I don’t often get to empathize with my students. 

I teach at one of the top bilingual high schools in Taipei where the majority of the students will end up at prestigious universities across the globe. Every day they do their work, write graffiti on their desks, and chat on Instagram in two, sometimes three languages. They spend more time on school each week than I did during any two weeks of my academic career, including graduate school. In short, they inspire a constant mix of awe and pity in me. I will never know the level of stakes they attach to each exam, but I always worry about how little free time they have to make all the mistakes that I made. 

Oliver's students write graffiti on their desks. (Source: Graham Oliver)

So sympathy, yes, though there’s so much distance for empathy to cover. But for a brief moment this semester, that changed. 

Like many foreign teachers, I had hoped to return home over the summer to visit family, friends, and make exclamations of “I didn’t know how much I missed this!” while eating various foods or experiencing a lack of humidity. But, of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, from the other side of the world, I watched as the number of cases rose. As a friend and her husband got the virus. As my dad told me a week after the fact that someone at his office tested positive. As everyone I knew slunk into some form of lockdown funk. I didn’t know what to do besides write a few more emails, make a few more phone calls, reach out to a few more people than usual. I’m not good at it. I run out of things to say so fast.

I never know how much to tell them about our very uninterrupted lives here, about a night out or a wedding or a weekend getaway. About feeling lucky, safe, and incredibly guilty.

The first week of November means midterms for my students. Under the best of circumstances those are difficult times for teachers too--Did I make the test the right difficulty? Am I grading these fast enough? Am I grading each student fairly?--but my students psych themselves up with intricate routines like pitchers stepping up to the mound and are so worried about their results that their hands shake when I give tests back. The same week, as you might have heard, we had a little election in the United States. An election that I, like a lot of people, was watching with obsessive closeness.

The morning my students were taking their first exam, I found out my sister had tested positive for Covid-19. 

And so I spent the week in the same emotional state I imagine my students do during exams. I started each morning with election and virus news, hitting the ground with the stress running. Walking into classrooms to teach became blurry. I’d try to grade and instead doom scroll through more and more negativity: the latest cases, results, rants. I worried over how often to message family, not wanting to be a source of stress myself but wanting to make sure I got any news. My eyes went watery at anything: a message from a student thanking me for help, coming across a picture of our dog in the US, a Seamus Heaney poem. I felt so overwhelmed and brittle, exactly how my students seem during that dreaded exams week.

My sister is doing okay. Relatively mild symptoms. I don’t think I’m going back to the US until there’s a vaccine. And something worse is probably going to happen to someone I love between now and then. I am trying to prepare myself for that moment, preemptively talking myself through acceptance, that the only thing I would’ve done by going back is risk myself getting the virus as well. I don’t think I’ll believe it then, though.

Between two classes, Thursday of that week, I stepped outside for a deep breath of fresh air. I put my hands on my head and closed my eyes, but then felt a pat on the back. It was a student I didn’t really know. “Hey,” he said, “Don’t be sad.” And it was exactly the right thing to say, not “Don’t be sad” exactly, but instead the idea those words meant: “Hey, I can see things are rough right now, but I’m letting you know that I’m here too,” or, to put it even more simply, “We’re all in this together.”

About the author：

Graham Oliver is a teacher, writer, and editor living in Taipei. His book reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in Guernica, Harvard Educational Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction from Texas State University.

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