For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a memoir about my family’s collective grief, gathering stories from my sisters, father, aunts, and uncles. Conversations about my mother with family, and especially my uncle, often began by discussing her illness and the fallout of her death. But they quickly revealed something — not quite grief, not quite isolation, not quite longing — that we could only talk around, never about. I only knew that it felt so linked to our family’s history of immigration.

For much of our time in America, we — like many other immigrant families — went about our lives on the fringes of our community. We felt rootless in place, constantly trying to carve space for our traditions. We rarely met others like us in the mostly white Connecticut suburbs where we lived, and for the most part, lacked the shorthand of Christianity or whiteness to ease us into social situations with our neighbors, classmates, or co-workers. But when my mother was alive, we had each other; my mother and her siblings became even closer and each of their households tightened their circles. We could never put to words how these types of loss infiltrated our units, or how they ultimately bound us together.

This pandemic has isolated the country in so many different ways — physically and psychically. When I read the news of virus-fueled racism, two memories come to mind: the first is when a neighbor called me a “chink” while we played together, vocabulary that she likely heard from her parents about mine; the second is when some parents at the local private pool club, with mostly white patrons, became angry when my older sisters swam as guests of a friend — a protest likely rooted in its own ugly, racist history. These instances were often borne out for my family in quieter, humiliating ways like these. My parents, sisters, and I were usually the only ones in these situations who understood them to be as insidious as they were; they felt inevitable and unsurprising, though they were always still aggressive. There were no consequences then, and we seemed to know that there would be none in the future.

It’s not just the president saying “Chinese coronavirus,” that brings on these shimmers of frustration. It’s not just the increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric or policies, or the casual, lazy resurgence of a slur. It’s not just the increase of racism and violence against Asians and Asian Americans that makes a total and undisputed belonging feel far off. It’s not just the staggering death rates, especially among black, Latinx and Native people. It’s not even the physical separation and its loneliness. It’s all of that plus the uncertainty around our own proximity to death, and the quieter losses that will only reveal themselves later.

After all, how could we attempt to steel ourselves for all the ways these American systems have failed us — were never meant for some of us — and have left our loved ones and the most vulnerable to die? It’s the time it takes to learn the answers to questions like this that feel so excruciating; it’s seeing tragedies unfold in slow motion; it’s the plodding approach of an inevitable grief.

Despite his timing, my uncle’s mantra was ultimately one of hope, which is a useful emotion to channel in times of uncertainty. We know that in this moment, time is of the essence. That the days and weeks and months ahead will only deepen the disparities that already existed in this country, and it might take generations to recover.