By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer
Director Jesse Stewart and actor Sam Li on the set of a Chinese miniseries.
In March of last year, I was on a date with a model at a fancy Italian restaurant in Hong Kong. In March of this year, I was alone in my parents’ basement with a plate of chicken tenders. I ordered chicken tenders in Hong Kong as well, but that's not the point.
To say that COVID-19 has upended the average life would be an understatement. Every nation has been brought to their knees, economies slowly sinking and people more unsure and insecure than they have been since the Second World War. Even those that love to plan and prioritize have found themselves look at not just the coming year with uncertainty but the coming week.
I am among those that had a 'good' life before the pandemic. For the first time in my career and far younger than expected, I was going to make six figures in 2020. I'm a filmmaker and the third 'big' project of my career was set to shoot in the summer. I was a bit ambitious as well, planning to take those six figures and use them to shoot my debut feature film, with the goal of having it ready for festivals in 2021. In reality, through no fault of my own, I had lost thousands of dollars by the end of Spring and my industry wasn't even sure how it could possibly exist in the current state of the world. Sure, the quarantined masses need entertainment, but how are projects supposed to be funded when no one has any money? If actors need to stay six feet apart, how are we supposed to shoot that romantic scene where they share chicken tenders?
My initial reaction to the pandemic was somewhat average. I had a part-time job that immediately shuttered because it was based on theatre, opera, and symphony patrons, an entire demographic that has temporarily ceased to exist. I used the free time to finish a screenplay or two as well as indulge in what will likely become one of the most significant media releases in history, the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Focusing on my inner creativity as well as my digital bonsai tree was beneficial: like many, I would argue that I 'grew' as a person through this isolation and seclusion.
I had the benefit of staying with my parents at the time, but I own a small business: though my rent was now significantly cheaper, it's not like my bills stayed six feet away. My business partners and I looked at options for 'COVID-proof' film concepts, but it's very difficult to draw up battle plans for a large group effort when the legalities of basic congregation are in flux almost daily.
By the end of June, I had imploded. There's only so much 'character development' and 'internal growth' one can undergo before weakening your sense of self to the point of collapse. Flurry, the winter-themed hamster who lives on my Animal Crossing island, may be the sweetest being in existence, but she doesn't actually exist. They may be quick and tasty, especially with a bottle of orange sauce from Panda Express, but I can only eat so many chicken tenders. I am a modest and frugal man, but even I have my limits.
When faced with a massive difficulty in life, or even a multitude of minor troubles that coalesce into a solid mass of problems, there are really only two options. One can simply stop, resign themselves, and sink into the abyss, choosing to see the present condition as insurmountable. Or one can strategize. I grew up reading a lot of military books, learning tactics and maneuvers; it's simply a matter of physics in saying that there are only four options when faced with an opposing force in your path: you can go over, under, around, or through that which is antagonizing you.
In quarantine, I had inadvertently grown to be much more complacent than I usually am. I think I rationalized this at the time as a 'strategic retreat’: I would save as much money as I could, by living with my parents, in order to ensure that I could help finance my feature film. I would work on myself, striving for self-improvement with free time I didn't have before. And I would 'relax,' by playing a video game for the first time in a long time. But the problem was that each of these little endeavors had no metric for progression or advancement, as there was no external force by which to measure them against.
COVID-19 is not an opposing obstacle in anyone's path: it's a state of reality. In the same way one wouldn't lament the fact that they can't breathe underwater, one must accept that there is a respiratory disease that spreads through close-contact infection and can't simply be 'willed' out of existence. COVID-19 is not a stone in your path, it's the uneven stones upon it. The terrain of life has changed, your tactics should change along with it.
By the start of July, I surveyed the peaks and valleys of 2020, those rolling hills that I didn't expect when I crested the New Year back in January. Filming anything this year seemed to be a foolish proposition, but remaining slow and reserved until conditions improved was clearly not giving me enough momentum and causing me to sink. John A. Shedd once said, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for"; the peaks and valleys of 2020 aren't as solid as land, we're faced with the rolling waves of an unsure sea.
So, I set out to find, inscribe, and place distinct milestones to place on my path. The film industry is often a 'wait-and-see' business, where one hands off the baton and waits for their colleagues to return it after running their lap, so chopping my own entirely-individual trail was something I hadn't done in a while. It's definitely odd to cut a path only wide enough for one.
Though I couldn't quite afford it in these unsure times, I found a great apartment in Denver. Not as great as my apartment in Beijing, but I learned to humble my expectations and have now fallen in love with my home. I hadn't done manual labor in years, but I found a part time job loading shipping boxes into the back of shipping trucks so they can be shipped to the coast and into shipping ships. Each day is tough, dirty, and tiring, but I sleep like a baby. And I returned to college to finish my degree, after quite a long sabbatical, having left to pursue my career; a decision that paid off until a force of nature ground the entire globe to a complete halt. Like Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
The benefit of COVID-19 directly punching the lives of just about every human being on the face of the planet, arguably making it the most significant event in history since the Ice Age, is the psychological advantage of knowing that one is absolutely not alone in this crisis. The event may be unprecedented, but there are far too many people affected by this for any one situation to be entirely exclusive to just one person. Whatever you're struggling with or whatever discomforts you face, there are thousands if not millions of others who are just as unsure, uncertain, unstable, uneasy, and unprepared for tomorrow as you might be.
I look around the campus at Regis University and it feels like an alternate reality to me; I didn't have the money to go to college when I graduated high school, regardless of how badly I wanted to go. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that I'd have a beautiful academic refuge and be surrounded by such bright young peers. I specify 'young' because I'm a little bit older than most students, still in my twenties but only just, while they're all so bubbly, smiley, and taking this crisis in stride. I'm happy to see they're facing this seemingly-ceaselessly-stormy sea with open sails.
Three years ago, my feet climbed on the ancient bricks of the Great Wall. Two years ago, they drooped over the mossy canals quartering the streets of Amsterdam. Last year, they dangled over the waters of Victoria Harbour as Hong Kong struggled over who they wanted to be. This year, well, the rug having been pulled out from under me; I’ve no choice but be head over heels about being up in the air and excited to see where my feet may land next. In the meantime, maybe I'll get lucky with the in-flight meal, “Flurry! They’re rolling out the chicken tenders!"