When my mom and I arrived at Incheon Airport in November, after twenty uncomfortable hours in K94 masks, I was shocked by its emptiness. There seemed to be more workers in face shields and white Tyvek suits than travellers. A polite young man from South Korea’s national health corps inspected our stack of documents, took our temperatures, and explained the conditions of our imminent ten-day quarantine. A “disease prevention” bus outfitted in plexiglass and plastic seat covers took us straight to our rental apartment, in Pyeongtaek city, about an hour south of Seoul, for a small fee. “Wow, door to door,” Mom said. The pandemic response proved how much the country had changed since she immigrated to the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies. “When I left, I only knew Korea as a place of hardship,” she told me. “I’m getting to know the new Korea now.”
Our quarantine rental was a cheap, dorm-size efficiency—a brand-new apartment in a brand-new building in a brand-new neighborhood. It had very little floor space but all the basics: a galley kitchenette with an under-counter washing machine, a bathroom, a tiny living-dining room, and a lofted bedroom. “The landlord said not to leave, not even to enter the hallway. He said that the authorities sometimes check CCTV footage to catch quarantine escapees,” Mom said with a sly look. We unpacked the snacks, tea, coffee, and instant meals we’d brought from the U.S. An uncle in Seoul had dropped off a care package of rice, banchan, eggs, gochugaru, and produce.
We would spend most of our waking hours at a round, plastic table (a flimsy Saarinen-tulip knockoff) that served as dining room and desk. Our phones screamed in unison every few hours with “extreme” emergency alerts from the local government. “Pyeongtaek city: 49 covid-positive people. Keep outings, travel, and gatherings to a minimum. Wear a mask, wash your hands, ventilate indoor settings, and observe all disease-prevention rules.” Or “Pyeongtaek city: Today, 6am to 9pm, emergency air-pollution measures. Limit outings, wear a mask, take individual care. No prohibited fires. Level-five traffic restrictions over the weekend.”
In quarantine, there was no rush to get over jet lag, as there was no one to see and no place to go. But quality rest proved elusive. The bedroom loft, up a twisty flight of wood-block stairs, never got below eighty degrees. Mom and I resorted to dragging the bedding downstairs and sleeping next to one another, rigid as planks, arms touching, on the two cushion cubes that served as a modular sofa. The setup was absurd but tender. Some nights, I would look over at her and think, My face, but not my face. My future body. I would imagine an older version of me remembering this time of inseparability.
We had meant to come earlier, in the spring of 2020. But, as the virus spread worldwide, Mom and Dad were stuck in Tacoma, Washington, where I grew up, just south of the first nursing-home outbreak in the U.S. I was in Brooklyn, sleeping with earplugs to muffle the sound of ambulance sirens. My younger brother was in Philadelphia, where he had his restaurant hours cut back, then eliminated. South Korea chose to keep foreigners away with strict quarantine rules. Travel, especially across an ocean, seemed indulgent, even callous.
From Brooklyn, I reported on the South Korean response by phone. The central government oversaw the production of masks, which neighborhood pharmacists and public servants distributed at low cost. Testing was free and abundant. Cell phones were used to monitor social distancing and conduct contact tracing in real time. Some of these tactics were borrowed from Taiwan, which, like South Korea, had learned from an outbreak of sars in the early two-thousands and planned for the worst. Korea saw large covid outbreaks in churches and night clubs nevertheless. And there were serious privacy concerns: phone alerts detailed the locations and travel records of covid-positive individuals in the community, making them easy to identify. Still, I envied the effectiveness of the country’s public-health system.
Mom had left Korea for good during the postwar military dictatorship. As a teen-ager, she had attended a nighttime high school so she could work full time and help support her family. She passed the civil-service exam and took a job in her native Seoul, but saw no future for herself in a corrupt, patriarchal office. So, when a distant relative mentioned an opportunity to move to the U.S., she didn’t hesitate. In Southern California, she took low-wage jobs and classes, and laid unsuccessful plans to reunite with her mom and siblings. She later met my dad, who had also immigrated from Korea on his own, and they both gave up their Korean citizenship to become U.S. citizens. She returned to Seoul on job assignments in the late seventies and again in 1985, before becoming a social worker in Washington State. Aside from that, family trips to Korea have been sporadic and mostly brief.
