Living with Coronavirus Anxiety in Singapore

A woman wearing a mask in precaution of the coronavirus.
In Singapore, home to a diverse population of 5.7 million, the coronavirus has become a little-understood variable in a sort of living laboratory experiment in extreme urban and social management.Photograph by Edgar Su / Reuters

How does a virus take over a community? Slowly. Perniciously. Inconclusively. The first line of attack is not an aching body or a runny nose but an unease that seeps into every corner of life, and which is impossible to explain away because it is reasonable, even necessary. You must listen to this fear. You must calibrate your responses correctly. Otherwise, you are irresponsible, you are careless; in the body of the community, you are a failing organ.

Here in Singapore, we are perched awkwardly on the edge of the coronavirus crisis zone. As of this writing, ninety-two people on the island are known to have contracted the COVID-19 virus. First, it was travellers who’d been to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, but gradually the disease seeped into the community and began to spread. So far, no one in Singapore has died of the disease.

But fear, it turns out, is also a virus. A low-level fright of this little-understood malady has taken hold in the international school where my children spend their days, and in the sprawling condominium complex where we live, along with a mix of Singaporean families and foreigners. This fear has the uncanny power to force out the uncomfortable questions that usually lurk unspoken in the communities it invades. You start out talking about the virus and end up picking apart parenting styles or foreign relations.

The virus has become a little-understood variable in a sort of living laboratory experiment in extreme urban and social management. Singapore is home to a diverse population of 5.7 million, of whom nearly two million, like our family, have come to live or work here temporarily. Virtually every aspect of life here, from public-transport routes to political discourse, is carefully controlled by the government.

The normal rhythms of the city are now punctuated by incessant virus-related announcements: emergency e-mails, stern notices on the bulletin board, and urgent WhatsApp messages from the government. Two more cases confirmed. School assemblies suspended. If you’ve been to mainland China in the past two weeks, stay home from school, church, and everything else. It’s worse than SARS. Don’t panic.

The frustrating truth is that we don’t know what we’re living through. Scientists are still scrambling to understand the fundamental facts about coronavirus, such as how it spreads and the length of its incubation period. In the absence of knowledge, we check constantly to see what everyone else is doing, having conversations that only lead to more uncertainty and judgment. In social circles that are preoccupied with family and schools, the coronavirus has become a microcosm of parenting itself: a crisis that compresses all the unease and distrust and self-doubt that lurk around the edges of child rearing into a slow-motion emergency that demands we all collaborate and follow orders.

One morning, while my husband walked the kids out to the bus stop, I opened an e-mail from the school. It was a long message and, as I read, I set down my coffee. I had the sensation of vertigo, like I was tipping face first into my laptop screen.

One of the teaching assistants in the Chinese-language program was a Wuhan native. His parents, who had come to visit over the Chinese New Year, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Happily, they were in stable condition, and the teacher himself did not appear to have the virus, but, then again, the long incubation period made it too soon to know for sure whether he’d been infected. His parents had been staying with him as he went back and forth to school. He’d been in the classroom and had performed in the Chinese New Year staff concert.

If you want to overwhelm a communications network, here’s a good trick: compose an e-mail to thousands of Type A parents announcing that the deadly virus splashed all over the headlines has perhaps infiltrated their children’s school. Press Send just as school buses are heading off into morning traffic.

“Good morning.” That was the first text from one of the second-grade moms: an opening line so barren of exclamation marks and emojis that, on a normal morning, it would imply a grave misdeed on the part of my child. “Saw the email?” she continued. We texted back and forth, and meanwhile I was texting with other parents and with two friends who are doctors in the United States.

“It’s not very deadly,” my friend, who is a research doctor, wrote. “Though it does seem to be serious.”

“Honestly, it’s less severe than influenza,” my emergency-room-doctor friend wrote. “Even if your kids get it they’ll be fine.”

Here in Singapore, one mom was wondering whether the cafeteria food might be contaminated; another was taking pictures of the classroom where the teaching assistant had worked with the children. These calm assessments from America rendered all of that, somehow, ridiculous. I informed the first mom who’d texted that I knew a doctor who said we shouldn’t worry. She replied that she’d also spoken with a doctor and had been told not to worry.

At that point, I assumed we’d reached a consensus. But just then she abruptly announced that her husband was headed to school to pick up their kid. “We’re not comfortable,” she wrote. “I understand,” I replied. Our fragile alliance had fractured, somehow, along lines that had to do with our tolerance for risk. We would not text each other for the rest of the week, while she kept her son at home and I sent mine to school.

If the virus is toying with our parental neuroses, it’s also poking at the sensitive spots of nations. In Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrations have raged for most of the past year, the local government’s refusal to seal off crossings to the mainland was decried as yet another failure to protect the territory from the menace of Beijing.

