Captive in China: Michael Kovrig, the older brother who didn't come back

It is the photograph Ariana Botha didn’t take of her older brother, Michael Kovrig , that bothers her now as she looks through family pictures. Here is Kovrig as a child, cross-legged with a book — he always had a book — in the backyard of their childhood home in Toronto’s west end.

There is he, older, goofing around with his kid sister during a trip to France in 1985; and with their father, Bennett, somewhere in the Alps; and again, a few years ago, being interesting, funny, gentle, bearing gifts but never staying long enough, uncle Michael, reading a Chinese bedtime story to Botha’s two boys, Kai and Sebastian, at her home in the city’s east end.

The last time Kovrig visited was two summers ago, and it was too brief as always. Botha caught up with him on her back deck with the view of Lake Ontario. They shared a meal, and spoke of his next stop in Western Canada. His plan was to climb some mountains before looping back to his apartment in Hong Kong and his job as the China expert at International Crisis Group, an organization committed to building a more peaceful world.

“You were always wanting to catch that photo of Michael, because you wouldn’t see him that often,” Botha said. “Our last get-together, we didn’t go out to dinner, we didn’t really do anything, or go anywhere photo-worthy, and I remember thinking after he left, ‘Oh no, I didn’t get a single photo of us together,’ which I am often reminded of now, because you don’t think it is going to be the last time you see somebody for years.”

You can’t think the unimaginable: that your older brother will become famous as one of the “ Two Michaels, ” innocents ensnared in a Kafkaesque international political drama, imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party for the crime of being a Canadian citizen in the wrong country at the wrong time.

Chinese authorities on Dec. 10, 2018, detained Kovrig and, soon after, businessman Michael Spavor without charge nine days after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou , chief financial officer of telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., and eldest daughter of the company’s billionaire founder, Ren Zhengfei, at the request of the United States for alleged fraud and violating sanctions against Iran.

China doubled down on its gambit 18 months later in June, charging the pair with espionage in a country with a 99-per-cent conviction rate.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has rejected the notion of releasing Meng to free the two Michaels, and so another day, another month without her brother begins for Botha.

The 44-year-old agreed to speak with the National Post so Canadians might come to understand that behind the cardboard cutout of a guy caught up in a game of kidnap diplomacy is someone who could be anyone’s older brother.

Another family photo: here is Kovrig, grinning in the backyard. He is eight years old and dressed in the uniform of Royal St. George’s College, the boys’ private school in a leafy neighbourhood near the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Kovrig, being particularly smart, skipped senior kindergarten and fast-tracked through high school, graduating a year early, a few months after turning 17.

Former classmates who knew Kovrig barely knew him at all. They describe him as being very nice, extremely bright and intensely shy. He was always reading, and when put on the spot he would blink a wide-eyed blink, his face turning red. He didn’t attend school dances; he mostly kept to himself.

But the shy kid wasn’t a shut-in. He comes from a family of travellers with global roots. His mother, Marina, was a Czech émigré raised in Montreal, whose Austrian father, Joseph Kuchar, built a thriving multinational specialty chemical business from the bottom up. Kovrig did a brief stint with the family business in its Belgian offices, a time best remembered for his coming home after work reeking of naphthalene — that is, mothballs.

“It was a little hard for my brother to get excited about chemicals,” Botha said, laughing at the memory.

Kovrig’s Hungarian-born father, Bennett, is a retired University of Toronto professor who now has serious health concerns. The elder Kovrig wrote prolifically as an academic, publishing books on Cold War relations. His son left the University of Toronto in 1994 with an English degree and a loosely sketched plan to see the world, teaching English along the way.

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Among his first stops was Budapest, where he wound up living for the next four years, something in keeping with his character. On family trips abroad, Michael was always the one with his nose buried in the guidebooks, checking maps, wanting to know everything about every place.

In Budapest, Kovrig immersed himself in the local scene, and even briefly fronted a punk band called Bankrupt. Being a lead singer wasn’t a complete stretch: the now 48-year-old’s favourite holiday has always been Halloween, because he loves dressing up, being in character. (Role-playing games were a favoured distraction from his studies at U of T.)

Kovrig counts Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, the Australian alternative rock icon, among his musical heroes. In the handful of handwritten letters his family has received from him since he was detained by Chinese authorities 19 months ago he has asked them to send song lyrics.

“I think Michael must find the silence without music deafening,” Botha said.

Botha’s husband, Tim, recently unearthed an old mixtape Kovrig made for her in 1990 featuring The Police and Peter Gabriel. Whenever Kovrig would pull into Toronto from wherever he was, he always invited his sister to check out a band with him, but hitting a bar wasn’t really an option for Botha with two young kids at home.

Kovrig in his letters has also asked for books, great lists of them, including Franz Kafka’s The Trial, published posthumously nearly a century ago. It is the story of a man arrested and tried for a crime, though for what crime neither the captive nor reader ever learn. Other requested titles run from the Bible to books on venture capitalism, something by Milan Kundera (excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being), a Leonard Cohen poetry collection, anything by Mark Twain — in Chinese translation — and Catch-22, the Joseph Heller classic.