We never lost touch with our relatives there, though, and several of them sent fretful text messages when covid-19 hit New York. They had seen footage of overwhelmed city hospitals and morgue-like nursing homes on the Korean news. Was I O.K.? “This moment has taught us that the West we’ve so admired isn’t as logical and reasonable as we thought,” the then mayor of Seoul said at a press conference. “In New York, up to six hundred and thirty people a day are dying. In all of Seoul, two people have died.” The mayor added that medical costs in the U.S. were “unimaginably high.” I could tell that my parents were revising that graph in the back of immigrants’ minds. The x, over time, from place of birth to adopted country; the y of health, stability, and general flourishing. Their plotted lines were arcing downward, and fast. Had they made the right choice?
Over the course of 2020, our extended family survived what seemed to be the worst of the pandemic—and my parents and I waited for another chance to travel to Korea. The summer of 2021 gave us hope. After the Korean vaccination rate reached seventy per cent, in October, the government urged the population to accept a new normal. Its slogan, “With Corona” (transliterated in Korean), implied a baseline level of transmission and eventual herd immunity. If my parents and I travelled in the late fall (my brother couldn’t join us, as he was back at his restaurant), we would still have to quarantine upon arrival—but for ten days, down from fourteen.
My dad decided to stay in Washington State, put off by the thought of a long confinement. Mom and I packed our bags. We would stay for three months—the maximum for U.S. citizens without a visa. I would work on a book, and Mom would apply for a long-term-residency visa, a right given to ethnic Koreans abroad. Before departing, we read a lot of fine print: in addition to our passports, we would need our vaccine cards, negative covid PCR-test results from less than three days before our flight, birth certificates, citizenship papers, and family-registration forms showing that my mom still had siblings in Korea. Foreigners without close blood relations had to stay in government-run hotels, at about a hundred dollars per day. We, too, were foreigners, but our residual Koreanness gave us the privilege of paying less and staying in a rental of our choice.
From our seventh-floor micro-apartment, we gazed out at fast-growing Pyeongtaek. Our windows framed two construction sites: to the left, a cylindrical shopping mall; to the right, an apartment complex that occupied an entire city block. Straight ahead, an office building was being readied for its first tenant, the Pyeongtaek Chamber of Commerce. It seemed fitting to face these symbols of capital: Pyeongtaek was being rapidly remade by Samsung and LG factories and U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys, the new headquarters of U.S. Forces Korea. Humphreys hosts some forty thousand American military personnel, contractors, and their families. Further north in Pyeongtaek is a second U.S. facility, the Osan Air Force base. Since the pandemic began, many Koreans had come to resent the loose covid protocols on these bases, and feared U.S. soldiers as vectors of the virus. By early January, U.S. Forces Korea would report more than three thousand positive cases, a rate “far higher than desired,” and restrict “off-installation activities.”
On day two of our quarantine, Mom and I were required to go to the neighborhood health office to get tested for covid-19. We were also told to install Korea’s Self-Quarantine Safety-Protection app, which paired us with a civil servant named Mr. Park. Though we would never meet him in person, his temporary job, on top of his real job, was to insure that we stayed healthy and didn’t go awol. I imagined him monitoring our locations by G.P.S., our little red dots hardly budging within the space of the micro-apartment.
The following day, a weekend that Mr. Park should have had off from work, he arrived with gift bags full of medical supplies: masks, armpit thermometers, hand sanitizer, neon garbage bags bearing a hazardous-waste symbol, and disinfectant spray. The apartment building was so new that the lobby and elevators were unfinished, so we gave him instructions by Internet phone.
