For a brief period, I lived in a windowless box. It was a glimpse of what it must be like to be trapped in a tiny apartment under lockdown for days, weeks, on end.
I often think about how Taiwan will be cut off from the world by Covid-19. Taiwan has not been severely affected by Covid-19; there have been less than 500 cases and no expansive lockdowns. We will be cut off, not so much by travel restrictions, but by our radically different collective experience of this world-altering event.
This sense of subjective distance between Taiwan and the rest of the world will solidify as the pandemic rages. For Taiwan, long described as a society isolated, the “orphan of Asia,” Covid-19 will help form a distinctive sense of Taiwaneseness in the eyes of the people here and those outside.
