Last week, my mother’s home health aide Zhou asked me whether I thought that her own medical insurance might be imperilled by Chuan Pu. Chuan Pu is the Chinese rendering of Donald Trump, a man whose election had gone nearly unmarked in the specially equipped hospital room where my mother lives, with A.L.S., and where Zhou spends a third of her week, rotating with two other health aides. This is the twilight zone where I spent a good number of my waking hours, and where our President’s fulsome tweets and decrees usually cannot find me. Here, patients who breathe on ventilators and the people who care for them do not have time for Trump. And I am grateful for the reprieve.

Zhou’s question, though, which she uttered with a creased mouth and a piece of paper she could not read flapping between her fingers, pierced the boundary between the hospital walls and the world beyond—one which I had nearly believed to be impenetrable. Like my mother, Zhou has Medicaid. Unlike my mother, she is a healthy fifty-five-year-old used to toiling with her hands, for whom the relevant, legible America is neatly inscribed within a set of three coördinates: her daughter-in-law’s Chinese-takeout restaurant, the Flushing street where she lives with her extended family, and the Harlem hospital where she works.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-a-hospital-room-with-trump-near-and-far-away