Field Notes from a Pandemic Read online

  That may not always be welcome news. It is hard to argue the sanitary movement of the nineteenth century, in reaction to typhoid and cholera, for example, was anything but good. But the increase of the State in people’s lives can be disconcerting. During COVID-19, from China to Jordan to Serbia to the United Kingdom, governments saw fit to assume new and greater powers. Chile, still reeling from past dissent, declared a “state of catastrophe” and sent soldiers into public squares. Bolivia postponed elections — its last one had been disputed. Filipino lawmakers granted emergency powers to President Rodrigo Duterte, a strongman-type guy who had years ago given police expanded and largely unchecked powers to kill those involved in the country’s brutal drug war; who had compared the government’s constitution to “toilet paper”; and who had claimed to have personally killed someone as a teen, “just over a look.” In Singapore and South Korea, invasive surveillance rose. So did it in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also shut down courts — favourably timed, for he had been scheduled for trial for corruption. That is the same country that instituted a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence but never declared it over. Sometimes, there is a large shadow cast by the sheltering hand. Just as how people can acquire a taste for greater social assistance, so, too, can those in power get a stronger whiff of their opiate. Will they ever bear to live without it again?

  Even with the creep of the State, many parts of the world are, at the same time, showing a deficit of management, a void for greater government in some form to fill. In the United States, the pandemic has been a blunt reminder of the proper public healthcare it lacks, sticking out sorely among First World countries. In Canada, Vancouver’s mayor Kennedy Stewart suggested his city risked bankruptcy unless given a bailout of hundreds of millions of dollars by higher authorities — a story likely to be echoed across the land as residents default on property taxes and fees. In Stockholm, the virus spread through at least 75 per cent of the city’s senior care homes, which in recent years have been transferred from state to private management. When the dust settles, something will need to be done about everything, about the services in the hands of lower-level organizations that have either failed or been battered by the crisis. Spain’s government — a leftist Socialist Workers’ Party allied with the farther-left Podemos — mounted a public takeover of private hospitals. The government in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario took over some long-term care homes.

  Such takeovers, of course, were happening only in the industrialized world, where the State has the power to effect its expansion. Elsewhere, there are governments that already lack control and have become extra-weakened. Nigeria, for example, dependent on oil, an industry disproportionately damned by the pandemic, was on the verge of going broke at the worst possible time. Africa’s largest economy had long been battling the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency in the northeast and other violence elsewhere. From where does it find the energy or resources to bother with long-term care homes? For Nigeria and countries like it, with COVID-19, it may become increasingly difficult to even keep everything together as before. Then there is the United States, where public trust in the government has been declining for years, a trend all but set to continue among certain quarters, which raged against the lockdown measures. Yet, it is precisely the sorts of chaos, division, and uncertainty that will make people crave bigger government, and that collective hunger is a strong force.

  In 1920, Denmark’s king, Christian X, used his constitutionally granted powers to dismiss his government, ended up nearly overthrown, and never dared to do so again. Power can’t just be expanded willy-nilly, even if the law allows it. The real gatekeeper is the people, and their will is what will truly shape the role of government around the world post-pandemic. For countries with weaker governments, that might take longer and it might go along a more twisted path, but it will happen. The current vox populi has been shifting, just like in crises of the past.

  In the seventeenth century, as Frank Snowden has noted, amid the growing role of the State during the plague, philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, considered the founders of modern liberalism, argued citizens needed an authority to protect against the harshness of life. Now we see that idea repeated amid the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the population has seen a gradual shift in collective sentiment, favouring a greater role for governments. “They’re part of our survival kit,” the scholar Snowden told an interviewer. “And I think the coronavirus shows how quickly life could once again become nasty, brutish, and short without them.” Politicians everywhere see their stock rising — even U.S. president Trump, at one point. And, in one poll, the premier of Quebec — whose party clinched power with just 37 per cent of the popular vote — attained 96 per cent approval ratings.

  The star of the government is shining even in the strangest of corners, such as among people in cryptocurrency, usually known for their anti-state, individualistic bent. Bitcoin was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the community and multi-billion-dollar sector had traditionally leaned libertarian and toward the tiniest of small government. Now, according to a reader survey from the industry publication CoinDesk, strong majorities favour state-enforced measures like physical distancing, travel restrictions, and telling corporations what to manufacture. Just like the saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, there are few libertarians in pandemics, and like everything else that happened amid the crisis, this will leave a mark. With COVID-19, we are moving toward a world in which, perhaps, the term “bureaucracy” will have less of a negative connotation.

  * * *

  —

  After my stay at Uncle Niu’s, with most of my plans cancelled, I returned to Elias’s apartment in Bayreuth. I again met Risako at the train station, walking once more the same cobblestones and the streets paved with rock carved from the Fichtel Mountains to the east. I spent a lot of time hanging out with her in the subsequent days. We had drinks together and went for walks sometimes, as all around us, the restrictions on movement became tighter.

