The Big Disconnect

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, I was in southern Germany, holed up only half by choice amid travel disruptions. I had only one friend there, Risako, a Japanese exchange student who became my effective lockdown buddy. And she was leaving me.

Risako’s university in Japan was actually ordering her home, she said. She didn’t have a choice, and she was sad. With growing travel restrictions, with every country banning everyone but citizens and residents, once Risako went back to Japan, she was uncertain when she would be able to return to Germany and her studies.

I had a similar thought. I grew up in Germany, but it’s not really my home. Once I eventually returned to Canada, I didn’t know when my next international trip would be. I’d probably never see Risako again — which I accepted, as sad as I found that idea. I knew Risako only through a friend, and not prior to this trip. People come and go in one’s life. But I couldn’t help but view that loss as a small representation of something bigger.

With the insidious creep of the pandemic decimating human travel, it was doing much the same to the free flow of goods, as important supply chains between countries slowed to a halt.

Businesses and countries alike were having to reconsider the globalized manner in which they conduct commerce. Returning to normal after this pandemic has passed may be hugely risky, knowing what we know, hearing what we hear from epidemiologists who had, years ago, predicted something like this would happen and are predicting it will happen again.

Perhaps some pullback from the world’s interconnectedness is necessary. As a Chinese saying goes, “Good medicine is bitter.” But for someone who grew up around the world speaking many languages, a child of globalization if there was one, I also felt a certain sadness that we would have to live with thicker borders on a more spread-out map.

As I had drinks with Risako for one last time, as much as I was saying goodbye to a friend, I was also mourning the erosion of an idea that has bound the world, the reversal of the arc of humanity over the last century.

‘I’m trying to build a toaster from scratch’

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the humourist Douglas Adams writes about how dependent the quintessential human male is on his community: “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

Someone actually put that theory to the test. “I’m trying to build a toaster from scratch — beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that... sells for only £3.99,” the British designer Thomas Thwaites writes on the website for his book The Toaster Project. He failed miserably.

Our world has become so interconnected, the web of supply chains so vast and intricate, a simple toaster requires some 400 components, sourced from all over the globe. The core driver of that was the pursuit of efficiency and better profit margins, accelerated by globalization, and Thwaites was hardly the first to realize that.

In 1958, the American economist Leonard Read wrote an essay titled “I, Pencil.” It was from that writing instrument’s point of view, detailing the sheer complexity of its creation — such that “not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me,” the pencil said.

That statement applies for a toaster, a pencil, or anything at all for that matter. It exemplifies the extensive divisions of labour that have come to define our economy.

The required cedar for the pencil grows in Northern California and Oregon, whose farmers have made a name for themselves for providing such wood. The resultant logs are shipped to San Leandro, California, to be cut, where the area’s millwrights specialize in that, having trained for years and to do it better than their competitors. The graphite is mined in Sri Lanka, then mixed with clay from Mississippi and treated with wax from Mexico, and the oil that goes into the rubber is from Indonesia.

Stretching supply lines around the world, farming out the production of individual components to wherever they can be made at the lowest price means selling cheaper products than the competitor — or getting more profit while maintaining the price.

In turn, all around the world, such sourcing has caused certain industries, particularly specialized ones, to cluster even more tightly together. California’s Central Valley, for example, produces some 80 per cent of the world’s almonds.

Thus, no company — no country — is truly independent, everyone uploaded onto a vast, tangled global network. And that has exposed everyone to new risk. COVID-19 would show that, while everyone had profited, our web of complex international relationships has also increased the points of failure. It doesn’t take a lot for something to go wrong somewhere.

Grounded

Not long after Risako told me of her plans to go back to Japan, I received an email about my own plans for returning home: my flight back to Canada, a prized, nonstop Munich–Toronto route, had been cancelled.

The only source of comfort was that they did not require me to call in once more, as had been the case for all the other times my travel plans got dashed amid the pandemic. The airline had automatically issued me a new ticket.

It was probably a source of comfort for them as well, not having to listen to my voice yet again. The problem, though, was that the new route was no longer nonstop. It had two connections, first in Frankfurt and then Montreal.

In normal times, I would not have minded a few transfers, but with the pandemic and how fast things could change, any layover added an extra layer of risk. If an onward flight got cancelled, I could very well get stuck mid-route.

I had already almost had that happen to me in January in China, where I was visiting relatives, caught unexpectedly in the world’s first COVID-19 lockdown. I did not want to dance with the devil yet again. But I did not have a choice.

Travel had effectively become an act of desperation. As countries shut their borders, travellers became trapped in severe lockdowns, sometimes kept unilaterally in their hotel rooms, watching entire airports close, their hopes of returning home turning bleak.

