A tale worth telling

The lexicon of change. Phrases with which we were not familiar just a few months ago have now become part of our everyday language. Face masks, COVID-19, confirmed cases, social distancing and lockdowns. The images they conjure up are etched into our memory.

Since late January, Yu Tianrui, who is in her 20s, has been in contact with, and talked to, people from different countries and various walks of life about their personal experiences and feelings during this historic time.

"As the pandemic started to rage on, like many others, I was startled to see the dramatically increasing number of confirmed cases every day," recalls Yu, who is taking a gap year after graduation last year from Columbia University's Oral History MA Program. "I was anxious and wanted to help but didn't know how."

An idea then hit her. Why not use her specialty to highlight and preserve for generations to come the hardships people went through along with some of the touching moments.

She then initiated a COVID-19 oral history project. She did not know what to expect, but furthest from her mind was that a teacher from the Affiliated High School of Peking University would contact her and invite her to teach 68 Beijing high school students how to conduct the same oral history project.

Oral history is a field of study that gathers, preserves and interprets the voices and memories of people and communities that participated in past events. It reflects personal, subjective opinions offered by the narrator, and can be used to gain a valuable insight into history.

Among the people she interviewed was a reporter who stayed in Wuhan, the hardest hit city in China, for more than 80 days to report on how people in the city fought the virus. Not all the interviews were with people in China. One was with a Chinese person working in the luxury sector in Italy. Another was a Beijing resident who had to rethink his future plans after losing his job as a teacher at an online education provider during the outbreak. There was also the daughter of a couple who were frontline medical professionals in Wuhan.

Generally, they were questioned about how their lives had been affected during the outbreak, how their work had changed and how they reflected on the crisis.

"I hope the various perspectives offered by the narrators might help people better understand each other and therefore create harmony and cohesion in these tough days," says Yu.

She adds that after readers notice that most of the interviewees, though from different backgrounds, shared similar anxieties when initially facing the pandemic, they may later feel a sense of relief and empathy, having established a better understanding of others.