Repeatedly derailed trip yields book deal
Canadian’s travels in China, Europe amid pandemic leads to account on experience
A man goes to see his dying grandfather in China, the first stop in a two-month holiday. He makes it just in time — at the hospital, nervous doctors ask him to leave and not come back; soon after, China starts shutting down. He heads to the airport in Beijing to fly to Hong Kong to visit friends, only to find out at the airport his flight is cancelled. But he’s lucky: he can get to his next destination, Singapore. He lands and once again, the country is headed into lockdown. Fortunately, he already has a flight booked to Germany — and arrives just before COVID-19 does.
“It was like that every place I went to,” Ethan Lou recalls in phone conversation from Bayreuth, Germany, where he has now been holed up in a friend’s apartment for more than a month. His friend’s not there; he got stuck in Finland and couldn’t return. “When I arrived there, things were normal.” Until they weren’t.
That rather surreal experience, Lou says, was “like some perverted ‘Groundhog Day.’ ”
It sounds like the plot for a novel but, for the journalist, former bitcoin entrepreneur and now author, it unexpectedly became the beginning of his second book of non-fiction. He’d originally planned the trip — he expected to be away for two months or so — as a break between finishing his first book, “Once a Bitcoin Miner,” out from ECW Press, and launching a publicity tour in the fall. He was an early investor in bitcoin and paused a career in journalism, including stints at the Star and at Reuters, to found a blockchain startup and then to write a book about the experience.
Instead of relaxing, he found himself staying one step ahead of a pandemic that finally stalled him in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth, whose claim to fame is that it’s the site of Richard Wagner’s opera house.
Lou’s trip reflects his personal history: Now 29, he was born in China; spent ages one to six in Germany; went to school in Singapore, where he did his mandatory military service; and now calls Canada home. If there’s a metaphor about the international nature of the way we live, it’s embodied in him.
He wrote about the Chinese leg of his trip for Maclean’s magazine. When he left Toronto, Wuhan’s province hadn’t been sealed off. “That was a really dramatic escalation of events, perhaps while I was in the air,” Lou says. He landed on Jan. 23.
He managed to get in a couple of visits with his grandfather at the hospital before doctors told Lou to leave and not return. His plans to visit Hong Kong fell apart and suddenly he was stuck in Beijing — one of the lucky ones, as it turns out.
He wrote to the Star: “The runway was thick with snow, and it continued to grow thicker. I had to transit in the northern Chinese city of Dalian to get to Hong Kong and, in Beijing, the plane I was on was (stationary) for a good hour. Then we had to change planes, for the cold had broken the aircraft.”
Those delays left him on the ground in Beijing when Air China cancelled all flights from the mainland to Hong Kong, which turned out to be fortunate. “Otherwise, I would have found that out only at the Dalian airport, finding myself stuck in some random Chinese city to which I’ve never been, and about which
I know nothing.”
Lou made it to Singapore and then Germany on March 7, when Italy — the first European country to be ravaged by the virus — hadn’t even been sealed off yet. “There were no lockdowns; people were carrying on life as normal.” Until they weren’t.
During this time, he was talking with his agent about another project. But the Maclean’s article morphed into a book proposal and now it’s been signed to Signal.
It was Lou’s personal approach to the tale that caught the eye of Signal publisher Doug Pepper.
“First and foremost it was his personal story and how unique it is, but also how he captured the fear and panic and suspicion in China and Europe. That feels timeless to me, something we’re all grappling with. And he writes so well,” Pepper said in an email.
Some authors have rushed to get spurious books about the pandemic out; but there’s a hunger, Pepper thinks, for strong journalism and real thought, adding that Lou “has a lot to say about what he thinks the future for us all may look like once we return to some sense of normalcy. We all want to know that.”
With obvious time on his hands, (“I had to cancel a lot of plans,” he quips, including trips to Ireland and Spain) Lou’s writing the second book: “Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended.” It, too, is set to come out in the fall. It’ll be part travelogue, part pandemic guide, looking at the societal effects of the crisis. It will chronicle Lou’s real-time experience at the centre of the pandemic, along with the race to find a solution and the economic and other implications.
“The world we live in right now has been shaped from the ashes of the Second World War,” he says. “Everything we know now, the small ‘l’ liberal world order, the international bodies and the western democracies (have) happened out of a cataclysmic event. And I think the coronavirus pandemic is another one of those things.
“If you look, for example, at the world order, the U.S. has withdrawn funding from the WHO (World Health Organization). China said it would give more money to (it) now. China has been doing that for a long time, filling in the voids on the world stage left by a retreating United States. That is a trend that will continue and probably escalate with this crisis.”
Overcoming new national rules and airlines’ flight suspension, Lou has a ticket to Toronto booked, finally, for Monday. Once he gets back, he’ll be going straight into a two-week lockdown.
“I’m definitely not looking forward to that,” he says. “Here, I go out every day to run.”
He’ll draw the personal narrative in the second book in part from his digital trail — revisiting text and email chats and retracing his movements via Google Maps.
“Once a Bitcoin Miner” is drawn from the Before and “Field Notes from a Pandemic” from the After, as many have starkly divided the COVID-19 era. Are there connections that the author sees between the books?
“One interesting thing I’ve seen in crypto people is that they’re usually more libertarian. They’re always for smaller government. And amid this pandemic there has been almost a shift in sentiment within the crypto community where people are favouring individual sacrifice for the collective good.
“They say there are no atheists in foxholes and I think there are no libertarians in pandemics,” Lou says.