Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

People often have reasons that they use to describe their actions, such as “we were just carrying out written directives.” But reality is filled with all kinds of unpredictable changes, whereas written directives are often prepared hastily with only broad guidelines. Moreover, those written directives are mostly composed with common sense in mind, so they are usually not in direct contradiction with the basic principles of humanitarianism. All we need is for the people assigned to enforce these principles to have just a little more humanistic spirit; just enough so that a driver who had been stuck out on the highways for more than 20 days wouldn’t end up with his life in danger; just enough so that when someone is infected with coronavirus, a crowd of people doesn’t end up sealing their front door with a steel rod so that everyone is locked inside; just enough so that when an adult is forced into mandatory quarantine, their children don’t end up starving to death alone at home. That is all I am asking for.

If our humanistic spirit had been broad and embracing enough, we wouldn’t have to abandon our sick and weak as we do battle with this terrible virus. If our humanistic spirit had been more fully formed, it would have told us that we must do everything within our power to ensure that these other patients who are also suffering are able to continue receiving the care they need. There has to be a way forward that no one has come up with yet. After all, that’s what people do; we find new ways forward. Our social resources are strong, and this is not a weak nation by any means; there must be a way to resolve this issue. The problem is that your so-called humanistic spirit hasn’t allowed you to think about things from someone else’s perspective. If you did, then you would have taken all this into consideration already. Look how I find myself always complaining about these commonsense issues. Adhering to the principles of humanism is the most basic and fundamental type of common sense. We are part of the human race, after all.

Today I would like to reach out to my childhood friend who was with me from elementary school all the way up through high school and wish her a speedy recovery. I would also like to extend my thoughts to one of my middle school classmates, whose husband is trying to find a place for his kidney dialysis treatment; I hope she takes care of herself during these exhausting days spent running around trying to get treatment for her husband.

February 15, 2020

Wuhan, tonight I care not about the boneheads, I care only about you.

It is only when you are living amid a time of emergency that all the good and evil of human nature comes to the surface. It is only from that experience that you begin to notice things that you never imagined you would ever see. You are left shocked, saddened, and angry, and eventually you get used to it.

The snow is falling. Last night the wind was howling and there was a thunderstorm and today it began to snow. It is quite rare to see such a heavy snow in Wuhan. I heard that the wind ripped open a part of the roof at Leishenshan Hospital last night, which shows just how fierce the storm was. I hope the patients there who were affected are able to be safely transferred to different rooms; it is yet another small crisis for them amid a much larger calamity.

I’m in a really terrible mood today. Sometime during the early a.m. hours I discovered that there was someone on Weibo who goes by the name “Xiang Ligang [20] Xiang Ligang (b. 1963) is a political commentator specializing in the field of communications. He is active on Chinese social media, with over 1 million followers on Weibo. from CCTIME.COM” who ran a photo of cellphones for sale at a secondhand market alongside one of my posts that mentioned cellphones discarded next to a crematorium. He then sent out a message claiming that I was the one who uploaded the photo and accused me of spreading online rumors! My diary posts are always pure text and I never upload accompanying photos. One reader posted a comment directed at Mr. Xiang to point this out, but he didn’t respond. But there are quite a few of these arrogant and nasty people out there trying to cause trouble for other people. This guy is a big middle-aged man who has a verified user account and over 1.1 million followers on Weibo. I’d like to curse him as a brain-dead idiot, but who would believe me? The fact that he would take advantage of the fact that I am stuck here in this quarantined city, unable to leave my own home, and even my Weibo account has been suspended, preventing me from speaking out—it really speaks to how low this man has gone. He should have saved that image and waited to post it after my account was restored, then we could settle things—that is, if he had any decency. Am I wrong? Instead, all I can do is post my thoughts on WeChat. One of my friends recommended a lawyer to me today, but what is that going to do? When you are living in a city that is so tightly sealed off, you can’t even get to the post office to send off a letter to an attorney. Then before I was even able to get the lawyer to notarize my letter of complaint, Mr. Xiang suddenly deleted all his posts. The fact that he deleted everything was a clear sign that he was scared of a lawsuit. Hard to believe that there are people in the world like this!

There are actually quite a lot of people out there like “Xiang Ligang.” I’ve seen plenty of them, but it’s best not to heed them. That said, it is really a shame that such a person has over a million followers. What can they learn from someone like him? But as one might expect, his followers seem to have no basic sense of decency, either; they started cursing my online posts and sending me nasty private messages. Several of them were so out of control that you would think that our families had some kind of multigenerational blood feud, when in reality most of them probably never even read a single entry from my online diary. One young man named Xu Haodong, a self-described photographer from Wuhan, sent me a particularly long message filled with profanities and even threatened to come to my home and beat me up. What is it that could make him have such deep-seated hatred toward someone whom he never met and has absolutely no understanding of? Perhaps people like this are raised in an environment of hatred and animosity instead of truth and goodness? Or perhaps people like this are simply brainless.

Today the bad news just keeps on coming. A nurse named Liu Fan [21] Liu Fan (1961–2020) was the first nurse to die due to COVID-19 in China. She worked at Wuchang Hospital in Wuhan where she served as deputy chief nurse. Her death was widely covered by the media in China and gained a massive amount of attention due to the fact that her parents and brother also died due to novel coronavirus. Early on, her death was subject to a variety of online rumors and speculations. was still working on the second day of the Lunar New Year [January 26] without wearing a face mask and she ended up getting infected. Later her parents and her younger brother all fell ill. Her parents passed away first, and yesterday she died. Her younger brother was the only one still hanging on. This afternoon my doctor friend told me that her brother just died. Just like that, the virus swallowed up an entire family. I’m devastated, but I also wonder if the virus was the only thing that swallowed them up.

What is making me even more depressed is that my middle school classmate whom I shared a desk with for many years also died yesterday. She was one year younger than me; I always thought she was so elegant and cultured. She had a soft and gentle voice, a great figure, and was quite stunning. We were in the school orchestra together. I played the yangqin [a Chinese-style dulcimer], and she played the pipa [a plucked lute]. We were the only two girls in the orchestra; we were in the same class and shared a desk. We stayed close all the way through high school. In mid-January, she went to the market twice to buy some things for the Chinese New Year and unfortunately ended up getting infected. It had been extremely difficult for her to finally get admitted to a hospital, but I heard that she was recovering nicely, then her family got the shocking news that she had suddenly passed away. All my old middle school classmates are crying for her today. All those classmates who are usually singing praises to our current “age of prosperity” are today saying things like: “The only thing that will quell the people’s anger is the extermination of those evil monsters who caused us this pain!”