Let's Hunker Down 避避風頭

Series title: "My Ancestors Made An Expression for Everything - to describe, guide and affirm life." Piece No. 1

Let's Hunker Down 避避風頭  bì bì fēng tóu

Gisela Jia

My child was tested Covid positive, today. I heard the news as she called me from her bedroom while I was in the kitchen.

She is fully vaccinated, with the two shots and the booster. Two years of continuous precaution...

This gust of Omnicron wind is so strong that it has blown off some hats, some hair, and even some heads! 

Now, I've finally qualified for a close contact, and may even soon qualify for a positive, pushing up that thin-looking ascending line that I've been watching everyday.

If my classes had started on January 3rd Monday, this moment I would be in the classroom with ten students. This past five days, I would have been in close contact with dozens of students and teachers.

If I'm tested positive in a few hours, I would need to tell all these parents that their children are close contacts. Parents then should go through the thick paragraphs of guidelines that have kept changing, and figure out whether they should quarantine their children for just the weekend, or into early next week, or not at all. This would be a nice "add-on task" to these parents who are sending their children back to school, battling the various systems and trying to stay clear of covid for their children's sake.

If I'm not tested positive, then, as a close contact, what should I do with my onsite classes tomorrow ?(On Sat, boy, I teach quite a few students the whole day) In some schools a teacher like me can go onsite. But I really don't feel comfortable aspirating diligently to correct my students' tones when I'm worried viruses are brewing in my body.  I may not be able to find a sub teacher at this hour. Well, then, all my onsite classes need to go online. 

I feel so lucky that this is not happening!

I've been tested frequently and so has been my child. But now I've seen that this happens so fast that I likely would not have tested in between Mon and Fri the first moment when my covid status was elevated by the virus.

Around Christmas time, seeing the Covid numbers going up driven by such a crazy variant, passing crowds of people gathering for the holidays,  hearing from jolly friends and families traveling domestically and internationally, a Chinese phrase kept on popping up in my head. I tried to drive it away, but it just kept on coming back to pester me.

The phrase is an idiom, with four characters corresponding to four simple syllables -

避避風頭 bì bì fēng tóu 

避 Bì =  avoid; 風 fēng = wind,  頭 tóu = head

Literal: To avoid the head of the wind.

Actual: To lie low until the gust of wind blows over and past.

避避風頭 finally led to our program starting classes one week later. No student loses any class. We just extend the school year. The majority of the onsite students' parents also voted to have at least one week of class online. 

One may say, "Your case can happen any time, as long as the pandemic lasts." I disagree. The north wind blows in the winter, but the wind is different from day to day. In the summer of 2020, when I had just spent April and May sitting at my small work desk in the kitchen listening to the sirens of ambulances rushing Covid infected people to the hospitals where thousands died,  I and another teacher ran an onsite full-day camp for 8 weeks straight. In a city shadowed by the tremendous amount of deaths, we ran, we shopped, we cooked, and we put on a play of the Indian epic Ramayana, culminating our intense study of the Southeast Asia.

That whole summer, 避避风头 never came to my mind even once. I felt we were sailing on a boat that just passed through a storm, the next lag uncertain, but the calm water and warming sunshine would last long enough for us to catch that breath.

避避風頭 - my ancestors really hit on something. We take off a bit later, we lose one onsite class, and in return, we might have avoided losing several onsite classes, and avoided having too many classes taught by subs (I who don't speak any Spanish was asked to sub for Spanish classes in schools many times), or having sick teachers appearing on the screen, when "education" is not the "education" we should be giving.

Only yesterday, I read that a professor of public health named Han Kim in Salt Lake City said this - "Maybe it (Omnicron) spreads so quickly, it burns itself out very quickly, which means it's just a matter of hunkering down maybe just for a few weeks." 

"Hunker down"? I did not know this phrase. Sounds like it means the same thing as 避避風頭.

To my ancestors - although your wisdom is not the One and Only, still, hats off to you, for reminding us of such a thing we can do that is called 避避風頭. I understand that you went through so much hardship that you decided to string the four syllables up to hand it down to us. Thank you! 感謝!

To the readers of this note - It gets windy in life sometimes. I hope this phrase will come handy to you. Even if you are lucky enough not to run into any wind in life, these words, 避 - avoid, 風  - wind,  頭 - head are daily words that you can use to help with your daily expressions. Remembering your encounter with them in this note can save your Chinese teachers some ducking down, swinging their arms or tapping their heads in their lessons with you.