Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  On my first trip to Malaysia, though, I would find that while life can sometimes be hard, it is always harder when you have no luck. I got stuck at the border.

  Going before immigration, I had to be separated for extra health screening because I had recently been to China. Young men in light-blue protective gear made me fill out a form and repeatedly took my temperature.

  “Where in China did you go?” asked one of them.

  “Beijing,” I said. In that general area, at least. Adding Shijiazhuang to my answer, I figured, would lead only to confusion.

  But apparently, Beijing was confusion enough. The protective-gear-clad staff pored over a chart on the wall in their cramped office to see if Beijing was among the list of cities that they needed to worry about.

  While they did that, a guy with a buzz cut and broad face, who somehow looked both slithery and rodent-like at the same time, laughed at me, saying, “Quarantine, quarantine.” He knew only two English words, both of which were the same. And then, like that, I was on my way. They must have found China’s capital on a map, determined it wasn’t under quarantine, and decided I wasn’t a threat.

  Later, in a car from a ride-hailing service, I heard the driver complain the city was slowly sinking into a mini-recession. The major Malaysian city near the border, Johor Bahru, is sustained almost exclusively by tourists coming from the Singaporean side. With the decline in travel due to the virus, everyone was making less money.

  On the second trip to Malaysia, a friend and I went to Legoland. If you wonder what business two grown men could have in what is essentially a children’s theme park, then you did not grow up obsessed with Lego like I did. I had been dreaming of going to the theme park ever since it opened. Yet on the day of our visit, the park was nearly empty. Only one of its restaurants was open, and its efforts to make fries into the shape of Lego bricks was sorely disappointing. I don’t know if it was because of the virus or because the theme park was just in decline, but it was depressing nonetheless.

  The wrestling matches we went to, in the centre of Singapore’s bar and clubbing district, had something of a COVID-19 theme. The villainous character, the Coloniser — a blond, powerfully built Caucasian woman dressed all in white, and who sometimes had an Asian manservant as part of her act — had widely disparaged Singaporean culture while purposely mispronouncing the names of local food, such as roti prata, a type of savoury Indian pancake, usually served with curry. Evoking the country’s past British overlords, the Coloniser then made racist remarks about the virus while spraying the air around her with disinfectant. In the world of staged wrestling, she’s called a “heel,” someone the audience is supposed to root against. The Coloniser — in real life, as it turns out, a doctorate holder born and bred in Singapore — was obvious to the point of beating the message in with a stick. There was immense laughter from the crowd, which chanted, “Wuhan! Wuhan!” in response, expressing solidarity with the infected against the wrestler, in a deliberately ironic manner. I can’t remember if the Coloniser won or lost, but days later, when I wasn’t three beers in, I found the virus bit a lot less funny.

  Then came a text message from C.J.

  “I spoke with my dad and a cousin who works in a hospital, and their advice is to quarantine yourself for 10–14 days if you just arrived from China,” she said. “There will always be some risk and everyone needs to be responsible in taking care of their own hygiene.

  “You don’t have to follow this advice, but these are scary times and frankly I do not want the risk of bringing this infection to my elderly relatives.”

  At the time, I brushed off her concern. I did not even know C.J. that well. My primary connection had been with Kevin. But my ties with Kevin are important to me, and I did not want to put him in a difficult position. They lived with each other, after all.

  Kevin had texted me after C.J.’s message: “Sorry if C.J. messaged you anything about quarantining yourself. She was freaking out a bit because I think she’s anxious about her family and older relatives.”

  “Hey no worries. It’s all good,” I responded. “I guess if you’re still here next Friday we can go for another drink…then it will be two weeks after I’m back — considering C.J.’s concerns.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to C.J., though. It was one of those situations in which someone explains something technical, and you might respond, “I see,” but you don’t really see, and I didn’t want to just say, “I see,” because it sounds curt. I thus never responded to her.

  The fact was, though, that Singapore, which had started reporting daily infection numbers and death tolls, was becoming exactly what I’d hoped it wouldn’t. Over the sunny little island, a dark silhouette grew by the day.

  * * *

  —

  Anticipating gradually worse travel conditions all over the world, I decided to make some changes to my onward journey from Singapore. I had what can only be described as a special ticket, purchased with airline miles. I was able to game the system to get a complicated, multi-city itinerary that would normally cost tens of thousands of dollars for just the price of a round-trip ticket. I could have up to sixteen stops, anywhere in the world, and I had intended to make full use of it. Ultimately planning to end up in Germany, I had added in a slew of stopovers drawn from my love for both history and off-beat travel. There were ancient cities such as Istanbul, Cairo, and Athens, and the capitals of the post-9/11 wars, Kabul and Baghdad. The latter two destinations are not places I would normally think of going, but adding them to my trip had been effectively free, so I thought, why not? However, with the virus situation becoming worse every day, my original itinerary did not seem like a great idea. Moreover, the United States had just assassinated an Iranian general in Iraq. Breakfast in Baghdad did not sound nearly as attractive as it had before. I decided to bypass all of those cities and just go straight to Germany.

