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<\/a>Amid the onslaught of horrifying news about the winter surge in California, one story weighs particularly heavy on my heart: three members of the same family, all Filipino American nurses, all dead of Covid-19 within a month of one another. First the mother passed away, and then the father died a week later. Their son was intubated but eventually succumbed to the disease in late January.<\/p>\n
I knew about this family not because their deaths had made the news, but because the mother in that family was a beloved nursing school classmate of my own mother, who immigrated from the Philippines to work as a nurse in the U.S. in 1976. And when my mother shared the story with me during a weekly phone call, it was only one of several stories of friends and family falling ill and dying all around the world.<\/p>\n
Filipino Americans have been hit hard by the pandemic<\/a>. They account for 4% of American nurses but 31.5% of nurse deaths. Many of my Filipino American aunties, uncles, and cousins have been on the frontlines since the very beginning of the pandemic, serving some of the most impacted communities. In New York City, where several members of my family work as nurses, more than 30 Filipino American healthcare workers died by June<\/a>. Amid the news of these casualties, my mother, a paragon of courage and duty, declared her own willingness to come out of retirement and return to the hospital to help.<\/p>\n It was out of grief and gratitude for my Filipino American community that I began to reimagine my own responsibility to rise to the moment. In late March, back when many of us were still in the toilet-paper-hoarding and Tiger-King<\/em>-watching phase of quarantine life, I began to meet regularly with a close-knit circle of Filipino American pastors, theologians, and religion scholars to talk about the meaning of Filipino American Christianity in this moment of crisis. Together, we developed a collaborative research project<\/a> studying Filipino American spiritual resilience during the pandemic. It was a significant pivot for me, a scholar trained primarily as a historian of immigration. Yet it was also the right decision\u2014a project that was more than research, but an act of care for my community, whose past and present suffering has long been overlooked.<\/p>\n As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, it\u2019s worth taking a moment to reflect on the traumas and transformations of the past year. How has the pandemic changed us? In particular, how has it changed us as scholars? Covid-19 has sparked abundant innovations in teaching, researching, and sharing knowledge. We\u2019ve grown adept at giving lectures via Zoom and doing conferences online. We\u2019ve learned to research digital archives and create crowd-sourced public history projects.<\/p>\n But for me, the pandemic has forced a more fundamental transformation. Through the fear, dread, and sorrow of the past year, I\u2019ve rediscovered the mission that drew me to research and writing in the first place: a commitment to serving people and alleviating suffering. I\u2019ve come to understand my work as a way to bear witness to my people\u2019s pain\u2014and doing so has offered me a way to attend to mine.<\/p>\n