5/5/20 Sara Wu Period 8

Modern Mythology 2020

05.05.20

Sara Wu

Period 8 #30

Write about what you learned in your online English lesson.

The end of our vampire unit marks the beginning of our zombie unit. The zombies that are so popular in our pop culture today was first witnessed in the 1920s. William Seabrook, a writer, saw “zombies” in a sugar plantation in Haiti. They weren’t exactly zombies, but instead, human slaves who worked in the plantations like zombies. Zombies are often portrayed as unintelligent and can be easily be killed, as opposed to other monsters like vampires and ghouls in literature. They were viewed as the lower class which can be stemmed back to their origins of Black Oppression. I learned that suicide was common for slaves in Haiti and they wished for death as their only means of escape. Plantation owners did not take too kindly to the suicides and the slave drivers on the plantations used the fear of zombies to keep the slaves in order. Becoming a zombie means being “brainless” with only one purpose: “serving their master”. Zombies were unable to be freed from the plantations and slavery, and the only way to get back their soul and spirit was to eat salt.

What is it like working at home?

Working at home started okay at first. It was a week after school had officially closed and I was just so happy to get back to work. I remember waking up early that Monday morning, making breakfast for myself, and getting ready for my first-period class to start. However, a week in, I pretty much gave up. I was feeling more unmotivated than ever; everything around me is a distraction. Even though there are only three periods a day and a lot more time to finish up my work for the period, I’ve been a lot more unproductive. Going to school gave me a schedule and a routine that I can follow. Even though it has been more than a month, I still haven’t found a routine yet. Hopefully, everything can go back to normal by the next school semester. 

Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now.

When I first became aware of the coronavirus in January, I had a gut feeling that it would be something major. I told my parents that we should buy facemasks just in case but they dismissed it, telling me at most it’ll only be in Asia and that it’ll go away soon. But it soon came apparent that the virus was not something we should take lightly. Around early March, everyone started panicking and being paranoid and they began to empty the supermarket shelves. Xenophobic and racist hate crimes against Asians also started to rise and become more common. I think that people should become more educated about Covid-19. Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, people are dying. However, that shouldn’t be a reason to buy an unnecessarily large amount of food and supplies, causing the skyrocketing of prices, or causing harm to a whole community. This virus has produced both a mental and physical toll on many. When my neighbor got attacked by acid when throwing out the trash one night, it made me feel a lot of paranoia. What if that was my mom throwing out the trash that night or me? People should be alert, not panicked.