None of us had expected the virus to become a global outbreak until the WHO declared Coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020. By that time, I was already in NYC, expecting everything to be carried out as usual.

I heard that some Chinese international students got beaten on the street because of wearing masks; I heard that the virus got a new name - Chinese Virus - on the internet; I heard that some students got denied by Uber drivers because they are Asians even though they were born in the USA. I stopped speaking Chinese in public; I stopped using wechat in the stores; I even stopped going to the store and tried to buy every disinfecting product and food on Amazon.This news had a large impact on international students. In one night, we grew up. In one week, most of us learn to cook in order to prepare for a potential lockdown. I feel like I am a rat - everytime I sneak out of my nest, it would be a dangerous journey.

On March 10th, the number of cases in NY rose up to a thousand (One point three arcs). NYU officially announced that the course will be carried out remotely for 3 weeks (NYU Memorandum). On March 17, the school announced an evacuation: all residential hall students shall evacuate from the dorm no later than March 22nd. The school made this decision because the government might turn our dorm into an emergency hospital like the Huoshenshan Hospital in China (NYU Memorandum).

Bad news happened a lot in 2020 since the outbreak of Covid-19. Wuhan locked down the whole city; Shanghai banned traveling into the city; the death rate of Italian confirmed cases is so high; my friends were stuck in Spain; the price of flight tickets from the USA to China rose to almost 5000 dollars (my flight ticket was 2500 dollars since I booked it earlier).

Economy is the major issue of all countries. Due to city lockdown, the economy of countries which received severe damage from the COVID-19 had been in doom. Now, the 2020 stock market crash has officially become a major social event as it was recorded in Wikipedia. The USA stock market crashed for 2 times. Because Chinese economy contributes 16 percent to the global gross domestic product, any impact on Chinese economy may have far-reaching consequences. The food and agriculture was damaged as well, according to FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations,) and will be continually affected in the future. Because the wild-capture industry has been severely damaged from the lockdown, it can “generate a domino effect throughout the value chains in terms of supply of products, in general, and the availability of specific species (FAO).” Moreover, “problems in logistics associated with restriction in transportation, border closures, and the reduced demand in restaurants and hotels can generate significant market changes – affecting prices (FAO).”

From this pandemic, we could sense how adults had dealt with this problem. In China, senior hospital officers hesitated to spread the news because they did not realize Covid-19 is a new disease; whistleblowers tried to alert the ignorant residents by sacrificing their own fame and lives; Nurses and doctors of all countries devoted their nights and days in hospital, taking care of all the patients and watching the unfortunates die; Other countries were undergoing the same journey as China. Young people may not understand the immediate effect of this event, but they are usually affected indirectly. Because one day they will grow up and try to survive in this new constructed society. And the process would be much more complex in the twenty-first century due to globalization.

Experts had suggested that the next generation, today’s children and teens, will likely be shaped by very different influences and forces than the generations that preceded it (The Whys and Hows of Generations Research).

How have significant social events affected the young generation of the time?

A series of events had resulted in a subculture among young high school girls in Japanese society, called Gyaru. These events are the trade war between America and Japan in the 1970s, the Hanshin earthquake in 1995 and the Tokyo subway sarin attack.

If this Sarin attack is only a random event, she may advocate for severe penalties on those prisoners. But under that intense social atmosphere when Japan had not recovered from the financial crisis and the Hanshin Earthquake, she knew that as a normal woman any effort would be futile. If death is so common and inevitable, what would be the point of life? If people are living in fear for all the time, could they ever taste the fruit of happiness?

This is only a small case of how a series of sudden social events could indirectly affect young people.

Nevertheless, long term social events could also have the same effect on the younger generation.

