Days after signing a lease for her New York City apartment, Kelly Liu received a call from her parents. The last flight to Singapore, where she was born, was in less than 48 hours, they told her. Liu, an undergraduate studying design and photography at The New School in Manhattan, scrambled to book a flight back. Within 30 hours, she found herself flying across the world, leaving behind the life she’d built mid-semester. “Singapore called back many of their citizens to ensure their safety,” she says. “Everything that happened within those 30 hours felt so surreal.”

When she arrived, Liu and her brother, who also studies in the U.S., quarantined for 14 days in a hotel room. They both had to