A Cultural Disconnect

It's not often when my relatively off the grid town of Riverside becomes a focal point for national news.  Riverside, California is known for its former glory for citrus, smog, and other current attractions such as The Mission Inn, Lunar Festival, Festival of Lights (Mission Inn), and a new UCR School of Medicine, now has become a focal interest for Wuhan's Corona Virus.

Flashback ten or more years ago when the former March Air Force Base was in operation.  It was a major Strategic Air Command location. In those days in the 1950s and 60s, there was a ready alert squadron parked their with dark and looming B 52 Stratofortress bombers and their pilots poised at the southern end of the 13000-foot runway ready to be launched at a moment's notice.

Their daily practice sessions could not be missed with the roar of engines and a trail of smoky engine exhausts.

What a difference, this week 195 souls arrived from the consul in Wahun, China.  There was no fanfare, and there was no rumbling noise heard.  Jet engine technology is much quieter and fuel-efficient.  No one would have known about it, but not for the internet.

Riverside may be known now for the repatriation of our diplomats from China, or it may be known as the entry point for Corona Virus.  Hopefully, the quarantine will be successful.  Although I just hear about an attempted escape from the March Air Reserve Gulag.

I missed seeing the arrival of the chartered Boeing 747,  even though I am able to see departing aircraft (FEDEX, C117s, and occasionally Air Force One. MARB, as it is now known, has been proposed for many things, a medical destination, housing for the homeless. For a time it was a haven for developers.

Most people had no awareness of this once in a lifetime event.  I have not witnessed an outbreak of facial masks, other than the ones some people wear to void off bad air.

So it is now time to segway to the Cultural Disconnect.

LOS ANGELES — Several staff members of a small community health clinic in L.A.’s historic Chinatown spoke on the phone with patients Tuesday while wearing face masks that muffled their voices.

The masks are a recent phenomenon at the clinic, located inside the Chinatown Service Center, a nonprofit community assistance organization that serves mainly Chinese immigrants.

Staffers showed up for work wearing the masks Monday, a day after public health officials confirmed the first two California cases of the new coronavirus, in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said Dr. Felix Aguilar, the clinic’s chief medical officer.

 Bright-yellow warning signs instruct patients to tell staff immediately if they have just traveled out of the U.S. and are experiencing cough or fever or are having trouble breathing. (Anna Almendrala/California Healthline)

At the Chinatown Service Center medical clinic in downtown Los Angeles, which serves predominantly Chinese immigrant patients, administrative staff wore medical face masks after local health officials confirmed the presence of two cases of the novel coronavirus in Los Angeles and Orange counties. (Anna Almendrala/California Healthline)

As China grapples with the growing coronavirus outbreak, Chinese people in the Los Angeles area — home to the third-largest Chinese immigrant population in the United States — are encountering a cultural disconnect as they brace for a possible spread of the virus in their adopted homeland. 

 The use of face masks is common in China, to protect against both germs and pollution. But when Chinese immigrants wear them in the U.S., it often conflicts with guidance from officials, who warn that they offer minimal protection and could lull wearers into a false sense of security. It can also draw suspicious gazes from passersby.

“In the U.S., if you’ve got a mask, people will sort of look at you like you’re doing something unusual, whereas in Asia it’s fairly common to do this, and people don’t give it a second thought,” said Dr. Bryant Lin, co-director of the Center for Asian Health Research and Education at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Alhambra Unified School District in Los Angeles County, where a significant proportion of students are from Mandarin-speaking families, is getting a lot of pushback against school rules that ban face masks for students, said Toby Gilbert, a spokesperson for the district.

“There is no evidence that the mask-wearing in a school setting does anything but create fear,” Gilbert said. “It keeps people from remembering that the primary defense is hand-washing.”

The Los Angeles County Office of Education, which encompasses 80 school districts, notes that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the L.A. County Department of Public Health do not recommend the use of masks for preventive purposes. It reiterates the view of the county health department that there is “no immediate threat to the general public and no special precautions are required.”

Nonetheless, local stores have run out of masks.

As a final welcome to Riverside, I offer you a bag of oranges and grapefruit.

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