The Covid Connections

Getting to video chat one-on-one with people from all over the world was an experience I’ll not soon forget.

I moved out of China in March 2020, one month after Covid struck there, and until early 2022 my only source of income was part time freelance English teaching online. This unique period of time allowed me the privilege of having one-one-one conversations with people from many different countries. Here are some of the dear students who stand out in my memory more than a year or two later.

Grace, in South Korea, was 7 year old truly gifted child, precious and bordering on a prodigy. She had somehow taught herself near fluent conversational English purely through educational TV programs, despite her mother not speaking any English. She also could cobble together a bit of reading despite not ever having been taught letter sounds; the child could just absorb language in whole chunks. She was extremely knowledgeable about dinosaurs and liked to demonstrate her kickboxing in her pajamas. She was saying I love you in all the ways a child knows how. “Watch me.” I could hardly get a word in edgewise.

Laura was a frazzled new mom in northern Spain with a busy working partner. She was working part time as an artist and teacher. I remember her telling me how her baby was the only child in the whole apartment building and about the Celtic influence on the culture of Galicia. I remember that she was fun to talk to and had a thick accent, and that she told me that it rains quite a lot there.

Lucas was a deeply empathetic young Brazilian man who was educating himself on Brazil’s own version of the Black Lives Matter movement that was sweeping their nation at the time.

Guilherme, also Brazilian, was such a hard working student. Impecably grateful and polite, he was painfully deliberate and always smiling. He worked for an international company, like so many of my other students who were businesspeople. They all either had ambitions to advance further in their careers or had recently received promotions that required more collaboration with other branches.

Nasrin was a striking woman, deeply intelligent and deeply lonely. She was an Iranian graduate researcher, working diligently to try to live up to expectations in the research lab while adjusting to new life all alone in the American midwest. Her English skills were already essentially fluent. She had fallen for a guy who didn’t want a relationship, so she was struggling with heartbreak as well. Visa restrictions and other global circumstances prevented her from going home to be with her father when he had recently a bad scare with his heart. If he had died, she would have missed the funeral. She confessed that she, as aware as she was of the health risks given her circumstances, she had nevertheless chosen to take up smoking because of the amount of stress in her life.

There were a few lessons with a Chinese attorney, who was full of ideas, offers, and promises, but short on follow through. He introduced me to the difference in body language between chinese and western culture, saying that he could always read people’s faces in a courtroom or meeting and knew what they were feeling or thinking but he couldn’t read mine. This was fascinating to me since I am rather notoriously expressive. You can read more about this phenomenon here

And now I come to Sasha and Misha, two Polish twin girls about 14 years old. They were such absolute jewels of young people, and it was such a privilege to get to know them. They loved anime and Japan, played the piano, and had a cat that they liked to play with. Sasha was shyer than Misha, but they were both pretty upset about bullying at school as well as various sexist and homophobic ideas and policies in Poland’s far-right government. They were animated, thoughtful, reflective, full of minor sibling bickering and thoughts on the world around them, passionate about their interests and human rights, and quite good students. The world does not deserve them. They were also clearly suffering from petty peer ostracizing and the lack of friends that came from the covid lockdowns and being stuck doing school from home. They were really so bright.

Ettore! My dear friend as well as client, ours was an old-timey meeting of the minds across distance. Wan, sickly epitome of a haggard philosopher, with a deeply reflective and gentle heart. He was Sicilian, got his degree in Milan, and moved to Germany to teach at a university there. He could write post-graduate academic paper for publication in Italian, German, and English, but wasn’t getting any in-person English speaking practice outside of our appointments. Prone to diving into tangents, smiling when he agreed and began to excitedly latch onto an idea or remark, speaking and enunciating in a painstaking slow way sometimes, he only needed the occasional correction on minor points of grammar or pronunciation. He was contributing a piece to anthology about the nature of consciousness. It was very heady, abstract stuff, with definitions of Greek words sprinkled throughout. It was a pleasure to squint at the text and really have something to academically sink my teeth into. Like kicking a bike into a gear that finally provides some resistance, only for the brain.

When I moved back to the US, I quickly transitioned out of online tutoring. By that point I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and that was to work in person, out in the world, out of my house, with people. However, the satisfaction of those eureka moments of communication, and the pure joy of watching a person make progress and light up, is a feeling I’ll probably be chasing the rest of my life. I hope it never leaves.