This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode
Patrick Cox: Hi, I’m under the blanket. This is how we record stuff when we can’t go to a studio. Throw blankets over ourselves to make the audio sound less tinny. I was going to say there ought to be a podcast called Under the Blanket but of course there was. It’s now defunct.
It’s hot in here. Just saying.
From the Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle, stories about languages and the people who speak them.
I’m Patrick Cox. I really hope you’re healthy and safe. If you’re sick, hope you’re being well cared for.
We have two overlapping stories today about the fantastic job we’re doing right now of misunderstanding the Coronavirus.
First, an Asian American medical student’s fear of a particular accent.
And then, metaphor and the trouble it gets us into when it comes to describing a pandemic.
Patrick Cox: Esther Kim grew up surrounded by accents.
Esther Kim: I was born and raised in Los Angeles.
Patrick Cox: Her parents both originally came from South Korea.
Esther Kim: My dad came here for his medical residency. My mom came here when she was nine.
Patrick Cox: Esther’s telling me this from her — need I even say — from her self-isolation at home. She lives in North Carolina. She’s in med school there, on her way to becoming a psychiatrist.
So, the accents. There were her family’s Korean accents. There were accents at school, all kinds of them. And different accents among the international musical students she met when she was studying classical violin.
Esther was less exposed to regional American accents. Before she moved to North Carolina, she says she never even met anyone with a southern accent. TV and movies was the closest she got to that.
Esther Kim: Do you remember the Pixar movie Cars? So there’s one character, they have a very very heavy southern accent, and I thought wow, it’s just very interesting how this movie is portraying them as kind of like the down-South hick person. And, I don’t know, that’s like a very strong one for me.
Patrick Cox: But soon enough she was living in the real American South.
Esther Kim: Before I moved, I remember people telling me people in the South telling me people in the South are so kind, have you ever heard of southern hospitality, that’s what they’re all about, and so I thought alright this’ll be nice.
Patrick Cox: Which it was, until one afternoon in Esther’s third year there.
Esther Kim: I was studying at the public library, and I was with a few friends. I was the only Korean American there, and while I was studying, there was a gentleman who came and really slammed down this huge dictionary and it kind of took me by surprise and then he looked at me and said, “Here, you’ll need this.” And I looked at it, and it was an English dictionary and I was so kind of, almost in denial, I thought maybe this was like a mistake. I didn’t want to assume that he was actually— you know, if this was an act of racism. But then I realized when I looked at my other friends, they looked at me, like, “Wow, this is not okay.” And so I was really fortunate because I had two friend who actually stood up for me and one friend who actually chased him down, and approached him and talked to him about it.
Patrick Cox: What happened? What was the nature of the conversation?
Esther Kim: Well when I asked my friend, he just said he didn’t even have words. I don’t know if he said sorry, but he didn’t even have any words, he didn’t argue back, he just kind of cowardly scurried away. He was almost embarrassed.
Patrick Cox: Esther says she still doesn’t really get what he was trying to say. It was so random. But one thing that stuck was his heavy accent. It was something she couldn’t shake off.
And then recently, things for her and her friends started getting worse. It began in January before Donald Trump famously renamed COVID-19 the…
Donald Trump: Chinese virus.
Patrick Cox: Esther isn’t Chinese, but she and friends sensed that they were being seen as Chinese. People steered clear of them on the street, one woman even made a show of covering her mouth with a handkerchief as Esther walked past her. And that was before most people were wearing face masks.
Her friends — other Asian med students — had it worse.
Esther Kim: There was one of my friends who, who had told me that her friend was stalked by a man in a car recording videos of her while she was walking her dog and the entire time he was just recording her on his phone and was yelling racial slurs at her and saying that she was dangerous and that she needs to stay away from him. Even though he was the one that was following her. I don’t know how that one works. That same friend that told me that story, she experienced something herself when she went to CVS a couple weeks ago. She was walking into an aisle and there was an older Caucasian woman and they were kind of both looking at the same thing. All of a sudden, she acknowledges that she’s there and jumps and yells, “There’s one now.” Those are a couple experiences I didn’t go through, but just hearing about it just breaks my heart because it’s really a shame that these are people who are in medicine who are really dedicated their lives to help others — and to think that they’re being treated like this is really awful.
Patrick Cox: So now, when Esther hears someone speaking with a southern accent, it sends a warning flare in her mind.
