Field Notes from a Pandemic
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ALSO BY ETHAN LOU
Once a Bitcoin Miner:
Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West
Copyright © 2020 by Ethan Lou
First edition published 2020
Signal and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780771029974
Ebook ISBN 9780771029981
Cover design by Matthew Flute
Cover image: Nicki Pardo / Getty Images
Published by Signal, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r1
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART ONE:
Year of the Rodent
PART TWO:
Anatomy of a Crisis
PART THREE:
Ripples across the Pond
PART FOUR:
Death of a (Global) Village
PART FIVE:
The Gathering Storm
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Before I left for my travels, a trusted friend, a man of few words, all of which nonsense, offered practical advice. “Don’t die,” he said. I’m glad I listened. I did write a fair bit, though.
In times of crisis, I like to think, we are pared down to our most basic parts, our core functions. I am a journalist. I observe and I document. I scribbled from the field. I wrote from train cabins and airport benches and government-imposed quarantine, from an address once occupied by the composer Mozart’s cousin.
It may or may not be relevant that I was born in China, although my family moved to Germany a year later, and then to Singapore before ending up in Canada, where I still live and work. While Toronto is my home base, I have written for international news organizations and have spent a lot of time travelling. I like to think I’m comfortable being anywhere — within reason, of course. This particular trip was certainly not one I had any intention of writing about. In fact, it was a trip to decompress after finishing another book altogether. I was to return to all the places I’d known and lived — and more. I could not have foreseen the eventual upheaval and chaos of COVID-19 — few could, most experts included. Even after being in China, my first stop, I expected other countries to remain unaffected. Then, as I moved on, I would look over my shoulder to see the plague had followed.
* * *
—
COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) most likely originated in bats, moved on to other animals, and then crossed into the humans that handled them in a so-called wet market selling fresh meat and fish. The first cases — detected in Wuhan, Hubei province — resembled lung infections and were reported to the World Health Organization on New Year’s Eve, 2019. Most people infected experience mild to moderate symptoms and do not require much, if any, treatment. Some may not even know they have it. But the elderly, and those with underlying issues such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, or cancer, often become seriously ill and even die. Experts quickly developed vaccines for trial, but they basically knew nothing about this novel coronavirus in the beginning. Suffice to say, there is still a lot we don’t know about the virus and how it works, this tiny, thorny sphere of genetic material, a hundred million of which can fit on the head of a pin.
What we do know, without question, is the devastation in its wake, and the deep foreboding within that it will change life as we have known it. Six months after COVID-19 was discovered, what began in a market in China’s ninth most populous city has already spread to nearly every country, with almost nine million cases and half a million deaths. At the root of such ongoing meltdown, mayhem, and lockdown — the virus spread through droplets, expelled by those infected in a sneeze or cough or even, as research suggests, in just their exhaled breath. Death hovered through the air, each and every one of us a potential agent for an enemy we could not see.
* * *
—
Despite evoking parts of history, this pandemic is different from everything we’ve seen in the past. Our world is more tightly integrated than ever, yet we were caught so unprepared and divided. We have become good at avoiding world war and nuclear destruction. Then along came an infected bat, and everything escalated with alarming speed and tenacity. The virus wiped away public life, eroded civil liberties, and decimated economies. It dealt distrust. And so, it will feed frustration and fear. It will stoke nationalism and fuel authoritarianism. It will upset long-standing balances of the world. While this is a travelogue of sorts, it is also about how everything we know will be changed by this thorny, microscopic sphere, and how the decisions made now, or indecisions, will shape and define the world for decades.
It all began — for me, at least — on January 23, 2020, two days before Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rat.
1
The COVID-19 plague was already in the news when I left for Beijing from Toronto. But there was another knowledge within me, rumbling no less uneasily: my grandfather in China was dying. He had worsened so much in the past year, my father had once told me to “prepare a dark suit.” For one reason or another, I had already delayed going to see him, and I could not put it off any longer. There was no question in my mind about this.
The trip to China was also to be the first leg of a long vacation around the world, for I had just finished the torturous task of writing another book, which is about the strange and complicated world of Bitcoin. I had planned more than a dozen stops, some for the sights, some to see friends and other family, for mine are scattered. I usually fly trans-Pacific once a year. This, though, was definitely one of my bigger trips. It had been in the works for months, meticulously planned. The bar for postponing it was high, and it hadn’t quite been reached.
This was all back in January of 2020. The World Health Organization had not yet declared a global emergency. No travel restrictions were imposed, no lockdowns in place. The morning I left, an email newsletter I subscribe to had just two lines and one cartoon about what was then an odd little phenomenon that hadn’t even been officially named. To be sure, I was far from unmoved — the shadow growing in the East and the first whispers of what may come; a novel strain of the coronavirus from China that causes breathing difficulties and is potentially fatal — I’d seen it before, a more lethal version. I lived through the SARS epidemic in Singapore. But while I’ve never forgotten, I also no longer feared.