  My choices and experience must have been relatable because the whole world seemed to have the exact same idea of changing their tickets at precisely the same time. Because of COVID-19 and its travel disruptions, the mileage-program call-in lines were jammed in a way that I had never before experienced. Even getting on a waitlist was fortunate. Sometimes the lines were so full, I couldn’t even be placed on hold. Due to the special nature of my ticket, the only way to change it was by phone. I was on hold for more than two hours, and when I got through to change it, the operator herself had to be put on hold by someone else within her organization. Then my call was dropped at the moment when my old ticket had been cancelled but my new one had yet to be booked. It was as if I had managed to walk between raindrops. I was on hold for another two hours and then had to explain everything to a completely different operator who, God bless her, took only another hour to navigate the mayhem and change my ticket accordingly. And the call centre was only staffed during office hours in North America. I was up all night.

  * * *

  —

  Near the end of my stay in Singapore, it started feeling like whatever bubble I had been living in had burst. It wasn’t that anything of great consequence had happened to me, but there were warning shots, hints that wherever I travelled to, COVID-19 would rear its ugly head. There was no safe zone.

  I had had the great pleasure of having no cellphone reception almost the entire time I was in Singapore; my Canadian telecommunications company had removed the Asian city-state from the list of places to which it provides roaming. I was more than fine with this, for most of my important communications are done through email or instant messaging such as WhatsApp, and I rarely have people with serious matters calling me unscheduled. Those calls I did need to make, like the ones changing my travel itinerary, were made on my parents’ phone. But at some point, while I was lunching at a country club with my father, it became clear that Singapore had miraculously been added back to my telco’s roaming list. For a while, as we sat at the club by the water, just across
the straits from Malaysia, the sun dull upon the surface, my phone started to vibrate uncontrollably. It had never done that before. The real world was coming for me, a little earlier than I wanted or expected.

  Increasingly, I saw hints of the pandemic in my own life. A friend of mine in Singapore is originally from Wuhan. He had two relatives infected, one of whom had died. His parents — allegedly members of the Communist Party, according to other friends — had gotten out of Wuhan just before the lockdown, leading some to question whether they’d acted on prior knowledge. His parents ended up quarantined in Singapore. Another friend, an American living in Singapore with his family, still in university, had to tell his father he was out studying to hang out with the rest of our group of friends. He had been banned from all nonessential interactions.

  My father is an engineer for a company that makes pharmaceutical equipment. The wife of one of my father’s colleagues was suspected of becoming infected, and the entire office started working from home. She ended up cleared, but the work structure did not go back to normal. Eventually, major companies in Singapore, such as banks and commercial research laboratories, redistributed their workers into team-siloes at different locations, so that if one group goes down for some reason, the organization continues to function. My father’s company and those of many of my friends adopted this model. That siloing extended even to non-work interactions. When my father made plans for a social meetup with a work friend, the primary consideration was: “We’re from the same silo. I guess it should be okay.”

  I haven’t lived with my parents for nearly a decade. On that trip to Singapore, I noticed they had developed a curious new ritual, at least curious for them. Every day, after dinner, they sat together on the sofa to watch the news. I found it a heartening thing for my parents to do, who are approaching their sixties and seem to have grown a lot closer since I and my younger sister both left the nest. Their newfound attention to the news also suggested a sort of respect for the journalism that is my profession, I felt.

  “When did you start doing that?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ve never done it until now,” my mother responded. “It’s only because of the virus.”

  Along with the daily tallies of infection rates and deaths, every now and then, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong — popular, but increasingly frail-looking after stumbling on live television in 2016 — would address the nation. My parents watched with an eagle-eyed intensity that was sort of unnerving.

  Despite the circumstances, I was happy to have spent time with them. It was hard to say when I’d see them next given the growing travel restrictions and the quickly collapsing state of affairs in general, but we were good at staying in touch and keeping up to date. My main concern in departing was what I would encounter next. Thus far, the virus had followed me like a shadow. I had watched in real time as China and now Singapore strained under the weight — the fear it engendered and the prospect of the unknown looming everywhere. Needless to say, this wasn’t the trip I had planned or hoped for. As I prepared to head to Germany, for most of the world, this month of March was to be a rude introduction to something already changing everything we knew.

  8

  On the plane to Germany, Turkish Airlines handed out contact-tracing forms for COVID-19. Despite cutting out all the stops between Singapore and Germany, I couldn’t get a direct flight and had to transfer in Istanbul. I was going to pass through what was formerly Constantinople regardless, through the city famously devastated by the sixth-century Plague of Justinian. And the Turkish government needed to know the contact details of everyone, no matter how brief their stay in the country, so if someone ended up with the virus, officials could track how it spread. I dutifully filled mine out and handed it in.

