For a young Chinese woman living in New York City, deciding on an emergency contact proved to be one of the hardest decisions she would face
Two years ago, in the waiting room of my doctor’s office in New York City, I froze. In my hands was a patient intake form asking for my personal information, with a blank I didn’t know how to fill: “emergency contact.”
I thought about the guy I had just started going out with—we’d been hanging out every week for the last three months and things seemed to be going well. But we hadn’t had the talk about what we were doing or who we were to each other. Was it too soon? Emergency contact seemed like a huge step. When I moved to the U.S. by myself at the age of 18, I didn’t expect my emergency contact to be one of the hardest questions I would face. I grew up in Shanghai as an only child under China’s one-child policy. My parents, who grew up in small villages in Jiangsu province, worked hard to put down roots in a big city where they had no family or connections. Grandparents and relatives would visit, but we were mostly on our own. Chinese healthcare forms generally didn’t ask for an emergency contact.
Going to college in the U.S. was my idea. Somehow I wasn’t scared by the thought of going to a foreign country where I had no family or friends and which I had only visited once before, for two weeks. Even in high school, I dreamed of becoming a reporter and going to Columbia University’s journalism school. My parents weren’t affluent, but they did everything they could to help me realize my dreams.
I had to put down an emergency contact for the first time when I enrolled in college in Boston. I simply put down my mother’s name and contact information in China without thinking much about it. There were far more important problems to solve: how to speak English all the time, how to survive the beautiful but often brutal New England winters, how to make new friends, how to find a part-time job on a student visa, even what to eat at the dining hall.
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