Wuhan Diary
Dispatches from a Quarantined City
by Fang Fang
translated by Michael Berry
2020
Wuhan Diary is a book that collects a series of 60 daily social media posts by the Chinese author Fang Fang that she made from her apartment in Wuhan, starting at the beginning of a strict mandatory city-wide lockdown in late January 2020, and lasting until late March when the re-opening date was announced.
Last year, I read Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun, a journalist who entered Wuhan just after the lockdown lifted, and who interviewed people from a variety of stations in life about what they did and how they survived. If you were only going to read one account of the Wuhan quarantine, I would recommend Murong's. Fang Fang's diary has value as a direct account at the time things were happening, and Murong notes that she inspired him to do his project, but she's also just one person, a fairly affluent older woman with a lot of friends and family members able to deliver food to her doorstep. Her experiences in isolation were not too different from mine! But Murong was able to interview a doctor, a delivery person, an unlicensed cab driver - people who had a much more direct experience with the coronavirus outbreak.
Each day, Fang Fang notes how long the outbreak has been going on, talks about the weather, discusses whatever news about the coronavirus has been making the rounds that day (often the death of a doctor or another public figure), she shares updates about how she's getting food and how her family members are doing, she comments on the latest specific rules of the lockdown, she reports on conversations she's had with friends who are doctors or who know other important information, she calls on her readers to follow the quarantine procedures and help each other as best they can.
And, as time goes on, her diary comes to be dominated by a few other topics - questioning the government's early inaction on the coronavirus, calling on government officials and hospital administrators who made mistakes to admit them and resign, talking about the lengths she has to go to publish each new day of her diary when her social media accounts have been suspended and each new post is often taken down by the time the next day's goes up (due to her large audience resharing her words, they stay in circulation, but corporate or government censors try to limit her reach), and responding to the nationalist 'ultra-leftist' trolls (who sound a lot like America's alt-right) who denounce her, threaten her, slander and lie about her, and who generally attack anyone who shares negative information or who criticizes the government.
Especially early on, when the lockdown has just started, and the diary itself has not become a topic of discussion, Fang Fang's experiences in quarantine remind me a lot of my own early isolation in mid-March 2020. Like me, she started off fairly optimistic - a two-week shutdown that will stop person-to-person transmission and reveal all the people who are already infected but haven't shown symptoms yet, allowing them to get treatment. Like me, like a lot of us, I think, she quickly realized it wouldn't be that easy, and that the quarantine period would need to be longer, and was forced to stare into the blank space where the future used to be and wonder what would happen next.
Early on especially, but kind of throughout her diary, Fang Fang remains pretty optimistic that the quarantine will work, the coronavirus will be brought under control if not defeated, and she mostly has a very vocal, positive faith that people are trying their hardest, doing their best, and that people cooperating with government regulations would be the cause of an eventual return to normalcy. Honestly, this annoyed me, and at times made me feel sick. I don't want to be unfair to her, especially how much she got pilloried by Chinese readers for the opposite reason, but her positivity was sometimes upsetting to me.
It's also hard to square with her acknowledgment that the city government of Wuhan and the national government of China both did everything in their power to hide the existence of the virus, to deny that it was contagious, to conceal how many patients were coming into the hospitals and how many doctors and nurses were getting sick and dying while treating them. They knew, for sure, by the end of December 2019, and should've know weeks sooner, and instead of announcing the existence of the virus and trying to keep it contained, they attempted to keep it secret and allowed it to spread around China and across the world. For at least 20 days, the Chinese government allowed mass events and huge movements of people associated with New Years festivities, and during those 20 days, any chances of preventing a pandemic were lost.
Arguably the American government, and our largest agricultural businesses, are doing the same thing, right now, with the bird flu. If H5N1 becomes another pandemic, it won't be because it evolved too fast for anyone to stop, it will be because everyone chose to prioritize secrecy and quarterly profits over making any real attempt to prevent another plague. (Incidentally, this is the actual reason for the much-vaunted high price of American eggs right now, even if none of our politicians will say that out loud.)
There's a sick dramatic irony to reading Wuhan Diary, because by mid-March, just as America was going into a panic, the new coronavirus cases in Wuhan were finally (and only temporarily) going down to zero. By the end of the diary, Fang Fang's city is about to reopen and she thinks her life will go back to normal. And meanwhile, the worst was still yet to come, not just for Wuhan or China, but for the whole world.
Fang Fang also thinks the ultra-leftists and the people within the government who pushed for secrecy will be discredited, that they still might be forced to resign, and that the public will turn away from them and demand something better. Staring down the gun barrel of my own dark future, I admire her hope and optimism. But again, there is terrible dramatic irony in knowing that the censors and authoritarians were actually empowered, that Xi Jinping was about to start a massive consolidation of power, making China less free and less democratic, and probably more like what the ultra-leftists want it to be. I fear similar changes are coming to America, and I can't muster any optimism of my own right now.