Take economic globalization as an example, in 2017, a new subculture, “Sang (demotivation) Culture,” emerged among young Chinese people who were born after the 90s. Economic globalization refers to the international trading and communication among goods, capital, services, and information technology. Because of Economic globalization, the young Chinese people who were born in the 90s live a different life than people who were born before the 90s. The elder generation had been in a harsh life. They earned everything through hard work, like real estate business and etc. because of China’s reform and opening up and modernization drive (Liu Li,2019). In China, Chinese people call this generation who had tasted the true “bitterness.” Their hard work had led to material abundance in the 21st century. Under this peaceful society, many young people are unable to recognize the importance of material life because they have not experienced the feeling of material scarcity. They are keen to live an ordinary life, do not like to work hard, do not like to buy the school district house blindly like what the elder generation used to do. Moreover the economic globalization actually led to the increasing competence among young people who were not accommodated into the society yet. In the past, the older generation could easily get a job by achieving a high academic degree. But now, a high academic degree won’t help you seize a sustained job because the competence of job supply is also increasing. Housing prices, education, medical care and employment competition have increased the living burden and psychological pressure on most young people. This is the culture of “Sang (demotivation)” among the young generation in China. They are trying to escape from the pressure imposed by society because they felt that any effort is futile. Their efforts were not guaranteed by rewards.

This is another example of how social atmosphere could direct a young generation. We can see how those events like Japan's social case are similar to China's. Perhaps it is not our education that cultivated our children, it is the society.

“Business Insider” interviewed Jason Dorsey, a consultant, researcher of millennials before of how to define each generation: “the Silent Generation, first born in 1928, watched World War II unfold. The first of their children, the baby boomers, were born in 1946 during the war's aftermath. Boomers were more defined by the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Gen X, first born in 1965, is the last to remember the Cold War. And millennials are marked by the fallout of the Great Recession. They're divided from Gen Z, the oldest of whom were born 1997, by the aftermath of 9/11. Gen Z doesn't remember 9/11 but millennials do…(Hoffower. H. 2020).” So far we don’t know whether the current generation would be the last one to remember the Covid-19, but at least they will remember this event clearly the most.

Compared to the epidemic in the past, the epidemic was not new in history. Already in 1976, a “swine virus” had emerged in the USA. Military doctors at an army training center in New Jersey expected this explosive epidemic of influenza. The U.S. Congress approved President Ford’s program, pharmaceutical companies manufactured a vaccine, and clinical trials were conducted before flu shots were administered across the country (Caduff, Carlo. Chapter 2. p62). Thanks to President Ford’s immunization program, we have a certain hope to protect us from influenza. Even though the predicted pandemic did not occur fortunately, this event provided human valuable sources to learn from. Scientists saw swine flu as a chance to advance the “state of enlightenment of the community and its practitioners of medicine concerning the nature of influenza and its prevention (Caduff, Carlo. Chapter 2. p74).” From this moment, we gradually learn to prevent the disease from happening prior to actually getting infected with. But, a pandemic still happens today. The SARS in 2008 became a pandemic. This disease is entirely driven by exposure to infected individuals. Transmission occurred primarily within health care settings or in circumstances where close contacts occurred (Donald E. Low, M.D., FRCPC. 2004).

We could see how similar history had happened now. But, the shadow of coronavirus is all over the planet. The debate on COVID-19 is much more intense than SARS and other epidemics. The hot topics are whether to wear masks, how to prevent diseases, whose responsibilities, and etc. The Covid-19 had persisted for almost 4 months already and no governments or scholars could say anything convincing about when this pandemic would end.

Moreover, the COVID-19 is a global crisis and was accelerated by information technology. So far in 2019, there are 7.6 billion people globally. Among them, 4.3 billion are internet users, 3.4 are active social media users, 3.2 billion are mobile social media users. The average daily time using the internet (we only consider mobile phones using time here) has increased from 1h 38 mins in 2014 to 3h 14mins in 2019. Among all the social media users, young people from 18 to 34 is about 60% of the whole media users. Young people aged from 18 to 25 is about 27% of the whole media users population (Global Digital Report 2019). From this set of data we can see how likely the young generation could be affected by the information on the internet.

Spectators v.s Participants

I interviewed a 23 years old adult about how big social events in the past, like the 911, the Great Sichuan Earthquake, affected his growth.

A survey on multi-modal social event detection, written by scholars from Chongqing University and Key Laboratory of Complex System Safety and Control, concludes that “effective multimodal media analysis is able to boost comprehensive and meaningful knowledge discovery from social media data (Zhou, H., Yin, H., Zheng, H., & Li, Y. 2020).” This means that instead of hearing the news when the radios and newspapers were the primary information spreading method. Nowadays, we can view the events by watching live video, and all other kinds of multimedia in a much faster way.

