infectious disease expert, referred to cases across the country, telling those present that they were underprepared to meet the new demand the crisis posed, with over a thousand patients filling their clinic. In her view, the COVID-19 cases exceeded thousands, and the twenty-one thousand pilgrims who had recently returned from Saudi Arabia had “ruined” the situation—an explanation for which she was forced to apologise although she was sharing the facts with medical students as part of an internal training session and the video was shot and posted on social media unbeknownst to her. At that stage, the Turkish government was denying that there were any cases in the country, and those who claimed the opposite were deemed ‘traitors’ to the nation.

The video hit me hard, blurring the rest of the year. Sick with worry, I began to obsessively search for news about the spread of cases in my home country. With the state’s expansive power to censure the media and its harsh criminal defamation and antiterrorism laws that bully journalists and citizen journalists alike, there were no reports for weeks. I was safe in my one-bedroom apartment in a small Canadian city; were my parents in Türkiye?

One question bothered me most throughout the year: what if my mother contracts the virus? She spends most days in hospital for this or that medical condition. A brush with the virus when you live with poorly managed diabetes and severe kidney disease cannot be something you shrug off.

Sometime in April or May 2020, mom and I got into the habit of video conferencing around noon every day. We went over mundane events of the day. I asked about her health, my father’s work on the farm, and silently hoped she would ask how I was coping with feelings of loneliness. After all, I lived in a foreign country and the pandemic quickly eroded my quite fragile social networks. It is hard to acknowledge the desire to connect with someone when you have been physically and emotionally distanced for years.

As I heard more about my parents` concerns, my yearning for reciprocity must have faded. First, the dialysis centre called off the shuttle service that picked mom from their house in the countryside three times a week. The dialysis centre demanded that the patients arrive at the centre in their own vehicles to avoid contact with other patients. As a senior citizen, my father was ordered to shelter at home and could not risk a heavy fine for driving mom to the town centre. Then, mom was denied food and drinks during the dialysis sessions, which left her very weak.

I recall exchanging emails with a Deutsche Welle journalist based in Istanbul, hoping she might publish an editorial about my own and other kidney disease patients` grievances. Someone had to expose how private medical institutions were abusing the COVID-19 measures to rationalise budget cuts and poor service, risking patients` health. I also remember making a complaint about the dialysis centre’s approach through the Presidency’s Communication Centre (CIMER)—unusual for a sceptic of such citizen-spying channels.

As time passed and the ‘novelty’ of the pandemic subsided, mom and I began to talk about other topics that mattered to me. I asked mom about her own mother, carefully avoiding her painful death in her mid-fifties. Her husband called my grandmother Delüş, the crazy one—not a term of endearment. It was my nickname, too, when I was a kid. Feigning a casual tone, I also asked mom why she stopped coming to pick me up on Fridays when I was in boarding school just a couple of hours’ bus ride away. Our chats would reveal bits mom kept from us kids then. A hesitant, newfound intimacy developed between the two of us—two steps forward, one step back.

Losing several of her friends, all kidney patients like herself, and her sister-in-law sapped mom’s morale. She repeatedly asked, “Will I ever see you before…?” Certain words need not be said out loud. “She moved to Germany” is mom’s preferred expression when she means another friend of hers has passed away.

Our conversations often left me feeling miserable. I had to put on a cheerful face and remind myself that these conversations were never about me; they were about her. My goal was to keep mom busy. Thus passed 2020 in a long, lonely blink. Days, weeks, months …

25 October 2021 is the day of an epiphany. Life is what Aşık Veysel, the Turkish bard and saz player, called “long winding road.” You arrive. You journey. You pass. All you need to do is to face life with one cup of tea at a time, like my parents and I do when we are on hour-long video calls.

5 My COVID Diary

By Arun Rajavel

Isn’t it crazy how, during the very onset of COVID-19 pandemic, we thought that this would bring us all together? Newspapers ran opinion pieces with titles like “The Great Equaliser.” There was a rhetoric in the air that the virus affects everyone equally-- the rich and the poor alike, the haves and have-nots alike, citizens and non-citizens alike. It was indeed a time of great disillusionment. Despite the horrifying news of piling deaths and people gasping for their last breath, desperately hoping for a cure, and governments seizing the opportunity to enforce effective control of their borders and their residents’ lives, we all – or, at least, I did – had hope in our eyes: we dreamt of a fair and equal world. We imagined an equalising calamity would bring us all together; that we are in this fight together; that the virus does not discriminate and would affect us all equally; that the suffering is not just for us but the same the world over. We sought refuge in this comforting thought. But then within the first few weeks, we saw how physical distancing and access to clean water for sanitisation is impossible for a very large majority, and that these are privileges that we took for granted. Soon, we saw how the rich and the upper-middle class stocked up supplies and wiped clean supermarket shelves, depriving others of basic amenities. We saw how the world’s millionaires and billionaires made record profits, while multitudes of employees got fired and small businesses went bankrupt. We quickly realised how naïve we were and how poorly informed our thinking was, fed on a plethora of cheesy Hollywood movies, where, during alien invasions, the entire world comes together, and love, the one element that aliens supposedly lack, ultimately triumphs. We came to an understanding that those were just movies. Fiction. In real life, however, we are a species who thrive by othering our neighbours.

While this was before the invention of the vaccine, we—or, at least, I—saw scientists from the world over collaborate in pursuit of this single goal. Knowledge sharing between scientists from different countries, many of them striving to make all the information open source, government and private bodies approving huge funding, and so on, made us hopeful again. We thought that the case of glaring inequalities may be so for hospitalisations and privileged work-from-home situations, but the vaccines would once more bring everyone to safety. Humanity, as a whole, would be cured. Alas! How misguided and idealistic were we! We once again saw wealthy countries hoarding up vaccines and even wasting many of the doses as their citizens wouldn’t turn up to receive their free doses, whereas their greed, in many cases, blocked access to vaccine in/by poor countries, where people were desperate to get vaccines and were even paying for something that should have been free. It is the same “great equaliser” thinking that was thrown out the window once more.

Left with a yawning gap between the rich and the poor, aggravated even more by the onset of the pandemic, we do nothing but nurse derision for the privileged. We can do nothing but mourn collectively our failure as a society. We, as a species, don’t deserve to survive, do we? All that we can do, given all this awareness and resources, is just to lament, not commit ourselves to any tangible action, isn’t it so? This author sits in their cosy room, in front of their expensive MacBook, having enjoyed working from home throughout the pandemic, not having seen any major changes in their lifestyle and comfort—if not an increase of comfort—and laments about the state of the world. Taking a sip from their expensive white wine, they think of all this and decide to write a journal entry. What a hypocrite! And, thus, they start, “Isn’t it crazy how….”

6 When a Hug Could Be a Death Sentence: Living in the Age of COVID-19

By Alka Kumar

A Sidenote: Now, more than two years later, and currently experiencing the sixth wave of COVID-19 in Canada, the musings below—written on March 27, 2020—are a kind of time capsule from when it all began. They feel both resonant and timeless. For one, they carry me back to the experience of that early first phase of the pandemic, and they remind me of the many twists and turns that have shaped this long journey. It also feels remarkable that we have spent two years sinking and swimming inside the ebbs and flows of this historic time. History is usually about the past, but this current time seems to have become both our past and our present.

Sadly, we have lost many near and dear ones, but there is much to be grateful for….

With international borders mostly closed due to COVID-19, few planes fly in our air space now. Let’s imagine us for a moment though—you, my fellow traveller, sitting beside me in this airplane—as our plane is taking off. I’m sure that in an aerial view our new world would show up with its streets sparse and empty, not even one lost soul in sight. Chances are the world we look upon from that airplane window will seem like it’s straight out of a dystopian novel; all inhabitants socially distanced, washing their hands on loop (twenty seconds each time), and a threatening voice on the Public Address system instructing everyone on this galaxy to not touch their face. When strange things happen in life, to express the sense of incredulity we feel, we often say “truth is stranger than fiction.” Nothing could be truer or more apt when it comes to the task of describing the surreal world we’re living in today.

Think back, for example, about the familiar shape of your day when you lived in that other era prior to March 11, 2020, before the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic (World Health Organization, n.d.). Although the strange and the unscripted is our new reality, I’m sure you remember that your morning normal back then was to wake up, shower, and head to work. On your way, you would stop to grab a coffee, maybe a bagel, too. What a simple concept, so routine, so every-day, and so comforting. Although technically you can still get your coffee at a drive-through in most jurisdictions in Canada, this seems like a fine luxury now. It is also one of the few exceptions still permissible in a world that’s barely recognizable. To be honest, in these times of lockdowns in most parts of the world, COVID-19 having impacted 199 countries and one territory globally, and many countries sit on the precipice of a surge. We are much less grounded in certainties, and simple pleasures seem to belong in the realm of the unimaginable.

I don’t know about you, but the way I’m experiencing the passage of time these last few days seems to have shifted radically, too. The days seem neither shorter nor longer but just differently drawn up, as though a completely new template were in use. The pace of time, too, has somehow re-configured itself, and maybe it’s the effect of social distancing, self-isolating, what do you think? For me, I must say, as each of the old and familiar props that held us up so far fall like a house of cards, it feels like all the lights are going out one by one, and the world will soon be a dark dark place. Perhaps it is this that makes the passing of time appear at once both slow and fast? We flounder as we seem to have no matrix by which to understand this new reality.

Everything seems contradictory, too, in these COVID-19 times, a new normal being invented every day. For instance, while we’re socially apart from our family and friends, terrified of human contact for fear of contracting this deadly virus, we have never felt closer to each other in the acute awareness we now have of our shared humanity, and the vulnerabilities that come with that. Neighbours who lived on the same street for years but barely knew each other; and complete strangers too, are taking initiative, shopping for groceries and delivering cooked food to the elderly and those less able to take care of themselves.

Take the communicative act, for instance, the protocols around which have also undergone a radical shift, thanks to social distancing. I live in Toronto. With warmer weather upon us and spring in the air, one of the reprieves during this time of self-isolation has been the walks I take in the Mount Pleasant cemetery in midtown. Having been a lifelong learner and educator, I have lived and worked in two continents. Moreover, being a researcher too, I’m always interested in understanding cultures, peoples, and social behaviours. As we walk, separately and socially distantly together (two metres apart), our nods and half-smiles to our fellow walkers speak volumes. “We’re all in this together; I hope you stay safe,” we say to each other silently when our paths cross. We also hastily cross over and move to the opposite side when we see another person walking towards us. This is another new normal that everyone buys into.

I’m grateful, though, for the use of the outdoors as this provides some physical and emotional nurture. We have no idea though how long this oasis will be open for recreational purposes though, given all parks in Ontario shut down today.

Uncertainty is the word of the day. How can it not be? How can certainty survive in such marshy lands? Maybe one of the reasons for this acute sense of loss we’re experiencing is that we are in a time of heightened and mixed emotions. My days are over-run with a range of feelings that move rapidly between disbelief and sadness, confusion and anxiety, a nostalgia already for bygone times conflating with a fear of extinction. What about you? How do you feel today?

The gift of technology is another new normal that’s been embraced almost overnight by people of all ages and from every walk of life—a good reason to be optimistic. I still find it hard to believe that a few weeks ago, we were chiding our children (and ourselves) for our excessive screen time usage and social media consumption, and now suddenly we’re living in a world that’s gone fully virtual. Way beyond being about WFH—yes, of course that’s work from home, one of the key acronyms in our COVID-inspired terminology—the internet has become our go-to for social get-togethers, gym classes, music concerts, reading clubs and care-mongering groups. In fact, I wonder if a quick transition on such a massive scale may have been witnessed during any other moment in human history. Isn’t that evidence that old habits can change overnight?

Both the data and the grapevine concur on the trajectory of this pandemic. It will stay with us awhile, they say, and will most certainly leave a trail of devastation in its wake, and on all conceivable fronts. That said, I feel compelled to end on a note of hope, or else what will save us? And then why write this, or write at all?

For one, I see glimmers of optimism in some of the paradoxes of this time that I have highlighted above: our common humanity, as well as the sense of interconnectedness we share with each other. The ability to be inventive and find alternatives will push us to do things differently. Keeping sustainability front and centre of our values and our actions might help us address the climate crisis, and leave behind a healthier planet for future generations. Hopefully.

Further, in my conversations with friends and family members distributed generously across the globe, I have found us describing this global crisis as that great leveller that does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, gender, privilege, and other such markers that usually differentiate between `us’ and `them. That said, let us not fool ourselves, or forget, that in taking from those already marginalised, like the homeless and the poor, the elderly and all cohorts that are already among those more vulnerable, it strips them of all protections and with little recourse to rise again. This is not true for those with privilege. As long as they survive it, chances are they will thrive again.

Maybe one of the teachable moments here comes from our enhanced understanding of our shared humanity? Once we have this, the guiding principle of `being kind to each other’ may help us imagine how we can begin to build better together. And what about empathy? We need that too, and urgently, as it will help us enlarge our circle of care. What do you think?

7 In A Way, We’re All Connected

By Chelsea Nyomi Richards

Verse

Verse I never expected the pandemic to be this long. Two years, but it felt like more.

Verse

Verse When I first learned about the outbreaks in Asia, I had doubts that it would reach over here, in North America.

Verse

Verse December 2019, January 2020, February 2020. The months went on, the outbreaks got worse. My stance stayed the same, as I gazed through a mirror made from two-way glass. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me.

Verse

Verse I watched their struggles on the news, and I thought ‘poor them’. I recognized they were in danger, but I felt safe because I thought there was enough distance between “us” and “them”.

Verse

Verse I thought that what they were going through had nothing to do with what I was going through, or what I had to deal with, or how I was living my life. It didn’t apply to me.

Verse

Verse Until it did. Until it applied to everyone, everywhere.

Verse

Verse And it wasn’t long before I started saying. ‘We’re all in this together’. I learned that we are all connected, in some way, somehow.

Verse

Verse The actions we perform, the decisions we make, will affect someone, which will affect someone, which will affect someone…

Verse

Verse I learned that our actions travel, and that someone will feel the result of your action, somewhere, sometime.

Verse

Verse So now, I am more conscious of what I do, and what I say, because the changes I make and the energy I emit. will move around the world from object to organism, and I have no control over it, once it’s been released.

Verse

Verse We really are all in this world together and we go through experiences together, we feel the impact of previous and current generations,

Verse

Verse even if we are distanced, isolated, or far apart.

8 2020: The Year of Stormy Stillness

By Bibi S. Baksh

2020 started with a bang. An unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime bang, that causes one to stop and evaluate one’s life to gain fresh perspectives. I was excited to be at the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) conference. On March second I was inspired by scholars like Kimberly Crenshaw and Rosa Clemente, but then apprehension set in. The tornado that hit Nashville on that night will forever be etched in my memory. Continuously eerie sounds of the emergency alert system followed by incessant sirens, constant banging, and unexplained noises, made for a sleepless night that I was happy to see over until I stepped outside. The streets looked like a war zone: toppled trees, smashed cars, and crushed buildings littered the way to the convention centre, at which we arrived by some miracle and thanks to a skilled and determined Uber driver. That night foreshadowed the unprecedented apprehension that emerged throughout the year. The trip home was uneventful except for some innocuous yet puzzling questions by security at the Nashville airport, questions that probed travelling outside of North America, in the past 6 weeks.

A similar path of unanticipated destruction upturned lives in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which appeared with a raging, unstoppable force that sent the world into a tailspin. By March 16th I had to cancel travel plans to celebrate a milestone birthday. A state of emergency with a complete stay-at-home order, including restrictions on gatherings and businesses came into effect in Ontario. Shopping was limited to essential items with drastically minimized hours of operation. Safety measures such as the wearing of masks, being screened for symptoms, and clearly marked distancing protocols were in place at the grocery stores. The world as we knew it, had come to a complete halt. By September confirmed worldwide cases of the virus surpassed 34 million with more than one million deaths. Children could no longer attend school or play with each other. Theme parks and museums were shut down and all major events around the globe were cancelled or postponed indefinitely.

As the weather began to change, being outside seemed natural and was one of the few recreational activities still available, albeit in regulated ways. The outdoors felt different; quiet and almost unnatural. The abnormal sight of playgrounds bordered with the yellow emergency tape and warning notices everywhere seem to create an atmosphere of lifelessness. The usual laughter and noise of children playing was replaced with an uncanny desolation. The few people out on the streets seemed tense and an unfamiliar strangeness prevailed. What was once a friendly neighbourhood had become a few masked people trying to avoid each other. I remember going for a walk and observing people crossing the street to avoid each other.

With an endlessly proliferating web of rules and regulations around every aspect of life, the world stood still. Aside from the anxiety of the unknown about how and when the pandemic will end, the social isolation imposed has significant personal challenges. I could no longer have the much-cherished time with my children and grandchildren: we had to remain physically distant to keep each other safe. This new and strange restriction impacted us in family and community. The usual overflowing at the local mosques in Ramadan, which started around April 23rd could not occur. Religious gatherings were prohibited, weddings deferred and funerals unattended. I was no longer able to go to my favourite place, Coffee Culture, to procrastinate over a cup of coffee as I contemplate, or maybe even pretend to work on my thesis.

