A small but growing number of COVID patients are trapped in limbo. They’ve been released from the hospital, they’ve tested negative, they’ve gone back to work – but they still can’t breathe. The smallest tasks exhaust them, their heads and joints ache, and there’s no medical diagnosis that seems to explain it. Welcome to the hell that […]
Social Progress
Beyond Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Social Movements
Progress happens through novel discourses. Black Lives Matter has revealed an age of moral awakening where the ‘woke’ generations have assumed avenues to bring about change. Social movements take center stage when it comes to mass social action through the collective opinions of communities. However, beyond the enormous contributions of the Black Lives Matter movement […]
Survivors of Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. Policy That Refuses Them
The word “alien” typically conjures up images of glowing, green creatures in otherworldly spaceships. Maybe even Steven Spielberg’s E.T. What seldom comes to mind are images of women fleeing violence, rape, and gang threats, in hopes of a safer life across the border. However, this was who former United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions was […]
Addressing Youth Mental Health at School
Addiction. Anxiety. Bullying. Depression. Eating disorder. Marginalization. Self-harm. Suicide. Trauma. Violence. Lives as teenagers are not always youthful nor blithe, and oftentimes life challenges are entangled with emotions and mental health. Youths’ cryptic codes of expression of these emotions, as well as the medium, have changed with the advance of technology. On social media platforms […]
Here’s Why ERs Need to be Immigrant-Friendly
“May I borrow you for a second? The patient over there speaks Mandarin,” the emergency room doctor kindly asked me. I would always encounter a couple of Chinese immigrants when volunteering at the Emergency Department at Bellevue Hospital in New York City before coronavirus swept the whole city. Most of the immigrant patients at the […]
Your “Model Minority” is Dying
“Chinese are destroying Bay Ridge.” Flyers with this title were found distributed across Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in June 2020. The flyers went on to describe some of the “crimes” that Chinese in Bay Ridge have “committed”: “junk stores: massage parlors (prostitution), nail salons, 99 cent stores, dirty Chinese restaurants; trashed up streets, bottle collecting, scavenging; coronavirus […]