Then I cleared Chinese immigration.
At Beijing’s airport, the baggage-claim exit leads to an unusually lengthy barricade blocking the way. To get fully land-side, you have to walk past a long line of people, all crowding around the barrier, waiting to receive travellers. While I’m no stranger to this sight — they scan your face, you scan theirs, searching for recognition — this time, all I saw was a surreal wall of face masks, on and on, as far as the barricade stretched. With not one nose or mouth on display, it was like the sea of Guy Fawkes masks in V for Vendetta. They were eerily expressionless, yet almost starkly projecting a dar
k message I would only later learn.
It was two days before Chinese New Year. A lot can happen when you’re in the air for fourteen hours without Internet. In that time, the Chinese government had taken the unprecedented step of sealing off the entire epicentre of the virus, the southern city of Wuhan. The announcement was made just hours before it took effect. Eleven million people were locked in, the healthy along with the sick. The death toll was then seventeen. A woman from Wuhan, quoted in the news, posted on Chinese social media, “Now we are lambs who will still be slaughtered, and we can only leave our fates to the heavens.”
I was supposed to meet my parents at the airport, who had flown in from Singapore, where they live. They didn’t want my uncle in Beijing to make more than one trip to pick us up, so they suggested we book our flights to arrive in the city at around the same time. My parents like to be efficient, something I had definitely inherited. It likely manifested in the way I had planned this very trip, arranging all the stops in as straight a line as possible.
When I finally came to where they were standing, I almost didn’t recognize my own parents. They too were in face masks, and after we embraced, so was I, for they immediately handed me one. It was the first time I ever wore such a veil, a light-blue surgical mask that smelled oddly like a closet. When we met my uncle, my father’s younger brother, I saw he had gone a step further with a superior version: a Honeywell H910V Plus. It was angular and had a mechanical-like vent. I envied him because, in such a mask, exhaled breath goes out only via the vent; it does not leak out the top to fog up the glasses, as was the case with my surgical version. Masks like the Honeywell had been increasingly hard to find in China, but my uncle is resourceful. The man has always been sharp and one step ahead.
We got into my uncle’s black BMW and headed out of the airport. The first thing I noticed was that my uncle had given his navigation system an accent that approximated that of his and my father’s hometown, Shijiazhuang. It is three hundred kilometres southwest of Beijing, in the Hebei province, which is some nine hundred kilometres north of Hubei, whose capital is Wuhan. My father, who grew up speaking Mandarin with his hometown accent, views Shijiazhuang’s Mandarin as a dialect — which, in China, is often a matter of opinion. The line between an accent and a dialect is blurry — as grey as the gulf between a dialect and a language, which is mostly defined by the latter’s speakers having borders and an army. Hong Kong’s Cantonese, a southern tongue, and the mainland’s northern Mandarin, for example, are not mutually intelligible and are considered dialects. But I, a Mandarin speaker, can understand the speech from the family hometown just fine. To me, it’s just Mandarin with a funny twang. The English equivalent is probably a thick Boston accent.
But that’s not an exact comparison. Accent in China carries more political and socio-economic connotations than it does in North America. It is no coincidence that Mandarin the dialect is the same word as mandarin the bureaucrat. Long ago, Mandarin, China’s now-dominant dialect, was known as Guanhua, “the language of the officials.” Not exactly a majority tongue. Now it is called Putonghua, “the normal language.” And in an almost Canada-sized country with just one time zone that is Beijing’s, where internal-migration restrictions mean social mobility is often tied to birth, less-prestigious regional tongues mark a person more than they do in English. Most people code-switch. My aunt, who lived most of her life in Shijiazhuang, does not speak with a Shijiazhuang accent. My grandmother has a mild one. My Beijing uncle and Singapore-based father speak standard Mandarin most of the time, but always put on their hometown tongue when they are home, almost going out of their way to show their roots. My grandfather — my yeye — is the lone outlier. My uncle’s navigation system evoked the old man vividly. I don’t know if he does not want to or cannot shake the accent. All I know is my yeye has a regional twang so thick you could stuff a mattress with it.
My yeye was born in 1938, just a little after the Japanese invasion of China, when the last Qing Dynasty emperor still reigned as a puppet in the north. In primary school, he met my grandmother, who came from a considerably wealthier family that made its money producing preserved vegetables, or Chinese pickles. My grandmother was born a year earlier, and as a baby during the war, she once cried so loudly while the family was hiding from Japanese soldiers that the adults almost killed her to save the wider group. She eventually became a chemist, and my grandfather, the first Lou and the first person in his neighbourhood to go to university, ended up a college physics teacher. At home, he was a noted tinkerer, fixing all sorts of electronics in the house. It must have rubbed off on my father, who became an electrical engineer. It definitely rubbed off on me, who, as a child, was also a tinkerer and copied my grandfather in all sorts of ways, some more welcomed than others. I drew laughs for mimicking my grandfather’s accent, but imitating the way he stripped wires with his teeth was a serious no-go with my parents.