People were having to pay through the nose for accommodations — expenses for which they hadn’t planned. The more fortunate ones were paying near-business-class prices for specially arranged government repatriation flights.

Along with restricting inbound travel, the European Union had also issued a directive to allow foreigners already on the continent to remain beyond the terms of their visas, already anticipating some might get stuck due to the disruptions. Travel was now fraught with fear, apprehension, and an uncertain outcome. For me, the way of the world that I had long taken for granted had ceased to be.

A world disintegrating

COVID-19 has shown that, in a world like ours, built over the years with so many moving parts, small shocks in one corner can now drastically affect the whole.

If war mars Australia, which produces the most iron ore in the world, maybe customers get no toasters in the United Kingdom. If strikes in San Leandro, California, close down the mill, perhaps the American pencil company shuts down.

Sometimes that is that. Sometimes the onward impact just stops there. It takes the alignment of millions of stars, millions of dominos falling in just the right way, for small events to ripple big. Most don’t, and you never hear about them.

The integrated nature of the world, however, combined with instantaneous transmission of information, presents more pathways for these events to escalate — more than ever before. Sometimes, when the San Leandro lumber mill shuts down, it doesn’t just affect the pencil company. It could affect the cedar farm in Oregon, too, for one of its biggest clients may be the pencil company that now cannot make pencils.

By the time of COVID-19, China, the global electronics capital, had a share of the world economy that was four times the figure during the SARS outbreak. That larger portion, when shaken, was enough to send global laptop production plunging by as much as 50 per cent at one point.

Four times as big also means four times as connected, in a world already increasingly integrated. A U.S. business is now more likely to sell to China. When that American business suffers, so does the Canadian company it partners with. So does the French company that buys from the Canadian one.

And that’s just the ripple effect from the disruption in China alone. When COVID-19 spread, that impact was amplified as economies everywhere shut down. Eventually, European carmakers feared widespread disruption simply because a single electronics manufacturer had been forced to suspend production.

While the economy was soundly shaken, nowhere can that impact be more starkly seen than in medical supplies. Countries that normally could count on international trade for those supplies now found themselves lacking. Those that made the supplies became powerful. And that difference between them led to friction.

Germany and France responded to the pandemic by restricting exports of protective equipment. A French firm had to call the British health service to say it could not deliver protective equipment because it had been barred by its government. An American company said the same to the Canadian government. U.S. President Donald Trump — rather ham-fistedly — tried to get CureVac, a German firm working on a coronavirus vaccine, to move its research wing to the United States, ostensibly to develop said vaccine exclusively for his country.

Post-pandemic, the world will keep in mind such incidents. We will realize that while we may not long remember the friendships of summer, we will never forget the frustrations forged in this pandemic winter.

President Trump’s trade adviser has already used the breakdown of supply chains to argue for more pullback from international commerce, saying his country needed to “bring home its manufacturing capabilities and supply chains for essential medicines.” Foreign Policy magazine polled 12 experts from a wide range of fields, eight of whom predicted that, after the crisis, many countries will turn further inward in some way.

That is, of course, understandable. Without international supply lines, making everything domestically, we may have to live with more expensive products and fewer choices, but when crisis hits, we would not be at the mercy of circumstances or the goodwill of others. We gain in resiliency what we lose in efficiency.

Yet we will also lose something else that is harder to quantify, but real nonetheless. Declining travel and the prioritizing of national interest in manufacturing represent one small step toward a more walled up world, with national and ethnic lines more starkly drawn. Between isolation and vulnerability, countries will have to find a balance. That calculation will no doubt be difficult, but such is the way for every COVID-19 situation, whether big or small.

A touching dilemma

On the morning Risako left for Japan, I walked to the train station to send her off to the airport. I hauled her two white suitcases for her onto the carriage, up steps that were too small and through a door that was too narrow. In our final moment, I said a brief “bye” and left Risako on the train, her white suitcases between us. It was an unworthy goodbye, too stiff and subdued. Sometimes I find myself thinking back to what led to that.

I had wanted to go in for a hug, but physical distancing measures were very much on my mind, for Germans are notorious for policing each other’s social behaviour. At the same time, such trains are scheduled precisely. Risako’s might stop at the station for only three or five minutes, and we had already been late in boarding. The longer I took to think, the more likely I would end up an unwilling passenger on the train. Before I made my executive decision and shuffled out of the cabin, I was asking myself: “Would the other passengers call us out for such intimacy?” “Or would they just silently judge Risako for the rest of her trip?”

With COVID-19, there’s suddenly so much to think about.

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Adapted from 'Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended.' Copyright @ Ethan Lou, 2020. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada.