March 3, 2011
Dear Nico,
I write while sitting in the café of the Wellcome Trust, on Euston Road, waiting for you to arrive. You are a bit late. Just three days have passed since your official arrival date, but your mother has now been in labor for almost a full day, first at home, on River Street, where you were meant to be born, and now in the University College Hospital next door. I expect you soon.
At the moment my thoughts are mostly directed at hoping you and your mother will be safe and healthy when you emerge (so far, so good). But now and then a deeper reflection on your entry into the world springs up, so I thought it might be a propitious moment to write them down. They are ad hoc and personal, but because you’ve inspired them, you may be curious to read them.
When I first heard that Catherine was in labor, I was writing a piece of my PhD dissertation that describes the structure of the grain trade in Argentina in the early 20th century, 100 years before you were born. It was pretty exploitative. Big, multinational export companies controlled the trade, squeezing every last peso out of the poor farmers, many of them immigrants from Italy. The Argentine government, ruled by landowners who also squeezed the farmers, tended to side more with the exporters than their co-citizens. The grain was sent across the wide, flat pampas by train, and then across the Atlantic ocean by steamship, before being sold to people in Britain, who made it into bread.
The world you will enter today is, in many ways, the same. Once-distant people and places have been knit together by technology, migration, and economic incentives. On balance, this is good for human progress. But it also carries injustices, as the Argentine immigrant farmers well knew. You are already a direct beneficiary of this system. It brought your parents together. It has given them (and the National Health System) the means to conceive you and provide for you. Throughout your life, you will likely benefit even more, in part through your own initiative and talents, but also because of the incredible luck you’ve had of being born where you will be, at the time you will be, and to whom you will be. The randomness of this birth lottery never ceases to astound me, and I hope you will recognize it as well. You could have been a gaucho baby.
I also hope this is the most serious ethical issue you will face in your life because, as dilemmas go, maintaining a sense of social justice while sitting on the privileged side of the global wealth divide is a relatively easy one. The world may not make it so simple for you, however. Between the time of the my Argentine farmers and the day of your birth, human beings have done much worse things to each other than exploit the fruits of others’ labors. Your English and Italian great-grandparents were, technically, enemies, fighting on opposite sides of a horrible war. We don’t think that will happen again, but violence still threatens. As you are being born the headlines are full of stories from Libya, where a revolution is under way against a bizarre and cruel dictator who is attacking his own people. You are largely protected against this kind of thing—again, because you’ve won the birth lottery. But that could change, no matter how fervently we hope it doesn’t.
Looking at the big picture, then, I think your world has a good chance to be the best one humanity has ever inhabited, and you have as good a place in it, starting off, as one could hope to have. But precisely because things are so good, I also fear your world will see some reversion to the mean. Threats abound (climate change is the one I personally spend most time thinking about). Fulfilling our national stereotypes, your father often speaks of history as a cycle, while I see it as more of a linear increase. In reality, as with many of our occasional disagreements, these differing emphases mask underlying agreement—history tends to get better, but with lots of setbacks along the way. I hope you will not live in one of the periods of setback.
I just got a text message—will you know what that means?—from your father. You are still taking your time. I write on.
What about the little picture, then? Here I’m out of my element, both because I’m no expert on human psychology or human relationships, and because the historical record is nearly non-existent, as far as I can tell. Again, the birth lottery has given you a very unique position. You have a mother and a father who love each other but who are not in love with each other. Instead, they are in love with other people, of whom I am one. But at the same time all these people, plus several more, will love you. Indeed, they already do, even before having met you. It’s a complex family, and your relationships with them will be diverse, but you are the greatest common factor between them. This is as good and safe a position as one could hope to be in, I think.
Other people may disagree. Though romantic love between people of the same sex is increasingly accepted, many people remain opposed to the idea that such relationships can be healthy and valid. But the arrangement you are being born into is more complex still, because it incorporates elements both of the “traditional” heterosexual, nuclear family and of gay relationships. It is thus fits neither the standard norm nor the increasingly accepted sub-cultural norm. This makes you different, and being different is often hard. It may bother you at some points in your life, which I regret. However, a lot of people don’t get loving, supportive families, so if this is the trade-off, it’s not such a bad one.
I’ve often thought about what the relationship between you and me will be like, and if I’m honest I have to say I have no idea. What will you call me? What will I call you? We don’t have the words. I haven’t told anyone yet, but I like the idea of you calling me Shu-shu, which means “uncle” in Chinese and is the standard term of affection for men who are a generation older than you. We’ll see if that—or my surreptitious plans to teach you Chinese generally!—goes anywhere.
Nomenclature is probably the easiest unknown to think about. Your father first announced to me the idea of you during the early stages of our relationship. I remember it taking place in a Chinese restaurant in New York; he thinks it was in London (but we agree it happened!). That was a bit less than three years ago, and in that time I’ve contemplated a very wide range of possibilities. How your father’s life fits together with mine is still being determined. I’m sure I seem old to you, but I’m still young enough to wonder what to do with my life. Career? Love? Children? I have ideas, hopes, fears, and inklings, but few certainties. I’m learning, though, that life tends to answer these questions for you through unforeseen twists and turns. You are a big twist. I still don’t know exactly how you will affect my life, but affect it you will.
Let me tell you what I am most certain about, though. I feel things for your father that I’ve never felt for anyone else, feelings I suspect to be indelible. Our relationship is—like you!— improbable in many ways. But the fact that I, a 29 year old American PhD student who could be anywhere, doing anything, am choosing to sit outside a London hospital and write a letter to you probably says a lot. I’m crying a little as I write this and I don’t really know why, probably a complex mix of joy and hope and fear and doubt and excitement (and lack of sleep). Whatever it is, it feels right.
Another message from Dad. He says you have delayed too long, and so will need to be born surgically. You are healthy though, as is your mother, so all should go well. If any of us believed in a higher power we would pray.
Here in the Wellcome Trust I’m watching a display that counts the number of human beings on the planet. We’re getting close to 6.9 billion. Nico, you are already, without even being born, one of the most extraordinary. I can only imagine how much more extraordinary you’ll become once you have a chance to shape the world yourself, instead of being shaped by it. I can’t wait to see you do it.
Shu-shu.
High, dry, and cold, La Paz still manages to impress. It's really two cities: El Alto, perched on the flat plateau of the Altiplano, and La Paz proper, which dramatically spills down the sides of a steep valley.
