Austria: Coronavirus Behind Closed Borders

MeiLan Haberl

My roommates wake me up at 3am. This in itself is not unusual. In the eight months I have lived in Vienna during my gap year , I have adapted to the irregular sleeping patterns of my 20-something flatmates.

What is unexpected, when I stumble out of bed to ask what’s happening, is the reason behind the ruckus: “We’re leaving. They’re closing the border.”

Four hours later, I find myself the sole inhabitant of a Viennese apartment. My ex-roommates are already somewhere over the Atlantic, having booked the first U.S.-bound flight they could find. Meanwhile, I’m pulling up youtube clips of the news briefing that spurred their panic. 

I watch as Trump declares the “suspension” of all travel from Europe to the U.S. in response to rising infection rates of COVID-19, followed by coverage of the announcement from major American broadcasting stations. Many of the reporters bear the same expression of frenetic shock I saw in my roommates’ faces.

You might wonder why I don’t share their panic: why I choose to remain in an empty apartment, and why I’m not rushing to circumvent the nebulous restrictions of Trump’s travel ban and avoid being trapped in a foreign country. 

Firstly, I’m not actually in a foreign country. My dad likes to joke that our family is “Triple-A”: Asian, Austrian, and American, a reference to our ethnic heritage and possession of dual U.S.-Austrian citizenship.  Though I might not have been born or raised in Vienna, I’m still fortunate enough to call it home. Secondly, like the rest of Austria, I’ve been preparing for a COVID-19 explosion for a while. 

In early February, the first clusters of positive coronavirus cases were reported in Italy. While the US was still covering the virus as a foreign (and thus, easily dismissable) issue, no such illusory degree of separation existed here. Thousands of tourists, workers, and goods are annually exchanged across the Austrian-Italian border. In the shared territory of Tirol, for example, townships displaying a blended linguistic/cultural Austro-Italian heritage spill into one another, blurring the actual “border”. This closeness between Austria and Italy made even the possibility of a wider outbreak cause for provisional measures.

News of the disease became the central topic in any Austrian conversation virtually overnight. In one day, five local acquaintances all advised me to buy dry goods in the event of a sudden quarantine. While there was no mass panic, no sudden shortage of toilet paper or proliferation of extreme hoarding behaviors, a palpable uneasiness suffused the whole country. The threat of the virus felt like dark clouds looming at the horizon’s edge. 

In the first week of March, the storm broke. As soon as Italy declared full quarantine, everything in Austria—from schools, to public transit, to performances at the State Opera House—was methodically shut down. Public service announcements—“Bleib daheim, es könnte leben retten...für Wien, eine Stadt, die zusammenhält” (stay home, it could save lives…for Vienna, a city that stands united)— appeared not only on TV, but also on navigation apps, Youtube, and Spotify. 

Even before the declaration of the U.S.-Europe travel ban, these increased safety precautions forced my family to have a difficult conversation about whether I should stay in Austria, alone, or take advantage of the privilege provided by dual citizenship to travel back to the U.S.  The U.S., even before its first confirmed case of COVID-19, did not feel safe.

As a Chinese-American, I’ve grown up constantly aware of the “Model Minority” label afflicting Americans of Asian descent. This moniker holds that “all Asians” are intellectually gifted, intrinsically docile, and academically predisposed to success. It’s a stereotype that at once negates the vast diversity of Asian subcultures in the States, dismisses our personal individuality in favor of monolithic myth, and deeply undermines the adversity we face as people of color.

However, the “Model Minority” fallacy is just one side of an irony inherent in the Asian-American condition. 

When U.S. news pundits or government officials describe the pandemic as “foreign” or a “Chinese Virus”—as if the coronavirus comes bearing visa paperwork and a made in China sticker—they are calling to mind a much older, more racially charged epithet. This, the other edge of a stereotypical knife, is the “Yellow Peril.” The slur amplifies already malign tropes, propagating the image of an inhuman, hive-minded threat from overseas, with slit eyes and eggy skin, associated with uncleanliness and disease. 

Historically, the use of this sort of xenophobic language in the U.S. preluded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (the first federal law preventing immigration for all members of a specific ethnic/national group) and the Internment of Japanese Americans during WWII (a forcible relocation of all Japanese Americans to concentration camps, based on the unsubstantiated fear that they were spies). The parallels between these historic moments of federally-sanctioned discrimination—the use of “othering” language and political scapegoating, followed by border closures—are uncomfortable at best. 

For my family, this created enough doubts about the U.S.’ relative safety to keep me in Vienna. While my flatmates crossed the ocean, I stayed on European shores, feeling my connection to home narrowing to a TV screen. I’ve spent the weeks following Trump’s travel ban perpetually hunched over my phone, devouring news about the U.S.’ situation. It’s as though I’m watching the last three months of developments in Austria compressed into an eighth of the time: the same safety measures that Austria implemented, slowly enough to give its citizens time to adjust, with days or weeks’ worth of prior notice, are thrust upon Americans without warning. The resulting havoc is heart-wrenching to watch. 

My parents try to keep the mood light when we FaceTime. At one point, they even joke that if I were to try to come home, the U.S. administration might consider me less Triple A and more of a Triple Threat: part Chinese, traveling from Europe, and a member of Gen Z/a possibly asymptomatic carrier.

Somehow, the humor doesn’t make me feel any less helpless (even selfish) for being stuck an ocean away. I can’t express the anxiety of monitoring family members spread out across three continents. But even as I try to keep up with pressures, provisions, and policies that differ internationally, I realize that there’s one unifying constant. 

All the arbitrary distinctions we’ve made, based on country, color, class and creed, are ultimately just lines in the sand. Despite them, we still share the same shores, connected by the same oceans. We share humanity and a humane responsibility to each other. The virus doesn’t discriminate. We can’t, either.