Letters from Seclusion: Reality Meets Fiction Under Quarantine

Students of Professor Hu Ying share their observations and experiences of Covid-19 with future generations in view of the challenges it presents to their reality of daily living.

To motivate myself when recording lectures, I placed a picture of a group of students I taught in the early days of my UCI career right next to my computer.
-- Hu Ying

In spring 2020, I taught “Fantastic Fiction,” a large lecture course that includes writers from East Asia and Euro-America whose commonality lies in their interest in non-realistic narratives. Reading authors such as Julio Cortázar and Ken Liu, students raised questions about their blurring of the fantastic and the realistic. And in view of  our own increasingly fantastic life under quarantine, I asked the students to “write a letter to the future generation about your Covid-19 experiences, observations, and feelings” on Discussion Board.  The posts below are a few samples in which the writers confronted the strangeness at the heart of reality itself with compassion, humor and amazing resilience.

Read Allison Greenlea's letter.
Read Hana Diatalevi's letter.
Read Amy Li's letter.
Read Brynna Hobart's letter.
Read Stacey Morales's letter.
Read Gwynette Faye Amian Paez's letter.
Read Jackie Heaton's letter.
Read Kathleen Ho's letter.