Interviewee: David Shim, Waltham, MA
Interviewer: Finn Register, Amherst, MA
Date of Interview: October 9, 2020, Via Zoom
Topic: Teaching during the Pandemic/Small business owners
F: This is Finn Register. Today is October 9th, 2020. I am interviewing David Shim, for the Hampshire College COVID-19 Oral History Archive. This interview will be taking place over Zoom. This is sponsored by Hampshire College and is part of the First Year Seminar, Pandemics. Where are you located now?
D: I am in Waltham, Massachusetts.
F: I am at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Do you give me permission to record your words and post this interview in the Hampshire College Oral History Archive?
D: Yes, I do. You can use my words with this recording for your project, use my words and images.
F: Thank you. What year were you born?
D: 1961.
F: Where are you from?
D: I am from South Korea.
F: What’s your occupation?
D: I am a clinical psychologist and a college instructor.
F: How many years have you been in both of those occupations?
D: I’ve been involved in the mental health field one way or another since 1987. My formal training began actually a little bit earlier, when I was an undergrad. I work with clinical populations and stuff like that. In terms of therapy and stuff, 1987 was the first year of supervised training. And I’ve been also teaching independently as a lecturer for Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, since 1991, when I was a grad student. Also, I have been teaching martial arts for, well, I’ve been training in martial arts since I was about 11 or 12. But I’ve been teaching in this area since 1985. And then at the current site that is being affected by COVID, and all of that. We’ve been open [since] 2012.
F: What happened to your academy as result of the pandemic?
D: Well, we had to close down. Because the state mandated it. What we did was we closed down for, it was supposed to be two weeks. And by the way, it turned out to be about four months altogether. Okay. And what ended up happening was that we shut down, we suspended all of our … We’re a small gym, right, small martial art school. So we actually suspended all memberships. And then we notified our members. We also followed protocol and then cleaned the space up, right.
And then we waited. And then we waited. And then we waited. And I, this is a business that I believed in and …. the school is not a main part of my making a living or something like that. It’s something that I do because it’s a hobby/ passion, whatever you want to call it. But, I’ve been training martial arts and it’s something that I enjoy doing. So I ended up paying, right, just a small business? But I ended up paying rent when we were closed. And we got to a point where we needed help. And we reached out and, and we got some donations right from our members. We basically lost 80% of our members. And under most circumstances, we would have closed, but our part of this is that I think I’m fiscally minded … and I put my own money into this anyway, so it wasn’t like I owed investors. But, we set up all the protocols which included procedures for scanning the temperature. We had state approved daily screen forms, we cleaned the place all the time, right? Distancing. We have the school all partitioned out, hand sanitizers, wiping their feet before they get on the mats, everything.
So we do that for everybody, every day. And we did some zoom classes in May and June. And we’ve been open since July 2. And we have returning people, we’re back to about 40%. We’re paying about 50% of our rent, for the end of the year, and our goal is to just go back and pay the rent. So, yeah, that’s, that’s what ended up happening to that part of the business. My teaching in terms of psychology, it was just exactly, well, I mean, we did remote. I did it all over summer. I’m back doing a hybrid kind of a thing, right. But I get COVID tested every week, and it’s been negative every time because I’m very, very careful. wear my mask, socially distance, wash my hands.
F: So, what was originally going through your head when the quarantine began in terms of your Academy and everything else?
D: Well, I guess I can tell you in retrospect, right, but like, none of us have ever been through this before. So I just followed it. It’s funny, because I document everything, you know, from my teaching to my students’ grades, patient records, everything so. And then we also have billing, financial records for the school. And I was like, alright, we were given two weeks, right? And then we’re gonna wait. And so, you know, I started to watch the days, you know, as they progress. Three weeks, four weeks, I don’t think they announced anything until, like, May, right? Because they had essential workers working. And then they had like, this phase two, which actually we fell under, because we do a lot of work with kids, right? And, saw our first class back. We did it outside and everything.
It’s like outside restaurants, right? Like, what the hell are they gonna do? They’re gonna have to make some kind of an inside outside. That means probably some kind of …like a tent setup, right? You know, heaters or something like that, that has some venting. That’s the only way. I mean we have a whole new normal. And so, I started to worry. But we have a huge venting system and our school where we change the filters, and we also got one of those room air purifiers with HEPA filters, right? It’s got three HEPA filters and sucks the air. It’ll clean the air every 20 minutes, something like that. We’ve been open, and we’re still open, and nobody’s been sick. And I get tested and one of the other two other people get tested regularly.
So I feel like I’m a canary in a mine shaft or something like that. It didn’t dawn on me not to pay rent, so I kept on paying it. But we had no income and then I picked up for three months, and then was like, I think I paid over $10,000 in rent. And then it was just like, there was no income. So that’s when I reached out to our members and we have a community. These folks are invested in, we don’t charge them exorbitant amounts of money. We’re just talking like $100, $120 for, you know, a bunch of classes a week for a month. That’s nothing. That’s a meal out, so for a meal out, you can get all this training.
F: When you were going into this, what sort of things did you predict accurately? Did you actually think about these things in that moment, trying to predict what’s going to happen? Or like, thinking about how you’re going to be dealing with any of these things?