Esther Kim: I definitely have a little bit more anxiety it if I’m at a grocery store and I hear it, especially when I hear of all these stories that have been happening to my friends. Actually, I think I’m a little bit more cautious. Ever since that incident in the library where the gentleman did have a very very heavy Southern accent, it’s almost like I’ve got this Pavlovian response. So if I hear it behind my back, or I hear it in public, I kind of feel like I have to be a little more hyper-alert, worrying that, “Okay, this person could maybe act in the same way, or they could be racist, they could act bigoted, and they probably don’t have the same political views as I do.” And I know that’s something that I have to correct. Because we shouldn’t make assumptions based on people’s accents, ever. But it is interesting how human brains become wired that way when you have negative experiences, more so than the positive experiences. I guess you remember the negative things even more.
Patrick Cox: Esther Kim. She’ll be graduating from medical school next month. After that, she plans to move back to Los Angeles where she’ll start her residency in psychiatry. It was a friend put me in touch with Esther. He’s Chinese American, a front-line doctor at a hospital also in North Carolina. He teaches med students. He told me of an encounter he had recently with a hospital patient, a white woman, who told him, “You people brought that virus over.” He uses that comment — and his response to it — he told her that what she said was inappropriate, and in any case, he doesn’t discriminate on any grounds — he uses that as a teaching moment for his students, many of whom are non-white.
To give you an idea of how widespread this kind of thing has become, there’s an organization in California called the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. It’s working with an Asian Studies professor at San Francisco State University to document what it calls incidents of Coronavirus discrimination.
Everything from being barred from getting on a subway train, to being spat upon, to being physically assaulted. In the two weeks up to April 1, the Council’s report lists nearly 100 incidents a day — that’s just the reported incidents mind you, probably a fraction of the actual number.
Patrick Cox: There are very few us who’ve experienced anything quite like the crisis we’re going through now. We don’t know how to describe it, or what to call it or what to compare it to. Our leaders though, seem pretty certain.
Donald Trump : America continues to wage all-out war to defeat the virus, the horrible horrible virus.
Boris Johnson: We must act like any wartime government.
Emmanuel Macron voiceover: Nous sommes en guerre.
Patrick Cox: Finally, my high school French is kicking in. “We are at war,” says French President Emmanuel Macron.
Why all the war talk? Are these words the best ones to use right now?
Seema Yasmin: People will say, “Oh, you’re being too analytical.” Or, “We’re in the middle of a crisis, word choice doesn’t matter right now.” But it really does.
Patrick Cox: Seema Yasmin thinks that many politicians are misleading us. She’s a medical doctor. She teaches medicine and journalism at Stanford. And one of her interests is the misrepresentation of science.
Seema Yasmin: The science isn’t at war with this disease, we can’t bomb it away in the same way that governments bomb enemies. Science in terms of its fight against infectious disease, it’s a slow slog. It can be hard. And in the meantime, you’ve got politicians and other officials using this very violent language at a time right now when there’s already so much stress. We’re seeing reports that domestic violence is on the rise. People are cooped up at home, stressed out. So, I don’t think it’s helpful to use that language and I don’t think it’s reflective of the science.
Patrick Cox: But if you look at it from a politician’s point of view, a leader’s point of view, it is easier to see why you might want to dress all this up in war metaphors. After all, you want the people to mobilize, to change their conduct, to make sacrifices. And they’re only going to do it if you can convey the danger, what’s at stake, in the starkest possible way.
— — —
Winston Churchill: What crimes has Hitler and all that Hitler stands for brought upon Europe and the world? The outrage of the unopposed air bombings applied with calculated and scientific cruelty to helpless populations.
Patrick Cox: Once you’ve established the existential nature of the threat, then you can ask people to act and maybe suffer so they can survive.
Winston Churchill: Lift up your hearts. All will come right. Out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice will the born again the glory of mankind.
Patrick Cox: With a formula as powerful as that, why wouldn’t a political leader declare that we’re at war? And why wouldn’t we buy it?
Seema Yasmin: I have to say that I too sometimes slip up and fall into that language. But I think it’s really important to correct ourselves, and think about the impact that can be had when you’re using really violent language at a time when people are already anxious and already scared. Like, how does that really help us?
Patrick Cox: Okay, okay. At this point I pushed back at Seema a little. I mean, in a crisis like this, we the people, we’re crying out for leaders who are fearless and honest and inspirational. Leaders who can use a strong, soaring metaphor — maybe a flawed one too — but use it in, let’s say more nuanced responsible way.