“Michael has asked for books on resilience, but he could write the manual,” Botha said.

Kovrig has always been able to write. His jailhouse letters are heartbreaking, funny, descriptive and searching, invariably asking others how they are, and urging family and friends that if they can’t help him then they need to help somebody. He is keenly aware of time being lost. He meditates, does yoga, martial arts — Bruce Lee is one of his heroes — keeps fit and hangs on.

Getting sucked up by the Chinese penal system would have sounded pretty far-fetched to Kovrig’s younger self in Budapest, where he eventually pivoted to journalism and had a great time reporting on Hungarian arts, culture and business before returning to school in his late 20s and getting a degree in international relations from Columbia University in 2003.

He met his wife, Vina Nadjibulla , while at Columbia — the couple separated several years ago — and he did some economic and statistical research on China for a New York consultancy firm prior to securing a gig with the United Nations. He was based in New York, but would travel widely, though Kovrig really wanted to return to Canada and get a job with the foreign service so he could represent his country on the world stage.

A phone call from his sister in Toronto accelerated the timeline as she told him that their mother’s health was faltering. Kovrig soon left the UN for a desk job in Ottawa. The siblings, always close, became closer, caring for their mother until her death in August 2010.

“Michael was always the prodigal son, off doing amazing things in the world,” Botha said. “But he really stepped up with our mother, and it is one of the reasons I know he is frustrated now by what is happening with our father, and not being able to help.”

Bennett Kovrig lives near his daughter’s house in an apartment he refers to as his “existential prison.” Once a big, rangy, rambling man, the 79-year-old is now bedridden and requires around-the-clock care following a botched hip surgery in Paris a year ago. A postoperative bout with a hospital-borne superbug nearly killed Kovrig, leaving him physically withered and a bit foggy.

French doctors recommended palliative care. Botha brought him home instead, on a Paris-to-Toronto bound Medevac flight Feb. 1, just as the first COVID-19 cases began appearing in the French capital.

“Silver linings,” she said. “Had my father stayed where he was, I am not sure he would still be alive.”

Kovrig had never cried for his son until recently, when he broke down sobbing. He has regained his appetite and mental acuity since returning home and is scathing in his criticism of the Canadian government’s handling of the two Michaels’ cases, calling it a great betrayal.

“This is not an abstract legal notion,” he said. “The two Michaels have done nothing wrong and the government is obligated legally — and morally — to do everything possible to liberate them.”

Like his son, Kovrig is achingly aware of time’s passing. At his age, he knows there is only so much time left.

“Michael wakes up in the morning and I wake up in the morning, both in our own little existential cells, and I think we both think of the other,” he said. “I want to see my son again.”

The pair once made good travelling companions, a tradition of shared father-son adventures stretching back to Michael’s childhood. The elder Kovrig describes an academic research trip to Budapest and Paris with a 10-year-old Michael as the “best trip he has ever been on with anyone, anywhere.”

China was a more recent destination, with his son playing tour guide, dazzling his father with his ease in speaking Mandarin and familiarity with the Chinese people. They hit all the must-see sites — the Great Wall, Nanking, Shanghai — but wandering off course, down crowded alleyways, in search of hole-in-the-wall restaurants was even more memorable.

“We are both big eaters,” Kovrig said. “Michael loves to cook and I love to cook and we loved discussing the food we ate.”

The younger Kovrig spent two years learning Mandarin before joining the Canadian Embassy in Beijing as vice-consul in 2014. He travelled throughout China, networking, researching, giving talks, writing reports, working rooms, hosting parties and being on, always on. He was good at what he did and he loved doing it, but he would also tell his sister how work took up too much of his available “bandwidth,” leaving little time for other adventures.

Forever the introvert, when he did get away, he sought out places to recharge. He practised meditation in Laos. His family wasn’t surprised that he remained in China when he took a leave of absence from the foreign service after his two-year posting ended in September 2016.

“He felt he wasn’t done yet, which is pure Michael,” Botha said. “He felt that he hadn’t learned everything there was to learn about this place.”

The kid sister describes herself as the family pessimist, a protective layer she has worn, even prior to her brother’s arrest, to guard against life’s letdowns and assorted disappointments. Dealing with Kovrig’s arrest, his finances, their father’s health, the fear of possibly never seeing her brother again has been exhausting, infuriating, hard.

“Michael really is the ultimate big brother,” Botha said. “He is wise, and the protector, and so strong and so smart and so capable, and I am definitely missing that in my life right now.”

There are nights when she cries herself to sleep with worry. But there are mornings, too, when she wakes up and hope inexplicably floods in, a feeling that somehow, someway, “we got this,” and another image of her brother, one not yet taken, will take shape in her mind: the phone rings and it is Michael telling her he is on his way home.

“You can’t give up hope because the alternative is too painful,” Botha said. “I fantasize about being at the airport and watching Michael walk off the plane. I am not normally a fan of the Disney ending but we need a Disney ending.

“We need a happy ending — now.”