Like all universities and schools, Wilfrid Laurier made the hectic switch to remote learning. We quickly learned the new reality of Zoom rooms instead of classrooms, but challenges emerged as the university moved online. In teaching, synchronous and asynchronous replaced words like classroom and computer lab. We were not a community in the classroom. Zoom became our master tool and internet problems were problematic, especially for the technology-resistant folks like myself. Plus, I no longer had the office space assigned to graduate students at the faculty. That space had been a retreat for me over the years. I had many discussions with fellow students; we shared perspectives and offered opinions on each other’s work in ways that were no longer possible. My research was at a standstill too, until new ethics processes were developed. No in-person interviews were allowed and all access to the university facilities was closed. The reality sunk in that I would not manage to complete my PhD program within the time I had anticipated.

Scrambling to adjust to new norms while maintaining some semblance of normalcy grew fatiguing. The fatigue turned into exhaustion; but what I attributed to tiredness evolved into something different. In December of 2020 and by what remains a mystery, my partner and I contracted COVID-19. This brought on an additional level of isolation. The housebound morphed into being bedbound. I could barely move for two weeks. My memory of those two weeks remains spotty, and recovery was slow. But I do recall friends and family dropping off food and groceries. In the grey fog of my illness, I felt the isolation not because I was unable to go out but because I had lost hope of being able to see my children and grandchildren. My son later told me that he was about to purchase a hazmat suit to come in the house to check on us but did not because of all the rules on isolation.

After my illness, I could not return to my research with any focus. By March 2021 after a short brush with Covid, my uncle died. His wife, unaware of his death due to her battle with the virus, followed five days later. This uncle and aunt were the last remaining of my parents’ generation on my maternal side of the family. Although I was able to attend both funerals, there was no closure. A funeral in the situation was not the usual sharing of grief and support instead, it was a quick completion of the rights while observing social distancing from the few family members that were allowed to attend. Not being able to hug my cousin was difficult. The grief and the aftereffects of my brush with the covid virus, along with isolation and grief of the loss of my aunt and uncle left me with little energy or motivation.

In April 2021, I applied to the CERC Migration StOries Project that was being offered by Ryerson (now Metropolitan) University, knowing that it would take time away from my core project, but I felt that I needed something different to cope with the situation. The program evolved over the summer and fall; the structure of the workshop allowed for intellectual engagement with other folks, something I had missed since the start of isolation protocols. Despite the new reality of Zoom, the space was in many ways therapeutic and healing for me. Listening to other students’ migration stories and experiences triggered renewed interest in my ancestral and personal immigration in many ways.

The course is over. I completed my short reflection essay on a trip back home, home to Guyana – to Zeeburg – the village where I grew up. Through the writing, I was able to connect with my past at a time when I had lost all sense of normalcy. This connection was essential to my well-being as it brought the story of my life to the forefront of my present. I felt that sharing my ancestral story with the group allowed me to experience new wisdom from my past. I wonder at the resilience and courage to thrive even in situations of tragedy, of courage to keep faith and to overcome surfaced from my grandfather and my parents’ stories. From this, I drew renewed energy and a focus that went into my dissertation which I have since defended. But we are still in this strange world; it is not quite post-COVID-19. Life is not back to normal–I am not sure what the “new normal” a term that emerged during the pandemic–means. More importantly, I can view life differently and realize that the small things matter. I have a new appreciation for being able to go to my favourite coffee shop, to teach in person, I cherish visits with my grandchildren, and I treasure the opportunity to go out for dinner with friends.

9 The COVID-19 Sidebar

By Owen Guo

The fracture was silent, and I let out a loud expletive. In the middle of a muted Zoom meeting in April 2020, a leg broke off my eyeglasses. This being the coronavirus age, how was I supposed to get them replaced during lockdown? What would become of my quarantined life without being able to read or watch Netflix? I cast a glance at my paper calendar, pinned to the wall. The dates blurred. Suddenly, the world was a puddle of fuzzy objects.

