The San Francisco region, San Jose northward through San Francisco county, has an extraordinary presence of people of Asian ancestry In comparison with the rest of the US, Except for Honolulu (which has more than a 50% Ethnic Asian population), no other area even comes close to the Asian presence here.
We enjoy a vibrant mixture of East Asian cultures in San Francisco proper, with enclaves of groups representing Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Laotian, Indonesian and Mongolian ancestry, to name a few.
One thing I noticed when I moved to San Francisco many years ago was the frequent appearance in public of people wearing masks, most commonly among people who looked to me like the certain chic young, harried middle-aged, or dignified older residents of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, or Manila, where work has taken me in the past.
Mentally, I filed it away under the “things that are are different in SF” category, and thought nothing more until an article I read today in Mother Jones.
The Grassroots Activists Who Protected San Francisco’s Most Vulnerable—and the City—From COVID
www.motherjones.com/…
They cited hard data:
As of March 15, about 450 people had died from the virus in a city of almost 900,000, the lowest rate of any major US city.
As much as that may chagrin the far right critics of the city and our early “catastrophic shutdown”, as well as the grossly selfish libertarians and complaints about the hellish controlling communist junta of the city, the numbers are facts.
Ostensibly about absolutely critical work done to protect the Latino community here, in the article there was a key line that linked many ideas for me:
This success was due in part to aggressive actions by the local and state governments, and a populace that embraced mask-wearing and took social distancing seriously.
For many Asian constituencies, mask wearing is completely ordinary.
Like many residents of the city, I was completely habituated to seeing people wearing masks as utterly ordinary.
When wearing a mask became an act of community protection, there was an almost effortless transition from seeing masks to wearing masks.
Certainly that wasn’t true across the US. We are all aware of the endless childlike, petulant complaints from people who are ostensibly adults about performing an absolutely minimal act in a pandemic — wearing a mask.
The look of masks, perhaps the symbolism of constraint, or fear of the new, I can’t fully hypothesize what all the reasons are for not wearing masks for many people.
But I do know I’m grateful for the Asian community in San Francisco, who through what was a cultural commonplace, created the opportunity for all the citizens of the city to effortlessly, unemotionally, and collectively embrace the cultural norms of mask wearing for individual and community protection.
I offer a heartfelt thanks if you are reading this.
I’m constantly surprised as open secrets of the city open up to me.