Has Covid killed off the global citizen?
Having family spread over several countries was once a marker of success. But, as Helen Kirwan-Taylor has discovered, there are downsides to life as a ‘cosmocrat’
I’ve been browsing the British Airways website for flights to New York since early this morning. Once the height of excitement, it is now something I do with a heavy heart. My 89 year-old father, who miraculously survived pneumonia two years ago, is back in hospital, this time with Covid. He was diagnosed with it on the day he was meant to be vaccinated; how is a pointless guessing game at this stage.
I am 5,000 miles away, feeling utterly helpless. As of yesterday, his prognosis changed from stable to uncertain and, to make things even worse, New York has a three-day quarantine rule (strictly enforced, I might add). Dr Charles Carpati, the head of intensive care who saved his life the first time around and is now overseeing his case says attempting to see him before he dies is a “roll of the dice”.
My sister, who lives in New York, and my brother, who lives in Washington, will manage. I may never again. This is the price you pay for globalism in Covid times. It’s a subject I have written about before but always from the opposite angle.
A “cosmocrat” – a term coined by John Micklethwait in his 2000 defence of globalisation, A Future Perfect – used to be a master of the universe, seamlessly moving between “hubs” such as London, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing in Business Class, clutching a Tumi briefcase with a British Airways gold card hanging from a faded leather strap. These are the sorts of people who knew that Prada Hong Kong fits better (leaner cuts) and where to get the best pizza in Naples.
“The one thing that is endemic to this class,” wrote Micklethwait, “is the emphasis on cosmopolitan consumerism. That is why the fish displays in Manhattan restaurants groan with Chilean sea bass and loup de mer from the Mediterranean, Hamachi from New Zealand and various other specimens that once used to be Jacques Cousteau’s preserve.”
Call it Ghislaine Maxwell’s preserve. She has just announced that she is prepared to give up two of her three passports – renouncing both her British and French citizenship, to leave her with “just” her American ID – for a plea deal. I bet she wishes she had settled down with some dullard in leafy Sussex, had children and missed entertaining all those titans on private jets now.
It staggers the mind to think we once applauded the ability not only to travel at the drop of a hat, but to foster global sophistication by going to an American graduate school and marrying some classmate from Singapore or Denmark before settling down in Hong Kong and sending the children to the French lycée (for their own advantage). Those “stateless MBA beings”, so well described by cultural commentator Peter York, have paid a high price for Covid.
My cousin Lee Cauro, an American married to a Frenchman who lives in Barcelona, has four professionally dazzling children living in four different countries. She has just missed the birth of a grandchild because her son lives in Hong Kong. “They won’t let us in,” she says. “People used to think we were so glamorous, moving around the world. Now it makes people understand what it means to be separated.” When Lee’s husband had a serious accident in the summer, it’s doubtful her children would have made the funeral. Zoom is her lifeline.
Covid has made many parents regret the decision to encourage a broader outlook. Four of my close friends have children studying at colleges in America. When lockdown happened, many remained in the US, in part not to jeopardise a place in the Green Card lottery. Even when restrictions were lifted, the families had to meet halfway to avoid quarantine. Two of my friends with children in Australia may spend another year without seeing them. One has yet to meet her daughter’s fiancé.
Though many families were also denied the ability to see their loved ones for long periods here, most managed eventually. The idea that you are only a car ride away is hugely comforting. My husband has been able to safely visit (even just wave) to his mother throughout. No such luxury exists for me, with oceans and different political regimes to contend with. My father was at such a high risk that we thought it prudent to wait for both of us to be vaccinated before visiting. Now, ironically, I can only hope to get into his Covid ward.
I am a second-generation global citizen. My Russian mother was already displaced, having been born in Yugoslavia (she came to the United States aged 14 as a refugee), before becoming an American diplomat’s wife, moving every four years. Having raised us all over the world, she found herself at one point with a son in Milan, a daughter in London and another in New York. The distance really began to hurt when I had my first child and later when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I felt then, as I do now, how different my life might have been had I stayed in one place with parents within “poppable” distance.
Internationalism’s benefits (worldliness, sophistication, breadth, education) are all big advantages, in the short term. Who would want to deny their child the opportunity – if available – of a scholarship to Stanford or work in Shanghai? Many of our friends succeeded in their careers because they were willing to move. I met my own British husband in New York where he was working for an American bank. I thought I would be the one staying put: instead, I was soon moving away again.
I once spent a two-hour flight sitting next to a 23-year-old gentleman from Pakistan. He was highly educated but lived at home with his family. He would marry in his culture, he said, and if he had children, he would only move as far as next door. “We feel sorry for the English,” he told me. “I could never abandon my parents.”
This all sounds wonderful to me now. The Cotswolds village we locked down in includes four generations of one family. I enviously saw them meeting up when they could, talking across stone walls when they couldn’t.
My British friend Catherine, who has worked in fashion all her life and now lives in Switzerland with her second husband, has three children in two other countries. She also has elderly parents, one of whom is very unwell. “Covid has made me think, where do I want to be buried?” she says. “Would my children come to Geneva to visit my memorial? My husband has a family crypt. No one ever moves away in his family.”
I think how it must sting the Queen – the embodiment of a family that is “truly English” – that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have chosen a future that involves those roots so little.
My friend Georgina has a daughter working for a law firm in Singapore who she hasn’t seen since last February. “We are making plans for a family holiday in Greece this summer, but I daren’t really hope that she will be with us.” She recently reread her father’s memoirs about his family’s life in India in the first half of the 20th century: “Moving to ‘the colonies’ involved proper goodbyes. You didn’t know when you would see your family again, how many weddings, births and deaths you might miss.
“I would still encourage my children to follow opportunities… but I’ll never say goodbye in such a blasé way again,” she says.
My younger son went off to Yale six years ago; it was with some bribery (namely, the promise of a rent-free life) that we managed to entice him back. Now, every bubbled family supper fills me with joy – but also sadness that my father, sister and brother aren’t there, too.
Globalism steals memories. Covid has hit those of us who aren’t “at home” hard. We used to talk about how nice it was to have an excuse to visit New York, Australia or Hong Kong regularly. Now we pine for the very thing we escaped: parochialism. We might speak five languages and know the names of every restaurant in Milan, but we can’t “pop” in anywhere. Internationalism now feels like a passport to loneliness.
Covid will ease as vaccines are rolled out, but we will never forget what being separated by borders means again. “Rejecting globalisation,” the American journalist George Packer once wrote, “was like rejecting the sunrise.” Covid has made us do so, maybe for good.
‘We might speak five languages, but we can no longer “pop” over to see our loved ones’