KEEP CALM: A SURVIVAL GUIDE

Holiday gone wrong

A trip that was three years in the planning culminated in closed tourist attractions, racist remarks and a stay-home notice

Everything seemed fine when we set out.

My parents and I were going to visit the United States to see my sister, who attends university in New York and spends most of the year away from us.

As a family, we would go to New Orleans. We had been planning this trip for the past three years, but my sister and I had dreamt of the Big Easy since we were little girls, and it was finally within reach.

My American adventure would take a little over a fortnight, which happens to be enough time for a country to go from having a sprinkling of coronavirus cases to a pandemic hot zone.

This did not occur to us when we left on March 7, when the World Health Organisation was still avoiding words like "pandemic".

Back then, our chief concern was that we would not be allowed into the US, since Singapore had been hit by the virus early.

I had spent the past few weeks diligently consuming vitamin C tablets, so that I would look healthy enough to be let in.

In Los Angeles, our first stop, tourists crowded Hollywood's Walk Of Fame. The 27,000-strong LA Marathon wound their way up Sunset Boulevard.

For us, who had spent a month under Dorscon Orange, La La Land felt like a postcard from the past. But the future would arrive much sooner than we expected.

We flew into New York on March 11, a Wednesday. By Friday, cases in the city had tripled. Broadway went dark. Museums closed in droves.

We powered through the Whitney Museum of American Art hours before it shut. I lingered in the Edward Hopper room as the staff began to chivvy us out, struck by the urban alienation in his paintings. Everyone in them already seemed to be practising social distancing.

ST ILLUSTRATION: CEL GULAPA

On March 15, we headed to New Orleans. The next day, Louisiana ordered all bars to close; restaurants could only offer takeaway.

The order kicked in only at midnight. For revellers, it was a shot at a last night on the town. For many of those working, it was the last pay cheque they would see in a long time.

Most of the waiters, bartenders, bellhops, front-of-house staff, shop assistants, flight attendants and more whom we met would wake up the next day without a job to go to. Entire industries shut down overnight.

Through the glass door of a restaurant that had been full just two nights ago, I saw the owner slumped at a table, his head in his hands. When we knocked, he hastily pasted on a smile to hand us our food order.

By now, we were mostly holed up in our hotel, subsisting on takeaway and room service. Once a day, we ventured outside. Even in a lockdown, New Orleans was so lovely it was painful to see it silenced. On Frenchmen Street, a woman was playing the trombone on her balcony. It was the jazz song Blue Skies, an ironic choice. "Blue days, all of them gone/ Nothing but blue skies from now on."

Since our walking tour had been cancelled, I cobbled together my own tour off Google and we wandered the deserted Garden District, staring at its splendid mansions through their wrought iron fences. We bought beignets from the iconic Cafe Du Monde and ate them on the banks of the Mississippi River.

We peered through the locked gates of Lafayette Cemetery, full of graves from the yellow fever epidemic that killed nearly 8,000 in the city in 1853, when the coffins stacked up faster than they could be buried and were left to putresce in the street.

Plague does not truly go away, as French writer Albert Camus observed in his 1947 novel, The Plague. It waits for the day it can once more "rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city".

Nobody in the world is immune to it. They just forget.

Despite the growing restrictions across the country, there were those who behaved as if nothing was wrong. People still spit on the sidewalk. In a hotel lobby, a woman, a total stranger, touched my hair without asking and remarked how long it was.

Then there was the paranoia. On a plane, a fellow passenger donned a surgical gown and a face shield, as if he were entering an operating theatre, not a domestic flight.

In a car, my mother fell asleep, choked on her saliva and woke up coughing. "Cover your mouth!" snapped the driver. Guiltily, my mother put on her mask, which I made her take off once we alighted.

We were divided on the issue of whether masks would help us avoid or attract anti-Asian racism. Last month, an Asian woman wearing a mask in a Manhattan subway station was beaten with an umbrella; this month, an Asian woman in Midtown was punched in the face for not wearing a mask.

The week we were in New York, there were at least three coronavirus-related assaults against Asians. US President Donald Trump had taken to calling Covid-19 the "Chinese virus", which did not help.

In Los Angeles, I passed a shop with the sign "Chinese Laundry". Scrawled over it in graffiti was "Dirty Laundry".

In New Orleans, a man cycled past us with his dog in the basket. "Want to pet him?" he offered my sister. Then he added: "Bet you'd eat him."

While my mother and I were walking out to get food, a young woman threw down everything she was carrying and started to rant at us. "You Asians, you come here with your nail salons - "

I did not know what her point was and did not want to be around when she found it. Keeping our heads low, we walked away as she screamed after us.

We became so used to bracing ourselves for nastiness that whenever it didn't happen, it was a happy surprise. We were often surprised. On hearing that we did not have rubber gloves, the housekeeper in my parents' Brooklyn hotel fished a handful from her cart and gave them to my mother. "You take them," she said. She was going to be laid off the next day. "You'll need these if you're going to get home safe."

It was all we were trying to do in those final days, as the number of cases in the US jumped from three figures, to four, to five.

On March 18, the Singapore government issued an advisory against all overseas travel; the day before, it had urged Singaporean students abroad to return. The message was clear: Come home now.

This was easier said than done. The abrupt grounding of domestic flights - our Delta Airlines flight out of New Orleans was rescheduled five times - caused me to miss my flight home, prompting frantic rebooking and a sleepless night in an airport hotel.

This was nowhere near as epic as some other travel stories I heard. The world's borders were tightening in frightening ways, forcing those of us privileged enough to travel for leisure to experience a sliver of the fear and uncertainty that millions of migrants go through all the time.

I wanted to go home. I wanted access to world-class medical care, efficient testing, a national stockpile I could have faith in. I wanted my family safe, or at least as safe as they could be in this world.

On Tuesday, I touched down at Changi Airport and embraced my two weeks of stay-home notice.

This was home, truly, at least for the next 14 days. Fine by me. I didn't feel like going anywhere for a long time.

Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on March 29, 2020, with the headline Holiday gone wrong. Subscribe