April 2020 by Elleen Xue
As a teenager who has grown up exposed to both Eastern and Western hemispheres, I’m usually caught in betwixt and in between the predominant sentiments expressed therein, and most recently found myself at odds with my family over the issue of the coronavirus. But more than just finding myself at odds with my them, I found myself at odds with China.
Paying attention, of course, to the early days of the pandemic, one could not help but notice the extent to which China bent over backwards to eradicate, in an Orwellian manner, any mention of China, Hubei or the city of Wuhan (my mother’s hometown) to the connection of what was then an epidemic, and soon to be a pandemic, too. For most of recent scientific history, new pathogens were labelled and referred to by the location of their origin: Ebola was named after the Ebola River in Africa, and no one objected. MERs, an acronym for the Middle East Respiratory syndrome, was similarly named after that region. Zika Virus, was similarly denominated after the Zika Forest in Uganda where it was sought to have leaped from species to species, and leaping back in time, a century ago, we have the Spanish and Russian influenza outbreaks. The nomenclature was never in question and in many ways helped scientists to zone in on and focus on certain geographic zones and perhaps associated zoonotic origins. But what happened in 2020?
China, appearing very guilty and thin-skinned, objected to any mention of a Wuhan-Flu, and instead went through political and financial gyrations to have the virus referred to as “the coronavirus,” ostensibly because the pathogen exhibited crown like appendages, but perhaps, and this was later hypothesized, to deliberately confuse the idea of “corona” with the SolarWinds cyber-attack, (thought to have originated in on this planet in Russia), at the very time there were literal coronal mass ejections from the actual Sun in space! Thus, even diplomats were confused as to whether there was a literal solar event, emitting electromagnetic plasma pulses, or a cyber-hack on a company named SolarWinds, or a pathogenic attack with “coronal” appendages. Indeed, Orwell himself would’ve been pleased at the obfuscation which the USA, China and Russia all thought was in their best interests, which also reminded me the scene from the musical Chicago where the criminal lawyer describes the technique of “Razzle Dazzle” - - confusing the jury with words that “glitter like the sun” so as to blind them. But look at what happened next.
As China took umbrage and offense to being labeled the source of the virus – and being “offended” is something China practices to Olympic Status – it beseeched the WHO and other publications to change the name first from the Wuhan Flu, to “the coronavirus” and then to “COVID-19”, which to any speaker of Latin languages translates to “co” (with) as in cohabitate, and “vid” (life), in other words, “co-life” which would make the threat seem to originate from cohabitants and thus bolster admonitions to “socially distance,” even from family, all the more logical on a unconscious basis.
But herein lies the rub of the lie: China then went on to refer to the “Indian Variant” as well as “viral variants and mutants” from among other places: New York, the UK, South Africa and Brazil by geographic name! In other words, it was none other than China herself who spread the practice of naming all the COVID variants after countries, while the original virus, no matter the precise origin, can never been referred to as the Wuhan or Chinese flu! And if it is, then the perpetrator of such labeling is himself labeled an anti-Asian, hate-crime committing racist!
Sadly though, while the truth will most likely never be known, history will remember China fighting like hell to take its name out of the mix, while invoking the names of all others.
And history will. . . judge.
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