  On the last day that restaurants were allowed to open, we resolved to go to one. I hadn’t been to one since Singapore, and that felt like a lifetime ago. I had been eyeing this one place that served the German delicacy currywurst — sausage served with a special spiced ketchup. It’s funny the curry from the dish isn’t derived from any contact with Asia, like how the British got their taste for the spice. The Germans actually got it from the British, from occupying soldiers after the Second World War. The dish is now so German that Volkswagen, which has its own butchery for it, makes more sausages than cars. Currywurst is definitely not high cuisine, but I must have it at least once any time I go to Germany, and when I saw it on the menu of what looked like a really fancy restaurant, that stoked my interest all the more.

  Unfortunately, Risako and I never ended up having it. We never ended up going to any restaurant. In the previous days, the restaurants were having their hours restricted, and many closed of their own volition due to the lack of customers. Risako and I couldn’t find any sit-down eatery that was open and ended up at a döner kebab stand Elias had recommended.

  So, we sat by the river, the Red Main rushing black into the night. The stars were soft and blurry, almost faded, and half-covered by clouds. Beneath them, the streetlamps accented the foil around our imperial beef-wrap feast, the yellow of the light dancing upon crinkled silver, and the wind blew from the north, brisk and boundless. It was only the second day of spring, the season so young, it seemed reluctant to relinquish the winter. It took only a few bites of the döner to acknowledge the riverside was too cold. We went back indoors.

  I think when language is restricted, you have to try harder to speak more plainly, which ironically makes communication more forthright. When Risako sometimes couldn’t find the right English words, I would try to finish her sentences, eventually describing her thoughts almost as if I were reading her mind. The accurateness ti
ckled both of us. Soon, though, our meetings became technically illegal. You were only allowed to congregate with people in your own household, the state government said. “The police will be under an obligation to check compliance,” read a “Decree” from the southeastern state of Bavaria. Our little rendezvous became a dirty deed, clandestine meetings under what Elias would only half-jokingly describe as “martial law.”

  Unlike how I would have imagined it, there was no stark line crossed or major happening to mark these new restrictions on civil liberties. They came into my world muted and unaggressive, no comet to mark their birth. They simply existed, a new normal creeping in without fanfare, the way the sun dawns and the tide breaks. Like the Italians just two weeks earlier, I went to sleep one night and woke up in the future.

  And what a future it was to be. Even as government size inched outward, even as the world writhed and morphed under an unequalled calamity to which it was and is uniquely helpless, an even greater transformation loomed. The full impact of this bat-borne plague had yet to be felt.

  13

  Elias’s apartment sat on a row of uniform sandstone buildings with red-tile roofs, on a rock-paved boulevard developed in the eighteenth century, in the dying days of the Holy Roman Empire which, up until 1806, nominally held together much of the continent. It was kind of like the European Union of its day. The road on which Elias’s apartment sat was called Friedrichstraße. There’s a street in every German city with that name, Berlin’s being its major culture and shopping hub. They’re like the multitudes of Avenue Victor Hugo in France, except the specific Fred that each is named after isn’t always as clear. You’d think they’re all based on Frederick the Great, arguably the most famous Fred, but not so — there was just less of a selection of names back then. Berlin’s street was actually named after the Great’s grandfather. Bayreuth’s Friedrichstraße was developed under the local ruler, the Great’s brother-in-law, also called Frederick — who once owned the address at which Elias lived (before Mozart’s cousin moved in, by the way). Called a margrave, a bit like a prince, the local ruler had an uncle also called Frederick. The German Romantic writer Jean Paul, whose statue stands at the intersection of Bayreuth’s Friedrichstraße and Ludwigstraße, also had Frederick somewhere in his name.

  The ch in Friedrich does not make a hard sound like a K, which I learned because, as we walked down Friedrichstraße’s stony tiles one day, Risako, ever the Germanic-literature student, made sure to correct my pronunciation. It’s “Freed-r’sch,” she said. That, combined with, in quick succession, yet another unexpected sch-sound and a throaty, back-of-mouth guttural R in “straße,” really makes the street name a quintessential German challenge.

  In Bayreuth, I lived in social limbo. I had only one source of real-life human contact, Risako. But being someone who likes solitude, I’ve never been bored by boredom. I’ve never minded the company of silence and thoughts. If I were at all religious, and could endure celibacy, I would have seriously considered becoming a monk. I had come, unexpectedly, to like the idea of having weeks of nothing in my schedule; it was a forced hiatus I never knew I needed.

  There was a certain familiarity I felt toward Bayreuth, even though, prior to this trip, I had never been to the city in my life. It was Germany, and that was enough. Aside from that brief visit in 2018 for the wedding of Niu and Yeung’s daughter, I hadn’t been back to the country for more than a decade. Everything in Bayreuth was a source of comfort, even — or perhaps, particularly — the little things. Elias’s apartment had an old-style German toilet, one with a “continental-shelf” construction in the white bowl. Out of politeness, I will refrain from over-describing, but it was the sort I hadn’t seen for years, and it brought an odd sense of nostalgia.