I tried tape and glue to no avail. Panicked, I called the optical stores in the Annex, where I lived. No luck. Then, I messaged a friend, before firing off a Facebook post screaming for help. Within an hour, that friend forwarded a link to a place that remained open.

Hallelujah!

I breathed a sigh of relief. With my blurred vision, I hopped onto an almost empty subway train. Toronto felt like a ghost town. At the store, I had my prescription read off my current broken glasses. A new pair would be ready in 24 h.

That night, without glasses, I listened to This American Life, engrossed in a story about a family tragedy.

Later, I dimmed the lights, as Chinese pop music started to flow in my room. For the first time in a long time, I basked in the intricacies of the guitar and flute. I found the breathing of the singers enthralling. My eyes closed, I was able to focus better.

We take stock of our environment through what we see, in a world brimming with sensory overloads vying for our attention. Not seeing, however, doesn’t always dim clarity or perspective. Sometimes, not seeing frees you to see more.

10 Five Words, or the Story of How We Lived Through 2020

By Jenny Osorio

Once upon a time, when I was two years old, there was a virus. A virus is something very little. It is so little that our eyes cannot see, but it causes so much illness and sorrow. I don’t remember anything about that virus but my Mami told me that people felt ill, and we had to take them to hospital, like her cousin Julian, who was asleep for 15 days, waiting for the virus to go away.

When I ask Mami about the year 2020, she says: There are five words, Juju, that summarise that year: guilt, resourcefulness, cooking, zooming, and change. And she tells me about the stories behind those words while she shows me the pictures that captured these moments.

10.1 Guilt

When the virus came to Canada and started to make people ill, they closed my daycare and Mami’s university. Papi was sent home, too. Permanently. Everyone was afraid of the virus, and we didn’t know what to do, Mami tells me, I felt guilty for taking precautions, like not letting your tias or la Nona come home for almost 3 months. We stopped going to the park; only Mami would go grocery shopping, and when she had to teach, she would hide in the basement, like when we play hide and seek, only that I wasn’t allowed to go find her, so I would scream calling her Maaaaamiiiiii! Where are you? Vengaaaa! (Fig. 23.1)

Fig. 23.1
A photo collage. It includes crafts, a baby, and a photo of a mother and son.

Multiple images. Photo Credit: Jenny Osorio

Full size image

10.2 Resourcefulness

Luckily for me, Mami joined Papi and I on vacation when her school closed. Mami would come up with ideas from her phone, show them to Papi and he would make them happen. I think that is how magic works! We saved dinosaurs from the ice age; we built a whole little town in our living room. With roads and cars. With animals and people. I even had a whole kitchen made from diaper boxes. I’m a big boy now, I do not need diapers anymore. Mami tells me that I learned to go to the potty during that time, too!

10.3 Cooking

Papi cooks all the time. Mami only sometimes. Mami shows me pictures of the dishes and recipes we tried in 2020. Papi did experiments. His creations were always yummy. Mami asked our family back home to share recipes from her childhood. I was their assistant in the kitchen Papi had built for me. We baked lots of bread and cakes.

10.4 Zooming

This is a new word for me. It is a program in Mami’s computer. With it, we can see everyone: la Nona, las tias, los primos. We used it to meet with our family in Colombia to exercise together everyday. I loved it because Mami was lying on the floor and I climbed on her back and played superman! There was music and happy faces, too.

10.5 Change

Mami tells me Juju, change is always a good thing. It shakes things up; it wakes them up; it lets energy flow. It is like dancing. That is why she is always dancing, cleaning and changing the layout of a room. Papi does not like when she does that. Where is the spatula? You changed everything again? Esa mami ome!

Change was important in 2020. We changed many things in our family. We sold our house, the one I had lived in since I was in Mami’s belly. We also changed my daycare because we moved to a different city. We changed the language, too. Where we are now I learned a song called “Bon appetit.” And we cannot start eating until I sing it. I am happy we did not change la Nona: she came with us to the new city, and la tia Camila too, and Merlin, la Nona’s dog.

Mami is right, change is a good thing. Here I can play with mis niños, and Papi’s brothers are here; and Lela, Papi’s mother came all the way from Colombia to be with us, too. I have changed, too. I am almost four now. I can colour between the lines, and I can count to 20 in three languages (Fig. 23.2).

Fig. 23.2
A photo collage. It includes a father, a daughter, and a photo frame.

Multiple images. Photo Credit: Jenny Osorio

Full size image