D: Well, I’m gonna tell you that I’ve already voted. So I can tell you that I voted, I dropped it off already at the Clerk’s Office, no mail for me. But I voted for Biden. And the reason is that there was no leadership, no leadership at all, there was no guidance. And you want to know, they sent us this letter, “Hey, you know, you’re supposed to post these things,” which is supposed to do social distance max. And you want to know how many times anybody’s called check in on us? Zero. Right. And I’m like, you know, this has happened. So basically … people like Trump are just, in my mind idiots about this, right? We have to follow our own procedures and so I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I’m a scientist. So I follow the data. The data said do these things.
In fact, I work [in] some situations where I work with young kids who are underprivileged, and stuff like that. That was a group I could serve many years ago. But a lot of these kids were worried. And some of my karate kids too, like, they’re worried. There’s this monster called COVID out there that was waiting around the corner. It’s like, that’s not true. It’s like particulates. And, you know, here’s the science on it. We’ve been lucky … And here’s the other part of it. As a scientist and also as a clinical psychologist, I remember — I had this supervisor. He’s retired, but he was Dr. Ken Garni. At the Suffolk University Counseling Center, where I did my internship over two years, he was a stickler for policy. And he would always say, “You want to know where people get into trouble. It’s when they have a policy, and then they don’t follow it. They themselves violate it.” And that’s how people are going to probably get set. There’s like no guidance.
And we know that some jujitsu places opened. And then they just let anybody enroll. We’re not taking anybody new. Anybody who wants to join us. For two weeks, they have to do conditioning classes. And then we have this practice dummy named Frank. And they have to practice on Frank. And then the second week, after ten days, they can do positions with each other, but they’re not going to be rolling into that two weeks. It’s taken us time. We want to be careful. So …no, I couldn’t predict it. No, there was no guidance. So I had to follow my own sort of rigid, adherence to procedure. And we’re still doing it. I go in and I mop and clean. You know, I’ve mopped my school so much, it’s just unbelievable. It’s better, you know, just in case.
F: So, who sent you regulations? Was it the state government or the federal government?
D: No.
F: What was sent to you? Was anything sent to you at all? Any information, guidelines?
D: …I remember when the lockdown started to loosen up, I remember getting my first haircut, right. I remember waiting and I saw the things on the postings. We were so close. And I was like, Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. We knew we had to do some of this, because we’re sort of following it. So then they give you a link, so it’ll follow that. And then so for businesses is what you’re supposed to do. That’s it, Finn.
You know, the government is supposed to step in in times like this. And have a uniform procedure. It’s always been done. Trump is an abhorrence. … It doesn’t happen this way. This was such a preventable … look, 200,000 people need not have died. … I guess I’ll do whatever … CDC doesn’t say I have to wear a mask. Wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands. A mask can probably reduce the likelihood of you catching it. There’s like two hairdressers had COVID. And they gave like 142 haircuts in a day, zero transmission. Because they were wearing it. The people who were getting the haircut weren’t wearing it. Particulates. Part of this is we don’t know, this guy, his administration has not allowed a study of it. That’s why you have to glean a little bit from here to here. And, often it’s through deaths and tragedies we learn. I think everybody’s … shocked [about] what happened in 2016. Right. But … this is a whole different time. And, I think that Biden … his administration will show that this is, you can contain this pretty quickly. Problem is, the well has already been contaminated. We’ll see what happens. But I’m hoping for those days when we can somehow get back, you know. Just because … it’s really weird. I missed that, you know, and I’m much more introverted.
F: So can you go into the specifics of how you had to change how you teach?
D: Yeah, we actually had, we had like, hour long classes. We used to fit as many people as we could, we’ve had like, 22, we get like about 1000 square feet. And we got 22 kids in the class, it’s like wall to wall, parents would be able to wait. We love having that. It’s a community, right? Now, our classes are 45 minutes, quick drop off, quick pickup. Parents cannot wait. We’re not doing any new trials right now, during this month, because schools are reopening. You understand that we don’t want to end up cross-contaminating, so we’re just going to see how our group fares. So at the end of October, beginning of November, we’ll think about adding new people, you know what I mean?
But yeah, so our classes are 45 minutes, 15 minutes in between. If it goes really rigorous, we clean up things, we’ll clean up certain surfaces. We have everybody wipe their feet, hand sanitizers … And these kids have been working together since the summer, right? Nobody’s been sick. So you know, I still haven’t put on hand sanitizers, and they’re grabbing each other up and throwing each other underground. And, we teach on Mondays. We used to be open almost every day, right? Because there were different people. But there’s like three of us teaching and we’re open five days out of the week, three days on the weekdays, and then Saturdays. So we’re just, we’re just staying afloat. You know, we’re at 40%. And like I said, they’re allowing us to pay 50% rent, and that’ll allow us to build it back up.
You know, I just want to make sure that the community has a place to try to train but, Finn, I’m going to do the best that I can. I’m going to get through this thing. I hope the school makes it, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, they’re offering the real estate place, because it’s a neighborhood development corporation, you know, like a nonprofit. So they’re like, “Oh, you should take this bigger space. And you know, build it out.” And we’re like, we lost 80% of our people. How are we going to, you know, pay for a bigger space. Then they finally said [that] they’ll help us build it. But then it’s like, “Oh, we need an answer soon.” Well, we’ve never seen it because you’ve never shown it to us and you know, they’re giving us two spaces. That means a wall has to come down and another wall has to go up. Are we doing that? Because we can’t afford that, you know, they’re talking about, well, how much would it cost? Probably $80,000 you know, for the whole thing. So, and then you’d have to help us, you know with rent. So they’re like oh whatever, so, you know, again, not a whole bunch of guidance.
And so this is why I think that you have to be more self determined nowadays. But follow the damn science!