To his children, my grandfather had been a strict disciplinarian, a reflection, perhaps, of China’s Cultural Revolution erupting around them, a period of intellectual and economic stagnation, unrest, and violence. But my grandfather was also unusually open-minded for his generation, rarely interfering with his children’s life choices and never expecting any financial upkeep from them. He didn’t need it anyway. Both grandparents had good pensions. But my grandfather, a lifelong smoker, got to enjoy retirement for only so long. Beginning with a stroke in the 2000s followed by a botched angioplasty procedure meant to treat narrowing blood vessels, he had been steadily fading in both body and mind. For years, he could barely recognize anyone and hardly ever spoke or moved.
* * *
—
On Chinese New Year’s Eve, staff at the seniors’ home in Shijiazhuang took our temperatures at the door in the dark and gloomy lobby, the infrared thermometers aimed at our foreheads like guns. They also noted our personal details before letting us in. Face masks were mandatory, of course.
My grandparents live on the second storey of the residence, in a room with two hard beds and a spongy green floor. It was one of the better residences — pretty expensive, as I had been told. At eighty-three, my grandmother — short-haired, bespectacled, and always wearing red — remains spry and vibrant, living at the seniors’ home only to accompany my grandfather. As we chatted, she rather relentlessly offered us fruit, chocolate, and chrysanthemum tea. She asked about my relationship status, and I deflected with trained skill. There was a little more white in her hair, but otherwise, I swear my grandmother gets younger every time I see her. I was shocked, however, by how much my grandfather had deteriorated.
It was one thing to hear about it from my father. Quite another to see it directly. Just a year ago, my grandfather could stand if supported, swallow mushy food, and even arm-wrestle me, although not particularly well. Now, my grandfather was too weak to even sit in a wheelchair. Or sit anywhere. He just lay in his white-metal bed. A catheter bag that hung near his foot swelled with urine in real time. A ventilator tube pierced his neck, connected to a machine that hummed and heaved. His hairless limbs were leathery from a lifetime of wear, yet thin with disuse. I was caught rather speechless seeing him this way. It was a lot to pack into that short visit. We had scheduled for no more than half an hour. The plan had been to go back the next day for a full visit, but as we left, residence staff told us, “It’s best you don’t come anymore.”
We didn’t listen.
While we were there the next day, however, what had been a recommendation the day before became mandatory. The residence officially banned all visitors. In the short time I had with him, I held my grandfather’s hand and wondered if this was the last time I’d see him. Then, both the director and deputy of the facility came to the room and said we had to leave. It was muted and unaggressive, not the same way, say, security would escort someone out of a mall. From the looks on their faces and the halting manner in which they gave me the news, I thought they felt bad for expelling me, t
he grandson who had travelled from halfway around the world. But that wasn’t quite it. Rather, it was fear — cold and weighty, yet effervescent, more contagious than any virus. After all, they were the ones who had to stay as we left, and it was obvious, even then, that things were only going to get worse. Within that realization was another: if my family and I had arrived in China just a day or two later than scheduled, the whole trip would have been for nothing.
Our eviction from the home was disheartening, but also understandable and hardly surprising given the climate of fear that had quickly enveloped the area, in nursing homes especially. Aging weakens immune systems. Later, surveys showed that only 2.3 per cent of those in China died after getting the coronavirus, but among those age eighty and older, that figure was 14.8 per cent. A coronavirus outbreak would be a disaster for any residence of the type my grandparents were in. In that event, statistically, at least one in seven seniors would not make it past the winter. In the weeks to come, nursing homes across the world would similarly shut their doors, both to the outside and between residents.
Farther north in China, in the city of Harbin, somewhere near Russia, I have another pair of grandparents. In Chinese, we call them waipo and waigong, “external grandmother” and “external grandfather,” because they are my mother’s parents. Traditionally, once married, a daughter is considered to be part of the husband’s family. Thus, I am not part of my waipo and waigong’s. But for people who do not share a surname, we are particularly close. I was born in their city, where my parents met. My waipo, eighty-one, had handled my poopy diapers — ours might as well be a bond forged on the battlefield. She gets so excited when I visit, she talks for hours, and the exertion of that leaves her tired even into the next day. My waipo and waigong are lucky in that they are healthy enough to live alone, but while nobody likes to acknowledge it, they too are declining.