Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

If what he said is true, that means we will need to be prepared to remain quarantined at home even longer. I’m afraid that at this point no one really knows exactly for how long all this will last. It has been one long and bitter quarantine. Even those comedians and meme writers have fallen silent. It has been really hard on the people of Wuhan. First we had to go through that initial period of fear and anxiety, which was quickly followed by a period of unprecedented sadness, pain, and helplessness. And now, although we are no longer living in terror and the sadness has dissipated a bit, we must face an indescribable boredom and restlessness, along with endless waiting. But there is nothing else we can do. All I can do is tell everyone, as well as myself, that we need to hang in there and wait. It is something we simply have no control over. We have already hung on so long, I’m sure we can get through the remaining days ahead. I’m sure it won’t be too long now. The entire world knows that we are making this sacrifice for them; we have closed our doors so that everyone else can continue on with their lives. Just put on the loudest and most vulgar TV show that you can find to pass the time, something like Sunny Piggy , that sappy adaptation of Journey to the West. What else can we do?

This morning I saw another video of a woman who insisted on going outside even though she wasn’t wearing a face mask. No matter what people said, she refused to go back in and insisted on talking to people without putting her face mask on. Community workers and public officials are all left in a tough place when they encounter people like this. Then there was a video of a small street filled with people and all the shops were still open; it was bustling as usual, as if there were not even an outbreak. The person shooting the video kept narrating as he walked down the street, saying: “Look at how free everyone looks! It doesn’t look at all like Wuhan!” I saw some people I knew in the video and even recognized the street where he was filming. With people behaving like this, it feels like this entire quarantine doesn’t really mean anything! Most of those people feel like the coronavirus has nothing to do with them; however, the difficulties we are seeing in controlling this outbreak and the fact that we have all been forced to remain quarantined for so long have everything to do with the behavior of people like that!

Yesterday I forwarded a suggestion made by AD, and quite a few people posted responses online. A lot of them thought that his suggestion was completely impractical because it would be too big of an infringement on people’s privacy. There were a lot of people who saw it like that. I sent some of those comments to AD, and he responded as follows: “That’s how things are. Of course an individual’s movements are part of their private information, but when it comes to the suppression of this coronavirus, some of those lines become a bit hazy; under this National Emergency Response System we need to utilize whatever means necessary to steer us out of this situation!”

I actually thought of that very issue when I first posted his initial suggestion yesterday. The issue really hit home when I read the last sentence of his original post: “We will be able to track everyone using this system!” After reading that, I even hesitated for a few seconds, but in the end I still decided to send it out. That’s because I’m here in Wuhan and what I know is that the lives of nine million people are more important than their privacy. Right now our primary concern is a matter of survival. What is privacy when compared with the cost of a human life? Those patients lying on the operating table with a doctor working on them won’t give a second thought to things like privacy. If technology can create happiness and assume a heretical guise, it is only natural for us to harness it to expel evil. In Chinese martial arts novels, you always read about those evil villains who have mastered the art of poisoning their enemies—but they always have an antidote hidden up their sleeve. Right now privacy isn’t what’s most important for the people of Wuhan; survival is.

Right now the god of the underworld is still playing his death fugue. Once the music has ended, we will seek out a cure.

Today one of my classmates told me that he was getting ready to go outside when his three-year-old granddaughter pleaded with him: “Grandpa, please don’t go out. There is a disease outside!” I also saw a video online of a child, also around three years old, who wanted to go outside and asked her daddy for the key. She said that she just wanted to look around at Wal-Mart. But the most heartbreaking story is the grandfather who was dead for days, but his grandchild was afraid to go outside because of the coronavirus, so he just lived on crackers for several days. There are all too many stories like that. There are so many children who won’t dare go outside because their parents keep scaring them by saying: “You’ll get sick if you go out! You’ll get sick!” The virus has already found its way into their hearts, living like a devil inside them. I wonder if when the day comes that they can finally go outside whether or not there will be children too scared to go out. Who knows how long the dark cloud of this will linger on inside them? These children have never committed any crimes against this earth, yet they too have to endure this suffering along with the adults. This afternoon a few colleagues and I chatted online, and we each reflected a bit on what we were doing in our lives before January 20th; we ended up all cursing those people we felt were the biggest culprits behind all of this, which made us all feel a bit better. We have all been traumatized by this in different ways; looking back, none of us feel lucky—we just feel like survivors.

This afternoon, Headlines Today had an article that tried to cover up for the Yangtze Daily ; it was highly likely that it was the work of one of those “sophisticated critics” who specialize in saying nasty things in nice ways. The article quoted some lines from a Yangtze Daily reporter who had attacked and mocked Professor Dai Jianye [35] Dai Jianye (b. 1956) is a professor of Traditional Chinese Literature at Huazhong Normal University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Laozi’s Philosophy of Life ( Laozi de rensheng zhexue ), and a popular columnist. On February 26, 2020, he published an essay supporting Fang Fang entitled “Shouldn’t Old Men Like Us Feel at Least a Little Bit Ashamed When Facing Fang Fang?” (“Miandui Fang Fang, women zhexie yemen nandao jiu meiyou yidian kuiyi?”); the essay was later removed from the internet. and me, calling us “internet trolls.” I’m not going to even bother engaging with the devious motives of this “sophisticated critic.” But that reporter from the Yangtze Daily is really in a weak position; she lacks even the most basic understanding and judgment. When I discussed the article “Seven Final Words That Left Everyone in Tears,” I just focused on one small aspect of the story; I thought it should have been titled “Eleven Final Words That Left Everyone in Tears.” It would have been a great article if they had just changed that number. And I doubt that it was even the reporter’s fault; based on my experience, I would bet that it was actually an editor behind a desk somewhere who came up with that headline. All I did was raise a few questions about the article from the perspective of a reader, and now that suddenly makes me an “internet troll”! Frankly speaking, I have always had a good impression of the Yangtze Daily . When I was a teenager I actually wrote several articles for the former editor with whom I actually collaborated on some stories. For many years now, the paper has managed to maintain a very high editorial standard and level of reporting. Did its high level of professionalism and quality reporting ever before result in such an embarrassing spectacle as we are seeing today? The fact that it is now being targeted for criticism is something for which they have only themselves to blame. The good reputation the paper had was destroyed by those people who keep writing articles that fawn over what the officials are doing, the people who ignored the second half of those “final words,” and those other “sophisticated critics.” We should all reflect on this together. As I get to this point, I feel that I might as well do some “trolling.” But on second thought, forget it. Some of my classmates work in the newspaper industry; I’d hate to embarrass them.