“I’m sending you money to buy rice,” my mom texted me in early March. She had gone to the West Coast to help my sister with her new baby and stayed when it became too risky to fly. As news of the coronavirus intensified, so did her fretting.

“I don’t need money,” I texted back. “Also, I have plenty of rice.”

“No, you have an American amount of rice,” she replied. “Go get the biggest bag you can find.”

I live in New York City and can’t just drive to the supermarket to load up on groceries. Every item has to be carried home, which I don’t mind. The hunting and gathering of city life energizes me, from the stooped butchers at Ottomanelli Brothers, to the East Village pasta maker who throws in an extra handful of gnocchi with your order, to vendors who show up at the farmer’s market, rain or shine.

When I first visited the Big Apple, as a 15-year-old, a forgotten bell rang. By then my family was living in American suburbia, but deep in my brain, the echo of another city, the one I’d been born in, sounded. In Saigon, one of my earliest memories was going to the market on a moped with my aunt, sitting on her long, traditional ao dai to keep it from flying in the air, my 3-year-old hands white-knuckling her waist as we zipped through traffic. Even though it was war time, I never felt more alive.