Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Things are still quite tense due to the outbreak, yet online the headlines keep changing, alternating between depressing stories and uplifting ones. The commander-in-chief responsible for spearheading the fight against this outbreak in Wuhan has finally been replaced. Actually, as far as the people are concerned, it really doesn’t matter who they send here. It only matters if that person has the ability to control this outbreak, if that person is able to avoid making the mistakes that keep repeatedly being made, if that person can refrain from those meaningless displays, and if that person can avoid repeating that same old empty bullshit over and over again. If they send someone who can do that, it will be enough.

As for those Hubei government officials who have been removed from office, they never lived up to fulfilling their most basic responsibility of protecting this land and keeping the people safe. They allowed this city and the people here to go through such terrible pain; I don’t see any way they could have quelled the people’s anger, short of firing them. But it is still unclear if they will simply be transferred to another location where they can start all over again. In traditional China, the emperor used to have a policy of “never again employing” government officials who had committed grave mistakes that led to catastrophic consequences for the people and the nation. I think that, at the very least, this approach should be adopted here—those officials would actually be getting off easy. I figure they might finally understand what everyday people are going through if they themselves get stripped of their power and get a taste of what being an average person is like.

One bit of news today left me particularly sad; that was the news of the death of the famous master of traditional Chinese painting Mr. Liu Shouxiang. [19] Liu Shouxiang (1958–2020) was a Chinese watercolor painter who also served as professor at the Hubei Institute of Film Arts. He was the founding director the Art Education Department at his Institute and he held individual exhibitions in Germany, Hong Kong, and Taipei, along with his work being exhibited in major collections all over the world. Professor Liu died of COVID-19 on February 13, 2020, at the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan. I had heard that the virus got him, but I still didn’t expect things to come to this. I also know Mr. Liu through my next-door neighbor, who is also a painter. Even more heartbreaking was a photo that a doctor friend texted me. Seeing that image suddenly brought back all the sadness that has been surrounding me these past several days. The picture was of a pile of cellphones piled up on the floor of a funeral home; the owners of those phones had already been reduced to ash. No words.

Instead, I had better talk about the outbreak. For nine days straight now, the number of people infected in the region north of Hubei has been on the decline. Hubei, on the other hand, continues to go in the opposite direction, and today alone the number of confirmed cases continued to multiply. The expanding numbers are enough to make anyone following the outbreak shudder. The reason for this is clear; this is what the specialists have been referring to as “stockpiled patients.” What that means is these are the people who originally could not even get into the hospital system due to overcrowding so they were all simply sent home and told to self-quarantine as “suspected cases.” Now the government is doing everything possible to get everyone officially diagnosed into a hospital and trying to make sure that all suspected cases are properly quarantined. Perhaps the numbers we are seeing today will be the peak? I suspect that from here on out, we won’t see another influx like this. There are, of course, all kinds of objective reasons that account for the missteps taken early on; however, as far as your average person is concerned, all those objective reasons resulted in real human lives being lost. Shirking responsibility is useless when millions of netizens are keeping a clear tally online. At least those heart-wrenching videos of people wailing out to the heavens for help have disappeared. This time I am confident that the situation is really improving and that it wasn’t just another case of internet censors erasing those videos.

But one thing clear is that the government actions taken to control the outbreak are proving to be increasingly effective. Over time, they are also gradually finding methods that are more humanistic. Large numbers of public servants have been sent to help out local communities on a grassroots level. Entities like my work unit of the Hubei Writers Association have a number of people they have sent out. Even Chinese Communist Party members who are skilled professionals are being sent out to help. Each person is assigned to oversee a group of families in order to help the government understand their current health condition and what they might be lacking in their daily lives right now in terms of supplies and other items. One of my friends is the assistant editor at Yangtze Arts Magazine and even though she is an MA graduate of a top school, she still makes a lot less than most public servants; yet even she was assigned to oversee a block of six families. Hearing her recall the details of those families and what they have been going through leaves one speechless. These days most families only have one child and there are usually several elderly people at home to care for. One family, for instance, was composed of a middle-aged husband and wife, each of whom had a set of elderly parents they had to care for; in addition to that, the wife also took care of their kids and the husband took care of all the shopping for everyone. Wuhan is a large city; even if you have a car, driving around to deliver food to all these people is itself an exhausting job. During normal times people would all comment on how difficult they had it, but these days they seem lucky as compared to all those families suffering from sickness and death. At least they are all still alive to take care of one another. They all keep saying that they will be able to hang in there and that they believe in what the government is doing.

A never-ending supply of aid provisions continue to flood into Hubei. This evening my brother told me that the [US] city of Pittsburgh’s donation of 180,000 face masks had just arrived in Wuhan via a China Air shipment. “They are still making arrangements for even more medical supplies to be sent over. Why don’t you mention this in your blog today?” Pittsburgh and Wuhan are sister cities; of course I’ll mention it, I told him. I actually visited Pittsburgh twice many years ago, and I really liked the atmosphere in that city. But as far as my brother was concerned, he really couldn’t care less whether or not we were sister cities; what is important is that his son and grandchildren all live in Pittsburgh. As someone living in the center of this plague zone, he just wanted to find a way to express his appreciation to the city of Pittsburgh.

By the way, there is one item I want to clear up: Several years back, Writers Publishing House published an illustrated book that described animals like the masked palm civet as being “edible.” The editor credited was someone named “Fang Fang.” A few people have been putting images from that book with the editor’s name crossed out online and using that as an opportunity to attack me. I just want to say that the “Fang Fang” responsible for that book is a completely different person and is in no way related to me. Today I even half-jokingly bragged to one of my colleagues, “Wow, I didn’t even know I was a book editor! Yet somehow I published this book as lead editor without even knowing it!”

Let me wrap up today’s entry with a quote from one of those online memes: “I long not for my trip down to Yangzhou to enjoy the spring scenery in March, I crave only to be able to finally go downstairs by March.”