“Yes, come up the elevator marked ‘residential,’ ” Mom told him. “Oh, and I’m so sorry to ask this, it’s kind of embarrassing, but we’re . . . running low on toilet paper. Could you possibly get us some from the corner store?” Mom and I had been diligent about our entry documents, but hadn’t considered napkins or other paper products. “Don’t you have family who can help?” Mr. Park said with a sigh. “This isn’t even my department. I work in an unrelated field. But civil servants have to do pandemic work after hours.” Poor Mr. Park, I thought. He had studied hours on end to test into a coveted public-sector job, only to field toilet-paper requests from random foreigners.
Mom persuaded him to help us. I left my credit card for him outside the door. A few minutes later, Mr. Park called to say that the only toilet paper he could find was in a very large quantity. Did we still want it? “The package is twenty-four rolls, but it’s buy one get one free, so forty-eight rolls,” he said. Mom and I laughed uncontrollably as I dragged the enormous plastic-wrapped bundle through the door. The apartment was so small that the toilet paper simultaneously blocked the recessed hyeongwan entryway, the bathroom, the galley kitchen, and the under-counter washing machine.
The quarantine brochure provided by Mr. Park told us to report our temperatures and any symptoms, via app, at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. every day. It told us to eat regularly but far less than normal. It told us to exercise—and call a hotline if we should feel depressed. I adjusted quickly, since my normal life consists mostly of sitting and writing things down. Mom was restless by comparison. She took to making dramatic pronouncements in English and Korean: “I’m hun-grrr-rrry.” “It’s time to take our temperature now.” “Just six days to go.” Her years-long study of Spanish on the Duolingo app assumed a ritual significance: a digital pilgrimage to divide time. She also spent hours looking up the sale prices of Korean apartments, daydreaming us into an alternate life.
Halfway through quarantine, my mom read aloud from a Korean news report, on a covid variant discovered by scientists in South Africa. We had come to Korea betting that things were on their way to some version of normal; now we knew that this would not be the case. In late November, we tested out of quarantine and moved into a studio apartment in the city of Cheonan. By then, the Omicron variant had arrived in Korea, and society was freshly circumscribed. In December, the Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency tightened covid restrictions on indoor dining, then tightened them again. Socializing was to be done in groups of four or fewer. No late-night outings. The government also instituted a discriminatory travel ban against visitors from eleven “high-risk” African countries.
South Korea never had a full pandemic lockdown—which is not to say that workers and small businesses haven’t suffered. But the big picture is that Koreans have traded some freedoms for others. Eighty-four per cent of the population is fully vaccinated, as compared with sixty-three per cent in the U.S. In exchange for wearing masks and being tracked at all times, people go to school and work and, statistically, enjoy a far higher chance of survival. Controlling for the difference in population, twenty-one times more people in the U.S. have died from covid than in South Korea; fourteen times more people have contracted the virus. I am sure that many Americans, since March of 2020, have wished for certain kinds of unfreedom.
Early in the pandemic, commentators in the U.S. and Europe struggled to explain the high levels of mask compliance, and low levels of death, in South Korea and other East and Southeast Asian nations. They invoked stereotypes, such as a general propensity to heed authority and “high levels of social cohesion,” ignoring the continent’s rowdy, revolutionary histories. The difference seems, to me, less cultural than structural: habitual mask wearing, owing in part to the sars outbreak of the early two-thousands; centralized governance (being a small country helps); and a strong public-health system. When I interviewed the Taiwanese cabinet member Audrey Tang about her government’s response, she relayed an early lesson in public education. “Wear a mask to protect others” didn’t work. “Wear a mask to protect yourself” did.
Like every other country, South Korea has its share of covid skeptics and people who oppose masking and vaccine mandates. A few weeks ago, a group of cram-school owners won a lawsuit exempting their students from having to be vaccinated—an infringement, they said, on the constitutional right to learn. And many older Koreans, remembering the curfews and surveillance of the country’s authoritarian past, are wary of strict government directives. Yet it’s rare to see anyone unmasked, even on an empty sidewalk; not once have I spotted a bare nose or chin on public transit.
