Insider’s story: Vietnam reopens. Will coronavirus solidarity last?

“I tested negative. Though we don’t know how many remain undetected, these numbers mean Vietnam is lifting the lockdown. It’s making the news this week as one of the earliest countries to reopen its economy.”

Like most Sacramentans, I have been in confinement. The difference: I could be back to scissor kicks at the gym and lunch at a pho shop by next week.

That may be unimaginable in Sacramentans, but I am 8,000 miles away in Saigon, where an exit strategy from the pandemic is in the works. Vietnam officially has 268 coronavirus cases out of 185,203 people tested, while California has 35,396 cases out of 465,327 tested.

I tested negative. Though we don’t know how many remain undetected, these numbers mean Vietnam is lifting the lockdown. It’s making the news this week as one of the earliest countries to reopen its economy.

So, there’s been a reversal of fortunes between Saigon, my home, and Sacramentans, my hometown, which remains locked down. But for most of the pandemic period, I felt there was more connecting my two cities.

My mom is required to spray a shopping cart with disinfectant when she enters a Raley’s, while workers squirt sanitizer on my hands when I enter a Vietnamese grocery. My sister’s meal came by DoorDash car delivery in Carmichael, while mine came from a GrabFood motorbike driver. And with everyone everywhere being stuck at home anyway, I have been getting more calls from 916 numbers than ever before.

It’s nice that loved ones call from Sacramento to check on me, and vice versa. It’s just too bad there wasn’t more concern a few months ago. In the beginning, the virus was just another tropical disease in Asia that Americans could ignore. Now, in Asian countries like Vietnam, people are going back outside and learning to live cautiously, but they’re not apathetic to outsiders. Hanoi has shipped medical suits and donated masks to the United States, and has reached out to places like California that need ventilators, IV pumps and gloves.

I understand we care about ourselves first – our “spheres of concern,” Professor Martha Nussbaum calls them. A Sacramentan would be at the center of her own sphere, with her family, and she’d have less and less concern as she moves to each outer circle, from friends, to the rest of Sacramentans, to California, then the U.S. … and then maybe the world? Where do you draw the line?

What if the pandemic gets us to push the limits of concern to the outer circles? If corpses were piling up at Sutter Health, or people vanished after challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom’s virus response, then Sacramentans would be horrified, and rightly so. These miseries are happening elsewhere, and sympathy comes with imagining them in one’s own neighborhood.

So I’ve had mixed feelings about the uneven waves of solidarity that follow a pandemic. On one hand it makes sense to care more when a virus tears through the U.S. When the world’s biggest economy gets sick, it affects the rest of the planet. On the other hand, both inside and outside the U.S., there’s also some concern for American suffering that is absent when the victim is in Bolivia or Qatar.

In February, once my Sacramentans friends knew I was OK, they had, at most, a passing interest in coronavirus news. Now in a strange twist of events, I am the one trying to reassure them as they worry about sick parents or try to take walks on Capitol Mall without bumping into people. With all these long distance calls, the coronavirus has me feeling closer to Sacramento than in any other time since I left, though I wish it hadn’t taken a pandemic to connect us. It’s like that children’s poem from Shel Silverstein, we all look just about the same now that COVID-19 has turned out the lights.

Vietnam, like any other country, does not want to declare victory against the virus too soon. But what seems to have worked so far, and the reason locals aren’t as panicked here as in India or Italy, is a mixed strategy. Officials isolated infected people and their contacts early on, restricted gatherings, dispelled rumors, and changed tack when the data dictated. People wore masks, which reduced the risk that they’d unwittingly give the virus to others, and stayed home when it was the law.

Many of Vietnam’s virus cases emerged after flights brought westerners into the country, prompting some local businesses to turn away foreigners, including Americans. Vietnam’s prime minister responded by threatening penalties for discrimination. Imagine the U.S. president threatening to fine people for their virus-driven bigotry against Asians.

The quality of air in the Sacramento region has improved as people shelter at home during the coronavirus pandemic, as seen along the Sacramento River on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Paul Kitagaki Jr. pkitagaki@sacbee.com

These days when I wake up in Saigon, usually the first messages I get are texts sent overnight from Sacramentans. One recent text came from my sister. It was a photo of her taking a stroll along the American River. It was her one-hour salve from coronavirus confinement, a snapshot of cool foliage, dapples of sunlight, and empty dirt trails to brighten her day – and, vicariously, mine.

Solidarity, sister.

By Lien Hoang Special to The Sacramento Bee. Lien Hoang is a Sacramento native and journalist living in Vietnam, where she writes about Southeast Asia. Contact her at twitter.com/lienh.

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