  I gorged myself on the two favourite foods I had as a child: schweinskopfsülze, a sweet and vinegary meat jelly made with pig’s head (yes, I know how this sounds), eaten cold, and Hanuta wafers, with thick hazelnut cream between layers. All my life, I considered these foods the rarest of treats — as a child, when my parents controlled my diet, and as an adult, when I would get them only via care packages from Niu and Yeung. There are limits to the benefits of globalization. The latter can be found for ten times the price on Amazon. The former — well, I think aside from me and three weirdos, nobody outside of Europe wants anything to do with meat jelly made from pig’s head. I know it’s the twenty-first century, and anything can be found anywhere if you have the will, but mine isn’t that strong. So now, in Bayreuth, when I got to have them every day, well, I was as happy as a kid on Halloween. I started stockpiling the foods. I had space in my luggage and had resolved to bring as much back to Canada as I could get away with.

  A week in, I gritted my teeth to call the airline and rebook my ticket back to Canada; the one that originally routed through the United States was now effectively null and void due to U.S. travel restrictions. I brought my return to Toronto forward by two weeks. Might as well, I thought. Then, days later, my flight got cancelled again. As it turned out, Air Canada had decided to stop flying the route, so back on the phone I got, navigating the jammed lines as best I could, the sort of call for which you need to stiffen the sinews and summon the blood.

  In every old western movie, there comes a point when the protagonist has a chance to leave town unharmed, ride into the sunset. But for whatever reason — a moment of clarity, a need to see things through, or even a death wish — he ends up staying, perhaps against his better judgement. In Bayreuth, I ended up doing something I previously never expected to do: I postponed my return to Toronto by more than two weeks from the original date. This could certainly be construed as sheer folly, ignoring all the government warnings — not to mention plain common sense — to get back to your own country before getting shut out for God knows how long. But while the situation was certainly changing wildly by the day, it was obvious to me at this point that going back to Canada wouldn’t offer much of anything anyway. With the lockdown measures, I’d be more or less isolated there too, prevented from seeing most people — no pubs, no in-person meetings, no friends, no nothing. My intention with this trip in the first place, besides getting to see my ailing grandfather, my parents, and some friends, was to disappear for a while and take a break. Holing up in my friend’s empty apartment, in a small town in southern Germany, without a whole hell of a lot to do fit the bill nicely.

  I knew full well that in feeling what I felt and doing what I did, I was also trying to hold on to something, yearning for the familiar amid the strange, aching for an ever-distant past that was increasingly no more than a memory. Eventually, I would find that none of the comfort to be derived from this quaint little town could shield or even distract me from what was going on in this country, this continent, and the world. But for a little while, at least, I felt at ease, protected by the sandstone walls and cobblestone streets around me and my memories of better, simpler times.

  * * *

  —

  Crises reveal true mettle. With unprecedented speed, the pandemic and Europe’s traumatic and widely varied responses to it had made it all the more apparent that the continent I knew and had grown up with was fading. There was something disturbing about this, like the Bayreuth ravens that flew low amid the heavy air and the Arctic gust across the black North Sea. Even in a new season, the winter casts its shadow — a dark implication beyond the tug of sentimentality, a foreboding outside the bounds of present dread. Beneath my feet, amid the plague, my world was shifting.

  And it wasn’t shifting back.

  14

  Elias had told me to check out the ubiquitous Euroshop, which, as he explained, wasn’t a souvenir chain emblematic of the continent, as I had thought, but a discount store where everything sells for one euro or thereabouts. He said it was full of funny little trinkets, although he once found bottles of wine there. I called upon one Euroshop only to find it closed, for it was not considered an essential business. Dow
ntown Bayreuth was rife with shuttered shops. As I strolled the Friedrichstraße that led to it, sometimes with Risako, sometimes alone, I watched the crowds grow progressively thinner in an increasingly desolate downtown.

  Sometimes, Risako and I would walk in the gardens outside Margrave Frederick’s palace, now a museum. We passed chestnut and oak trees, squirrels darting between. The canal water was always still and green as the grass, the gravel grinding beneath our feet — and the blue playground sealed off by red-and-white tape, another stark reminder that this little German haven was not untouchable.

  The thought did cross my mind to disregard the barrier and have a walk through the playground, maybe even push myself off from the swings. I figured that we were already breaking one rule: our strolls, of course, were verboten. The mingling of people from different households was technically illegal. But while you can’t tell what households two people are from by just looking at them, it is easy to discern by sight that someone is using a playground unauthorized. I recalled the “Decree” from the state of Bavaria, saying police will “check compliance,” and decided to let thoughts remain just thoughts. Indeed, perhaps because fewer people were outside, I started noticing the cops more. The police-to-civilian ratio in Bayreuth, as in Beijing when I was there, was definitely getting higher.