Here in Singapore, too, the virus dredged up some of the tensions lurking under the veneer of communal harmony. Three-quarters of the city is ethnically Chinese, and there are significant minorities of Indians and indigenous Malays. The city is also home to tens of thousands of residents from mainland China. Relations among these groups have been carefully smoothed by the government, which recognizes four official languages, enforces ethnic quotas on public-housing blocks, and criminalizes any action, including speech, that could undermine racial or religious harmony. Now, though, coronavirus has become an excuse for some landlords, who have tried to seize on travel and quarantine guidelines to evict mainland tenants from their buildings.

“Such actions are not helpful and they have no place in our society,” Lawrence Wong, the national-development minister, scolded in a speech to parliament. “I hope that every Singaporean will stand together and we will all do our part to confront and condemn such prejudice and discrimination.”

In the middle of all this, some friends from Hong Kong came to town; my husband and I planned to meet them for dinner. The night before, one of them texted to warn us that she’d been in mainland China. Unprompted, she offered up the exact dates of her travel, cities visited, and airlines flown. Both she and her husband felt fine but, if we wanted to cancel, they’d understand.

Should we treat our old friends like lepers, or should we risk bringing the virus home to our kids? In the end, we tried to compromise.

“Will you think we’re total nuts if we suggest meeting at the restaurant, not hugging and not sharing dishes?” I wrote. “I feel awful even typing that.”

“That totally makes sense to us,” she replied.

It made less sense the following morning, when our eldest son told me, as we walked to the bus stop, that the kid he’d played with the previous two days was staying home from school for two weeks.

“Uh,” I said. “He is? Why?”

“Because he was in China.”

“Oh, no,” I groaned and started mumbling, more to myself than to him. So all our precautions were flimsy, I thought, like trying to use twigs and string to dam the flow of human interaction. We couldn’t know who’d been where or who might be ill, nor could we live in a state of sterility. We couldn’t build a wall against germs, and the pressure to keep trying to do so was exhausting.

That afternoon, as we walked back from the bus stop, along came the kid. He was gliding down the path on his scooter, a big grin on his face, wearing nothing but a swimsuit and a pair of goggles around his neck. “Hey,” he said to my son. “Want to go to the pool?”

“My mom says I can’t play with you, because you went to China,” my son said.

“I did not say that,” I blurted out unconvincingly.

“You did, too,” he cried.

“I did not.” I could feel my face burning. “You were the one who told me he’d been in China.”

The other kid watched us with the bright half-smile of a polite sports spectator.

“But I didn’t say—”

“But that’s what you meant!”

“Enough, let’s go inside!”

I had the idea, then, that we were nearing the end of whatever we were all enduring. We weren’t, of course, but I couldn’t shake the expectation that this problem would soon be replaced by some fresh concern. The teacher’s assistant stayed healthy, and eventually returned to the classroom, but the numbers of the sick kept growing. A guard was posted at the entrance to our condominium with a thermometer and an imposing pump bottle of hand sanitizer. The school sent home slips that had to be submitted each day with that morning’s temperature reading. In the back of my mind lurked the knowledge that there were reports of people testing positive without a fever, so the thermometers were hardly foolproof. Frantic shoppers, driven by rumors that the government might close schools and restrict most people to their homes, thronged the supermarkets to strip the shelves of noodles and toilet paper.

I was at home getting ready to take our younger son to a birthday party the day the panic shopping began in earnest. My phone began to ding insistently. It was the mom throwing the party; she’d just heard that someone who lived in their housing development had the novel coronavirus.

“I do not have any details at this stage,” she wrote. “However, this is from a reliable source.” The party was still on, but they wanted other parents to understand the choice they were making.

We decided to keep our son home, but I didn’t like it. I felt bad for my kid, and even worse for the family that had planned the party. So I wrapped the present in colorful paper and headed over in a taxi to apologize. As we pulled up to the gate, a guard materialized at the car door and tapped my forehead with an electronic thermometer before nodding us through. The walkways and lobby felt strangely quiet. Upstairs, though, the party was in full swing; the adults drinking rosé and the kids painting on easels.

I was both relieved and mortified to see that a respectable number of parents were braver than we were. Or maybe they were foolhardy—I didn’t know anymore. I wanted to hang around and chat; I wanted my son to be there, too. And I realized that this is the sting: in the company of others, we derive the greatest comfort while simultaneously running the biggest risk. We need each other, we look for each other, we infect each other with insidious germs and fortifying emotions. I stayed for a short time, then left the gift and went home.

Back at our place, riding the elevator up to our floor, I read an announcement taped to the wall. It was from the Citizens’ Consultative Committee, which relays communications from the government to the people, explaining when and where we residents should collect our free masks. I’d already picked up the four masks allocated to our household, but I still enjoyed reading this note. There was comfort in the precision of the document, which was at once severe and optimistic: “Together, and with steely determination, we can overcome this as one community.”


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