Voices from Lockdown: My Nephew’s Struggle for Connection

My nephew, Mason Kong, 17 was in eighth grade when the world shut down. One day, he sat in a classroom surrounded by friends, and the next, he was trapped in his bedroom, staring at a screen. School no longer felt like school. It was just another window open on his laptop, competing for attention against the noise of a household stretched thin.

As a Cambodian American teenager, Mason grew up surrounded by stories of survival. His mother, a Cambodian refugee, had already lived through unimaginable hardship before coming to the U.S. But nothing had prepared their family for the sudden rupture of the pandemic.

His mom, a nurse, was isolating from the family to keep them safe. His dad was balancing work and taking care of the home. No one had the time or emotional bandwidth to check in the way they might have before. The distance between them grew.

When school resumed in person, the sense of disconnection didn’t go away. The masks, the distancing, the subdued energy in the classroom—everything felt off. “It was like we were there, but not really there,” he says. Teachers were exhausted. Friends were distant. School became something to endure.

For many Asian American students, that isolation was compounded by something even heavier.

Living Through a Pandemic, While Being Blamed for It

Anti-Asian hate was surging across the country. Every time Mason’s family turned on the news, they saw reports of attacks on elders, racist rhetoric blaming their communities for the virus. It seeped into daily life in ways that were hard to ignore.and out

Mason’s mother, Lada Kong, a frontline nurse, recalls facing racially motivated incidents while on the job.

For Mason, hearing stories like this only deepened his sense of displacement. “It’s like we weren’t just stuck at home,” he says. “We didn’t belong anywhere.”

From Isolation to Belonging

Mason’s story isn’t unique, and that’s exactly why I want to tell it. The pandemic exposed how fragile our support systems were, especially for immigrant families. Kids like Mason were left to process fear, loneliness, and uncertainty without the tools or the space to express themselves.

That’s what inspired me to create We Were Here, a multimedia storytelling initiative that invites high school students—especially AAPI youth—to reflect on their pandemic experiences through animation and oral history. With art as our medium, we’re transforming personal stories of isolation into collective narratives of resilience.

If we want to understand the long-term effects of the pandemic on young people, we need to start by listening to them.

And this time, making sure they feel heard.