What ends during COVID starts again somewhere else
It didn't hit me that the office where my parents ran a Vietnamese-language newspaper for decades was really closed until I noticed I still have a key on my chain that I no longer use.
My younger brother and I had been preparing for the shutdown of the office since July. On weekends, we’d sift through 36 years of existence packed into 1050 square feet. Binders of old invoices and advertising orders, stacks of newspapers and Vietnamese music CDs were stuffed inside the drawers of executive desks made of cheap wood with “mahogany” veneer, hefty enough to withstand the bulky monitors and desktops of the 1990s. The stuff stored there wasn’t just work-related. My brothers and I were also guilty of leaving our odd pieces of clothing, sporting equipment, and high school yearbooks at the office.
The adrenaline needed to constantly sift, pack, and then haul to the dump fueled me just enough to get through the over three tons of trash. When we were done, I had no energy left to feel sad.
The pandemic has many victims. Aside from the over half million who have died, the nearly 10 million who are still unemployed because of COVID, there have been over 300,000 businesses that have closed since February last year.
Our newspaper, a business started by my parents in 1986 to serve the growing Vietnamese immigrant community, hasn't closed... yet. For now, it’s just our physical office that is closed. We are certain it will never open again.
I haven’t been able to find a stat around how many businesses have moved to remote work completely.
Even before the pandemic, we had considered closing the newspaper office as a way to reduce expenses. We took pride in being one of the only two Vietnamese newspapers that had an office outside the owners’ home. An office represented professionalism. It also meant customers could come by the office to pick up newspapers and place ads. Anticipation filled the air on Fridays, when the newspaper came out. People would pick up a newspaper when they went grocery shopping for the week. Over the years, the sign with the name of the newspaper, "Người Việt Tây Bắc" has faded to a faint pink, a shadow of the bold red it once was when we first moved in.
The office was sandwiched between a foot massage parlor and a mortgage broker and it down the corridor from a school for nursing assistants. Although the neighborhood was getting a bit more gentrified because of the Light Rail station built across the street and expensive high rise housing soon followed, the shopping center we were located in became increasingly run down. Over time, we opted to use the elevator instead of the stairs to avoid encounters with those passed out on steps. The pandemic halted the already slowing activity. With the governor’s orders in March, my parents and the newspaper staff started working from home. The Vietnamese community events that the newspaper use to cover religiously ended as well. Advertising dried up, as many of the Vietnamese-owned mom and pop shops, restaurants, and nail salons had to close temporarily.
In August, we began the process of getting rid of the furniture. I posted on my Facebook page photos of items available for free as long as they could be picked up. The pandemic caused a shortage in desks and appliances. The refrigerator was claimed first. One acquaintance lamented the lack of desks for purchase for her two sons on Facebook and I privately offered desks and bookshelves. Another friend who came for the fridge realized she also wanted the big leather couch. She enlisted her neighbor, a professional rodent catcher with a full-sized pickup truck, to make numerous trips to transport the goods. We used our vinyl event banners to protect the furniture and I smiled at the image of a Vietnamese singer flapping as the truck drove away. Bit by bit, people claimed and picked up most of what I was advertised. I was amazed by who responded and how the various ways they transported the furniture away. One month before everything shut down in Washington, we had managed to give away 20 banker boxes of Vietnamese-language books and newspapers to the University of Washington.
In the end, parts of Washington's longest-running Vietnamese newspaper found new homes throughout the community, mainly with immigrants from other countries: in a Somali family's home office in Renton; in the community space of a small nonprofit run out of a Guyanese woman’s home in Bellevue; in the house of a South African couple with a newborn baby in Tacoma; a Millennial couple’s apartment in Pioneer square; at the University of Washington’s Southeast Asian Collection; in an African-American owned fashion store called Platinum Plush up the street on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South; and in the community center space of the nonprofit Friends of Little Saigon in the International District. The bookcases, the dishware, the couch all had new lives, with new owners.
One friend later told me, “It is not just a couch for me, it's meaningful. Thanks for the difference you made in my life.”
We have been both donors and recipients. Two years ago, a high school friend of mine was moving and offered to give us an 8-person high dining room table with matching bar stools that didn’t fit into her new home. Her boyfriend even delivered it in his pickup truck from Wallingford to my parents’ home in Newcastle. Now we use that table as the standing work desk hub. My father is there every morning, starting around 5 am, working on the upcoming newspaper. None of us could have predicted that what once was used for her vegetarian dinner parties would be the new “office” for a Vietnamese newspaper.
January marked the last official month of my family having a “professional” office. In closing it down, I came to redefine what an “office” means. The pandemic expedited the inevitable. I also witnessed what it feels like to be a part of a community that shares whatever we have, including the time and labor it takes to transport something from one home to its new owners.
I’m keeping the newspaper office key on my chain. It serves as a reminder of what I once deeply believed so that I can appreciate what I have since learned.
For the Vietnamese version on Northwest Vietnamese News, please read here.