Take 911 as an example, Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine says that. “I think that up until that time, perhaps people were more optimistic or certainly had a sense that it couldn't happen here. Terrorist attacks were something that happened overseas, but not in the United States on our soil...(Dora Mekouar).” The contrast between my interview above and her comment on 911 events reveal a double perspective: one is the perspective we are closely related to the event, the other is those who spectate the events.

The side effect of COVID-19 also characterized Roxane Silver’s ideas. In China, lots of the old generation ,who had little access to the internet and easily deceived by false news, refused to let overseas students come back to their home country. They think those students are bringing the virus back to their own country when they have enough money and resources to stay abroad because they are rich. But the truth is:

Not all overseas students are rich; most overseas students have nowhere to go after the dorm evacuation; the health insurance won’t cover all the medicare; Foreign countries have the responsibility to prioritize local patients rather than non-citizens. And the most important one: not all overseas students are spoiled children. At least in China, some older people and illiterate people think that only those who can’t survive through the local education system will choose to study abroad. But if those people could read English news, they might look at overseas students differently.

Why would some people have such different experiences over the same kind of events: Sars and COVID-19. Perhaps the answer lies in the differences if roles a person takes in such big social events. If one is a participant, he or she could generate more information and thus empathize with others. But if one is a spectator, he or she would know this event like reading a story. The memory is not saved in the hippocampus.

One local Chinese student expressed his attitude on the pandemic:

In contrast, a Chinese student living overseas while studying in Spain had a much more intense feeling than Hu Peicheng:

From China’s young generation point of view, they are aware of the cultural difference due to this global event - even for those who had never been to other countries before.

But American students had different perspectives in the early stage of the pandemic:

In contrast, there are still some American took immediate action to prevent from catching the virus.

I interviewed them in early May when coronavirus was not that severe in countries other than China. Except those who have been in China, they understand what is better for them during this pandemic. But as you can see on the news nowadays, most countries start to copy the virus-prevention work of China, such as lockdown the city, require citizens to wear masks, or ban large social activities. This is because they finally become the participants of the pandemic rather than being a spectator through reading news.

From the three interviewers above, we can see how they face the Covid-19 with different attitudes in the early stage of pandemic in America because they play different roles than Chinese students in this pandemic. They used to be a spectator rather than a true participant.

At least, we can conclude that we should always have precaution over epidemics. Every epidemic, we have large progress in modern medical science. But still a weird argument happened, like whether we should wear a mask, like who should be responsible for such an epidemic. Why would those arguments happen now but not in the past?

This is partially because of the rise of social media and the exposure difference of information due to language.

A netizen shared his experience of information asymmetric on the internet. He had just landed in Thailand when the virus became severe around the world.

Back to the question of how coronavirus could affect people coming of age, we can only foresee how the Covid-19 could affect the young generation in career choice.

Jason Dorsey explained to “Business Insider”: “It's likely Gen Z will become even more financially risk-averse than they already are and that the pandemic will change how they view work and learning.”

But some other people may have more assumption on the spirit of new generations after Covid-19. Ed Yong, a journalist of Atlantic wrote that "(the young generation) might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C (Yong. S. 2020).” And in another article of Atlantic written by Amanda Mull, she wrote that “Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand even when the world isn’t weathering what looks to be an epoch-defining calamity…(Mull. S. 2020)” History won’t lie to us, but I am surprised how the essence of each historical events look similar―

First, not all new adults have the same literacy level or social status. They know the world from a different angle due to language.

Second, internet and social media is the largest compound factor in the case of coronavirus because the accelerated exposure of information has already rewrite the rules of the world. This is a period of globalization.

Third, Coronavirus may have a direct impact on industry but it may affect new generations by reforming society.

Last but not least, the impact of coronavirus may not be immediate. There may be a bomb in the future because the new generation will grow up and take part in the society with a matured heart.

However, this is not the reason for us to undermine the effect of the virus. Just like no one expected the trade war, the earthquake and the subway attack could affect the fashion of young girls, the virus may affect young children by building an atmosphere to influence their world view. Just like no one would expect the new generation would lose their ambition due to globalization, the virus may affect young children by imposing pressure on the society. Due to the growth of the internet, young children have little ability to discern the truth yet.

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