Alright, its story time.

Mostly because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this incident since it happened yesterday, and I need somewhere to process… But let me tell you, if you are sick of wearing a mask and refuse to do so, this probably isn’t the post for you. In fact, you should scroll on by for both our sakes.

Yesterday my husband and I went to the grocery store. Considering we have been living within this pandemic for over a year, buying groceries lately has been pretty uneventful. Regardless of Governor Abbott lifting mask mandates and “opening Texas 100%” last week, we still wear masks everywhere. With both of us being high risk, having a covid scare earlier this year, and having so many friends and family struggle with and even die from covid, we take covid precautions pretty seriously. When we got our things and approached the store, I found the mask sign on our local HEB (reminding customers to just ask for a mask if they don’t have one) a bit comforting.

Like I mentioned earlier, buying groceries lately has been pretty uneventful. I remember when we were living in Washington State when the pandemic started and things were starting to shutdown… grocery shopping was a bit eerie and sometimes too eventful. We started shopping in the middle of the night to avoid the long lines, frustrated crowds, and fights for eggs, toilet paper, and Lysol. This trip to HEB yesterday wasn’t eerie at all, the grocery store was bustling and full of life, nobody was fighting over items. In fact, we made it through almost the whole store peacefully going about our business, when I remembered we needed to grab apples in the produce section.

As I pull our cart to the side and my husband walks away to grab a bag of apples… I hear the most horrendous cough. Then, the singular cough is followed by a coughing fit.

Let me tell you, so many thoughts went through my head in that short moment. I wanted to turn and look, because the cough sounded so bad that even pre-covid I would have heard that cough and asked the person if they were alright. I also didn’t want to turn and look, because I am well acquainted with the feeling of having a tickle in the back of my throat (or allergies) and needing to cough in a public space, and not wanting to be immediately ostracized or talked at because people might think or assume I have covid. When I decided to look (because I wanted to make sure the person was ok) I saw people around the produce section trying not to look (eyes wide), or hurrying to move away from the person coughing. When my eyes landed on the person coughing, a white woman maybe in her 50s, my concern was met with frustration at the sight of a mask being warn incorrectly: covering the mouth but not the nose.

My frustration soon turned to anger (boiling away all concern for her), as I watched her face my direction and move closer to me, then PULL her mask down below her chin and proceed to cough ALL OVER the produce and other people. She did not attempt to cover her mouth with her other arm or her hand, which would be common courtesy and manners PRE-covid. Instead, she continued to use one hand to hold her mask below her mouth and her other hand to inspect produce, all the while moving in my direction. I promptly shoved decorum out the window and moved away. My husband met me and we left the coughing woman in the produce section.

As we moved towards the self checkout, I was red hot! We live in a time where everyone knows how masks are supposed to work, which makes it hard for me to accept that this was incidental and not purposeful. For sure the coughing was real, but to knowingly pull down your mask and not cover your mouth when you sound like death during a pandemic when we all know about the purpose of masks either makes you legitimately dumb or purposeful in choosing your actions. Its incredibly hard to think we can be living in 2021 with all this information out here and someone is just ignorant.

As we got in the car, I couldn’t stop talking about the scenario because I was both angry and in shock. When We got home I couldn’t help but think that if that woman had been any other ethnicity, but especially if she had been Asian, that whole scenario would have played out very differently. We live during a time when Asian-Americans are being beat up in the street and harassed at their places of work or even having their homes broken into simply because of the racist ideas pushed by #45 last year and the racist belief that Asians are super spreaders.
We live during a time where “Karen” ‘s can have emotional breakdowns over black and brown people minding their own damn business and safely call the cops on said black and brown people with hardly any real repercussions. We live during a time where people can accost employees enforcing their companies mask rules and further put front-line and essential workers and minimum wage workers further at risk with largely no repercussions at all…
The stress this pandemic has been on everyone- but especially on communities of color- and this woman can get away with it all in the produce section! Spreading her germs, showing no manners, with reckless abandon! Part of me is upset that I didn’t say anything. Another part of me knows that engaging in that drama probably wouldn’t have been worth my time nor my breath. And as much as I shouldn’t be, I’m still in shock over the audacity.

Normally, I’d like to leave you with some lesson I’ve learned or something to think on…. but this time I just don’t have that. I’m feeling pretty raw and frustrated- not just over this one experience, but it feels like one more thing on top of the mountain of things piling up over the last year and a half. I’ve gone from living out one extreme in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic, to one extreme in Texas where the state government wants to declare the pandemic over. I’ve gone through the racial tension in this country further aggravated by what happened to George Floyd, Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. I’m witnessing (and stepping in and speaking up where I can) racist incidents greatly increase towards my Asian friends and their communities.

I’m hoping I can gear this frustration and awareness towards more productive outlets, like this blog or broadening the Amplify Our Voices Project. I’m just not sure on if I can do that or if I have the bandwidth to do it well quite yet.