In December, the Korean government updated its contact-tracing system to recognize covid vaccinations received abroad. Even short-term visitors like me could now register and get a booster shot free of charge. When I called my neighborhood public-health office to ask about getting a third dose, they scheduled me for an appointment a couple of days later, at a women’s clinic near our apartment. On the fourth floor of Queens Obstetrics and Gynecology, a uniformed receptionist gave me a necklace sign reading “Pfizer” and sent me to a giraffe-themed room. A young doctor whose bedside manner was well adapted to soothing toddlers and new parents counselled me on possible side effects, then sent me upstairs for the shot. On my way out, I asked a different receptionist for a certificate of vaccination. She typed my registration number into her computer and pulled up the dates and places of all three of my doses, two marked “overseas.” She printed out the document and stamped it with a red, glossy Korean seal.
Restaurants and cafés must verify that every customer is either triple-vaccinated or has very recently received two shots. Mom and I are now used to the routine. Everywhere we go, we have our temperatures taken, our phone numbers and addresses logged, and our vaccine records perused. We continue to receive frequent alerts by phone, telling us how many covid-positive people are in our area. The Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency releases an array of daily statistics: persons infected, persons recovered, persons single- and double-vaccinated, persons hospitalized. The numbers are generally trustworthy, and trusted, because testing and record-keeping are so widespread.
Outside the public-health office nearest to us in Cheonan, big white tents offer free, walk-in covid tests. Workers sheathed from head to toe in protective plastic greet people in puffy head-to-toe coats, checking them in by QR code. On previous trips to Korea, I had little reason to speak with civil servants, except for at the post office and the library. This time around, Mom and I have interacted with them constantly, starting with our quarantine minder, Mr. Park. These government workers have treated us with kindness, despite what I can only assume is a bone-deep exhaustion, two-plus years into the pandemic.
Though many weeks have passed, I often think about my time in quarantine with my mother. Just before Thanksgiving Day (which means nothing in South Korea), Pyeongtaek city delivered two heavy boxes of free food—a major event. Mom and I giggled as we opened the packages and took commemorative photos with our rations of rice, bottled water, canned banchan, instant ramen, prepared jjigae, and soups. “Korea is so rich now! I can’t believe this spread,” Mom said. A few hours later, I caught her wistfully surfing food blogs for restaurants in Pyeongtaek and Seoul.
Our daily repetition of temperature-taking, disinfecting, and exercising made us feel like hypochondriacs. And our constant proximity—Mom was never more than a few feet away—exaggerated these bodily preoccupations. By coincidence, the novels I’d brought from New York were intensely corporeal and focussed on women (and, perhaps less coincidentally, had protagonists who are middle-aged female Asian writers). Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) tells the story of Natsuko Natsume, a middle-aged novelist in Tokyo, and the women around her, all of whom have some physical longing. Natsuko realizes that she wants to have a child with a sperm donor. Her sister Makiko, a restaurant worker and single mom, wants a boob job. Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko, wants out of her adolescent body.
I also had a copy of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s forthcoming “Activities of Daily Living.” In it, a writer named Alice looks after her stepfather in a nursing home while doing research on Tehching Hsieh, the legendary real-life performance artist. Hsieh is known for making endurance art: punching a work clock on the hour, every hour, for a year; living lassoed, rope around waist, to another person for a year; staying inside a cage for a year. As Alice’s stepfather develops advanced dementia, she, too, becomes a kind of performer. She visits him in the nursing home, but outsources the care of his fleshly needs. Female nurses attend to every bowel movement after meals, after naps, after baths, hour after hour.
A compression of bodies in compressed space. In quarantine, our living-dining area was just large enough to place two yoga mats side by side. Every day, Mom and I propped up my laptop on a stack of books and did aerobic videos or walked in place, back and forth, while watching movies. We binged Aki Kaurismäki, Wayne Wang, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. We talked about Korea, then and now, and made plans for the outside world. I thought of friends whose mothers had passed away and the millions who have died from covid. I felt lucky to know this strange intimacy.
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