  After a short layover in Istanbul, I slept through most of the flight to Munich, during which I had an aisle seat. A German woman beside me, next to the window, would climb over me to use the washroom, her shoeless feet on the armrests, to avoid waking me. This did wake me up, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless, and was kind of impressed at her agility. With the eventual decline in air travel and physical distancing measures making passengers sit farther apart, that dexterous dance would become a thing of the past — and fast. But that did not occur to me then.

  At the time of my travel, Germany had a zero mortality rate, and was still holding soccer matches with tens of thousands of spectators. In France, which had only a handful of deaths, President Emmanuel Macron and his wife attended the theatre. Nearly a hundred countries were now reporting cases of COVID-19, but air travel was still relatively the same as when I’d flown to Beijing. The West still hadn’t taken the matter seriously. Amid the bustle of everyday life, few heard the low hum of the looming menace.

  * * *

  —

  Germany was where I had spent ages one through six. I had a lot of people to see in the country, although most were those I met later in life, elsewhere. The fact that I had cut out all the stops between Singapore and Germany, however, all the cities from Kabul to Athens, meant I ended up in Germany much earlier than planned. So, I settled in the empty apartment of my close friend Elias. Elias is Canadian, a dual citizen of Finland, and was pursuing a master’s degree in Germany. When I arrived, Elias was in Canada seeing friends and family. I had originally planned to meet him in Germany only at the tail end of my month-long trip to Europe.

  I collected Elias’s apartment key from his friend Risako, a Japanese exchange student studying Germanic literature, who says she reads one German novel a week. We met at the train station and walked toward the apartment, my wheeled suitcase bouncing up and down the cobblestones. Risako gave me some pierogi and waffles, saying that because the next day was Sunday, no shops would be open. It was the law, and the Germans were particularly strict about such things. There was a genuineness to Risako, a kindness that was more than politeness. Her life’s purpose, her raison d’être — or the Japanese version, ikigai, as I like to think — is to bring happiness to others, she said. I took an instant liking to Risako, despite a bit of a language barrier. We did have two common tongues, but English was her worst language, and German mine.

  Elias lived in Bayreuth, in the state of Bavaria, two hours north of Munich, where I had landed. It was a small town of 75,000 people where the composer Richard Wagner had built his opera house, financed by his eccentric patron, King Ludwig II. Bayreuth had also been a centre of Nazi ideology, what with Adolf Hitler being a huge Wagner fan. Sixty kilometres away, as the raven flies, was Nuremberg, where the courtroom for post–Second World War trials was still in use by the local judiciary.

  While Risako and I struck up a friendship, there in Bayreuth, in the last days of winter, everything in Europe started to change. It began in the south, across the snow-dusted Alps. “Italians woke up on Sunday morning, and it was already the future,” one journalist astutely wrote at the time: Haphazardly and suddenly, Rome placed heavy movement restrictions across the wealthy north, corralling 16 million people and more or less locking them in place. Vatican sermons had to come via video from the book room. “This Pope is caged in the library,” the pontiff Francis said. Eventually, the whole of the country was locked down as Italy’s death toll neared the world’s highest and parts of its healthcare system, as one administrator told media, ended up “on the brink of collapse.” Other parts of Europe would follow. The Second World War comparisons started coming, which were apt, for even French cafés that had been open through the Nazi occupation shut their doors.

  When I left China in February, even though I had been there, I believed that this was something that would more or less remain contained to those borders. I thought I had escaped the worst of it, the lockdown, social isolation, and the fear that accompanied COVID-19. Even in my time in Singapore, with paranoia mounting, the numbers of infected and dead were low, and I couldn’t help thinking that people, like C.J., for example, were overreacting. If anything, being in Sin
gapore solidified my feeling that COVID-19 had not spread much, even in Asia. A concern, for sure, but one linked almost solely to China. Arriving in Germany had seemed like a welcome relief; I was out of Asia, out of reach of the virus and the baggage that came with it. Few protective measures were in place, and the air was calm. Then, in what seemed like an instant, Italy and Spain each reported four-digit growths in new cases, and Europe’s infection numbers surged to more than 36,000, growing by nearly 50 per cent. Barring China, the continent would have more cases than the rest of the world combined. The World Health Organization labelled Europe the new epicentre, and global deaths topped 5,000. There was alarm and panic like what I saw in China just a month ago. And it rippled. Global financial markets, already beaten, would suffer wallop after wallop, hearkening back to Great Depression–era plunges. In fact, the International Monetary Fund would warn about the world’s worst downturn since then. Even Bitcoin crashed. Everything seemed to be happening at once. In the husk of downtown Bayreuth, I was reliving what I had just left behind, like some terrible version of Groundhog Day, wondering how everything had turned so bad so quickly.