Patrick Cox: If there’s been any hero in this crisis for a lot of people it’s Gov Andrew Cuomo of New York. He’s shown leadership, toughness, and empathy, and people really seem to like him. He has taken this war metaphor further than anybody else. When he was on the New York Times daily podcast, in mid-March he said…
Andrew Cuomo: We see the enemy on the horizon. They are approaching very quickly. And we don’t have our defenses in place. When they talk about flattening the curve flattening the curve, they’re trying to slow the advance of the enemy, until we can get enough of our defenses in place. What are the defenses? A health care system that can handle, the injured, to torture the metaphor.
Patrick Cox: Is there a sense in which by using this stark language that he’s able to convey something that has more meaning to the general public, and is not just simply describing it just as a straight-out war, but actually trying to make points about public health concerns like flattening the curve?
Seema Yasmin: So, again, I don’t see how that language, which is violent, militaristic, paints this microscopic pathogen as the enemy, we need to fight, but I think about the epidemic of mental health illness that we’re seeing as well. We’re seeing people, really anxious, people grieving the ones they have lost. For some, there might be some power in using that kind of militaristic language against the pandemic, against the virus. But for others, that can just be really alarming. And it takes me back to the literature on cancer and the language we use with cancer patients. Some cancer patients like to be called cancer warriors or like to think about this being a battle. And others say, heck, no, I don’t want to think about this in violent terms. It’s something that’s inside my body. If you’re calling it a fight or you’re calling it a battle, then that suddenly has turned my body into a conflict zone. And so that could be perhaps how some New Yorkers are feeling personally if they are infected, but also maybe not wanting to think about their city or their state being a battleground in those quite scary terms.
Patrick Cox: And when you look at the history of this. Well. this fighting disease metaphor, it’s baked into our consciousness. It goes back at least as until the mid 1600s…
Seema Yasmin: …when there was a very famous British doctor called Thomas Sydenham, and this might be one of the earliest instances of that kind of violent language in medicine. But he said, I attack the enemy within a murderous array of disease, has to be fought against. And the battle is not a battle for the sluggard. And then we skip to the 19th century when Louis Pasteur, the French biologist who talked about the germ theory of disease, he talked about infectious disease being invading armies that lay siege to our bodies. So really imperialistic language, actually, that ties in with what was happening politically, then. They talked about disease had to be conquered very much in the same way that continents and dark continents had had to be conquered, too. You skip forward a little bit more to the 1920s and suddenly we’re talking about cancer cells being anarchists and cancer cells being Bolsheviks. And then skip forward to 1971 when Nixon signs the National Cancer Act and he talks about the war on cancer. So, it’s not new. It goes back to at least the 1600s as far as I could find.
Patrick Cox: One other effect of this war metaphor is that it makes it easier for political leaders to turn entire groups of people into potential enemies. For a while as we heard, Donald Trump called coronavirus the Chinese virus — he implied that he gave it that name in retaliation for a Chinese theory that American forces had somehow spread the virus to China. He doesn’t call it that anymore, but Seema says the damage is done.
Seema Yasmin: We’ve seen a president who really framed this as a foreign problem that’s come from outside and almost was an attack from China on the U.S. And that language, again, talking about the impact of words, that language has translated very directly into attacks on Chinese American people, people of Asian descent. I think that’s very deliberate in terms of framing this as a foreign invader and something that needs to be fore on those grounds as opposed to a compassionate approach with empathy towards those who are infected and those who are fighting those who are trying to treat those people who are ill.
Patrick cox: Seema Yasmin is a public health physician and a medical journalist. She directs the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. And she also mentioned to me that in the UK there’s an online collection of alternative metaphors for describing cancer. That sounds really fascinating and I’ll see if we can talk to someone there for a future episode.
We’re planning more episodes with stories like these, of words and phrases, metaphors that are coming up in this moment. We’d really like to hear from you — if you have a story to tell about a phrase in another language — or any issue involving language, let us know.
Write us. The address is subtitlepod@gmail.com. Or tweet us. We’re @lingopod.
This episode of Subtitle was reported by Patrick Cox and edited by Kavita Pillay.. The podcast version of the story is available here and on Apple podcasts.
Subtitle’s sound designer is Tina Tobey.
This episode was edited by Patrick Cox.
Thanks to our partners at the Linguistic Society of America, the Hub & Spoke audio collective and The World public radio program.
Subtitle is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.