It’s Christmas Eve, 2016. Two masked men enter a Chinese family gathering of about fifty people at a home in northern Jersey. Their masks are not ski, stocking, or Halloween. They’re blue surgical. No one else is wearing one or is concerned about the two men who are.
One man is Frederick Lee, my Chinese machuten (ma+phlegm+OO+ten). That’s Yiddish for my daughter’s father-in-law. (Our Sara married his son Geoff in 2014 and became Sara Lee.) He’s arrived with his own son-in-law, Ken. They’ve donned masks to protect the extended family from their common colds.
In my sixty-plus years, it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone wear a mask to a social gathering. This is years before the Coronavirus pandemic made masking a social need and a political issue. And it’s damn considerate of them.
Masking has long been a common practice among Asians. For them, it’s a logical and simple response to the spread of airborne illnesses like colds, flu, and occasional past epidemics like SARS. It’s an easy contribution to the public health of civilized people. Fred and Ken are not imposing on anyone’s freedoms, and they’re not taking away anyone’s guns.
“Not much else you can do.” Fred says, “I take some extra vitamins. Cold will go away on its own.”
He’s the patriarch of the Chinese family my daughter Sara married into. They gather every Christmas Eve, though they’re not Christian. They’re either Buddhist or follow no religion. It’s just a convenient date to get together; people have time off. And Christmas Eve 2016 was also the first night of Chanukah that year. So, for the first time, we Jews got invited to this otherwise all-Asian event. After all, we’re family.
In 2022, Omicron, vaccinations and boosters are here. The decline of the pandemic was somewhere in sight until it wasn’t. I’m back to wearing my mask in stores and indoors among strangers. About half of Jersey does the same.
After two years of isolation and caution, I’ve been lucky and haven’t caught a cold, the flu, or a Greek letter variant. Getting vaccinated and boosted was the gold standard of safety until it wasn’t.
Someday, in a pandemic-less future, a bug will find me. I’ll attend a Thanksgiving dinner or New Year’s party or Bar Mitzvah reception and have a case of the sniffles. Should I follow Fred’s lead and blow the dust off my box of trusty N95 masks?
Logic tells me yes; don’t sicken friends and relatives and avoid their cooties. But I never covered up in non-plague times, nor did my family as a kid. (Videotaped Passover movies show us exhaling who-knows-what as we climb onto each other to spear plattered potato latkes. A super spreader if there ever was one.) Any Chinese person present would understand if I masked, for sure. I hope most of my loved ones, having lived through the Covid pandemic, wouldn’t object, either.
What about a Broadway theater full of general population strangers who paid big bucks to see the show? What to do if I’m sneezing in my expensive (and never refundable) orchestra seat? Should I leave, as a courtesy to the guy who shares the armrest? Say screw him, it’s my freedom as an American? Or will ushers pick me up and throw me out into the lap of a Times Square’s Naked Cowboy? Should they?
Share your opinion at henrylevenstein.com. And for more fun with Asians and Jews as they merge their families, read my new memoir, What’s Cantonese for Mazel Tov?