Last year, I read Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun, a journalist who entered Wuhan just after the lockdown lifted, and who interviewed people from a variety of stations in life about what they did and how they survived. If you were only going to read one account of the Wuhan quarantine, I would recommend Murong's. Fang Fang's diary has value as a direct account at the time things were happening, and Murong notes that she inspired him to do his project, but she's also just one person, a fairly affluent older woman with a lot of friends and family members able to deliver food to her doorstep. Her experiences in isolation were not too different from mine! But Murong was able to interview a doctor, a delivery person, an unlicensed cab driver - people who had a much more direct experience with the coronavirus outbreak.
Each day, Fang Fang notes how long the outbreak has been going on, talks about the weather, discusses whatever news about the coronavirus has been making the rounds that day (often the death of a doctor or another public figure), she shares updates about how she's getting food and how her family members are doing, she comments on the latest specific rules of the lockdown, she reports on conversations she's had with friends who are doctors or who know other important information, she calls on her readers to follow the quarantine procedures and help each other as best they can.
And, as time goes on, her diary comes to be dominated by a few other topics - questioning the government's early inaction on the coronavirus, calling on government officials and hospital administrators who made mistakes to admit them and resign, talking about the lengths she has to go to publish each new day of her diary when her social media accounts have been suspended and each new post is often taken down by the time the next day's goes up (due to her large audience resharing her words, they stay in circulation, but corporate or government censors try to limit her reach), and responding to the nationalist 'ultra-leftist' trolls (who sound a lot like America's alt-right) who denounce her, threaten her, slander and lie about her, and who generally attack anyone who shares negative information or who criticizes the government.
Especially early on, when the lockdown has just started, and the diary itself has not become a topic of discussion, Fang Fang's experiences in quarantine remind me a lot of my own early isolation in mid-March 2020. Like me, she started off fairly optimistic - a two-week shutdown that will stop person-to-person transmission and reveal all the people who are already infected but haven't shown symptoms yet, allowing them to get treatment. Like me, like a lot of us, I think, she quickly realized it wouldn't be that easy, and that the quarantine period would need to be longer, and was forced to stare into the blank space where the future used to be and wonder what would happen next.
Early on especially, but kind of throughout her diary, Fang Fang remains pretty optimistic that the quarantine will work, the coronavirus will be brought under control if not defeated, and she mostly has a very vocal, positive faith that people are trying their hardest, doing their best, and that people cooperating with government regulations would be the cause of an eventual return to normalcy. Honestly, this annoyed me, and at times made me feel sick. I don't want to be unfair to her, especially how much she got pilloried by Chinese readers for the opposite reason, but her positivity was sometimes upsetting to me.
It's also hard to square with her acknowledgment that the city government of Wuhan and the national government of China both did everything in their power to hide the existence of the virus, to deny that it was contagious, to conceal how many patients were coming into the hospitals and how many doctors and nurses were getting sick and dying while treating them. They knew, for sure, by the end of December 2019, and should've know weeks sooner, and instead of announcing the existence of the virus and trying to keep it contained, they attempted to keep it secret and allowed it to spread around China and across the world. For at least 20 days, the Chinese government allowed mass events and huge movements of people associated with New Years festivities, and during those 20 days, any chances of preventing a pandemic were lost.
Arguably the American government, and our largest agricultural businesses, are doing the same thing, right now, with the bird flu. If H5N1 becomes another pandemic, it won't be because it evolved too fast for anyone to stop, it will be because everyone chose to prioritize secrecy and quarterly profits over making any real attempt to prevent another plague. (Incidentally, this is the actual reason for the much-vaunted high price of American eggs right now, even if none of our politicians will say that out loud.)
There's a sick dramatic irony to reading Wuhan Diary, because by mid-March, just as America was going into a panic, the new coronavirus cases in Wuhan were finally (and only temporarily) going down to zero. By the end of the diary, Fang Fang's city is about to reopen and she thinks her life will go back to normal. And meanwhile, the worst was still yet to come, not just for Wuhan or China, but for the whole world.
Fang Fang also thinks the ultra-leftists and the people within the government who pushed for secrecy will be discredited, that they still might be forced to resign, and that the public will turn away from them and demand something better. Staring down the gun barrel of my own dark future, I admire her hope and optimism. But again, there is terrible dramatic irony in knowing that the censors and authoritarians were actually empowered, that Xi Jinping was about to start a massive consolidation of power, making China less free and less democratic, and probably more like what the ultra-leftists want it to be. I fear similar changes are coming to America, and I can't muster any optimism of my own right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment