Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

March 4, 2020

Online shopping, binge-watching, sleeping: This is our life now.

Today is truly a clear, bright day. The sunlight is brilliant and spring is in the air. All the colors—green, jade, red, and pink—seem to be contending to fill every space with a good dose of “positive energy.” The Chinese roses in my courtyard are beginning to sprout new branches, even though I never tended to them because I spent all last year at my place in the suburbs working on a book. I never trimmed their branches, tied them to a pole, or gave them fertilizer; they just grew freely on their own without anyone’s impeding them. Seeing them like that, I almost felt guilty when I tied some of their branches to the railing.

It is now a hard fact that the coronavirus is officially under control. As a longtime resident of Wuhan, I know how difficult it has been to get to this point. When you introduce the terror of an invisible virus that can be anywhere into a large sprawling city like Wuhan, which has a messy three-town structure [5] For more on Wuhan’s three-town structure, please see Fang Fang’s essay “This Place Called Wuhan,” in the back of this book. and a complex maze of traditional alleys and old lanes, it is indeed an incredible feat that we have been able to get the coronavirus under control in such a relatively short time span. Things were especially chaotic during the early stages of the outbreak because the situation overlapped with the Chinese Lunar New Year and the government made a series of mistakes. Once the government put a new set of leaders in charge and put an iron-clad policy in place for battling the coronavirus, we began to see clear results. Right now the head of this monster has been cut off and all that is left is its writhing tail; we have now freed ourselves up enough to start taking care of other matters, like those people from outside provinces who have been stuck in Wuhan during the quarantine, as well as those Wuhan residents who have been unable to return home. These issues should not be too difficult to resolve. Today my doctor friend told me that the situation is continuing to improve, and he expects that by tomorrow the city should be able to get back to an initial level of functionality. Finally, I feel like we are able to heave a sigh of relief.

This afternoon a friend sent me a long audio file. It was recorded by a hospital administrator who had come to Wuhan to provide aid; in the audio file he recounted his team’s entire journey to Wuhan and the process of providing care to coronavirus patients. He originally sent this narrative to a friend and it is extremely logical, reserved, and objective. All he does is focus on the treatment process but he doesn’t get into too many other details. But whenever he mentions Wuhan and the people here, he begins to lose it a bit and you can hear him start to choke up. Only those of us here in Wuhan realize what lies behind those moments when he loses it. We know that he personally witnessed the situation early on; he just can’t get into those details, which is what kept causing him to uncontrollably choke up. You can tell that this doctor is a kind man with a good heart—someone who truly treats his patients with compassion and love. I want to again express my sincere hope that doctors like him who traveled to Wuhan to lend their aid and support will be able to record everything they saw here, especially during that early period, and get it out there. Those documents will become some of the most important testimonials to what happened during the fight against the coronavirus in 2020.

When I first began this diary, I didn’t think at all about how many people might read it; I just wanted to jot down some reflections for myself. When I noticed some of the big-name verified users on WeChat using some shocking headlines to publish stories about me, I became quite uncomfortable. After all, I know that here in Wuhan there are a lot of people writing blogs like this, besides writers and poets. It’s just that each of us uses a different method and focuses on different aspects of what is happening. But each of these records is extremely precious. When discussing fiction, I used to say that although literature is a form of individual expression, when countless individuals express themselves it collectively becomes a forum for national expression; and when many nations come together to express themselves, it becomes an expression of an entire era. By the same logic, one person’s document is never enough; it can never capture the entire picture, but when you collect countless individual records together, you can begin to get a more complete picture that represents the truth of what happened.

Starting yesterday, they began a massive three-day project to clear and disinfect the Huanan Seafood Market, the site that became a focal point of the outbreak early on. The market was shut down back in early January and ever since then people have been coming every day to disinfect the area. But when they first shut the market down, their actions were rather rushed and many of the items in the various stores there were left behind. I suspect that no one ever thought the market would be shuttered for such a long time; and they certainly never imagined that the virus that emerged there would set in motion a catastrophe that would engulf all of China and later the world. After they shut off all power and water to the market and the temperature started to warm up, a lot of the seafood left behind started to emit a wretched stench. My second brother said that people could probably smell that stench all the way down by the Vanke Building. There are more than a thousand vendors at that market, and the vast majority run legitimate businesses. Like everyone else in Wuhan, they too are victims here; moreover, many of them suffered much more than other people. During the process of disinfecting the market, I’m sure those storeowners had to dispose of everything in their shops. I wonder what the site of the market will become in the future. Some people have suggested turning it into a memorial hall dedicated to this calamity.

Today I’ll just talk about shopping. Online group shopping has become increasingly flexible. There are really countless possibilities in the world of the internet. The way in which this program self-adapts to the market is really incredible; it can really do all kinds of tricks. My second brother told me that his wife has also been recording everything that happens every day, all the details about how she does her shopping. My brother even sent me a few of the things she wrote, and I picked out a few passages about shopping in the age of coronavirus. I know that the internet censors won’t bother deleting posts about grocery shopping. What follows is a record of how my second brother’s family has been handling their shopping these past few days; you can look at it as a snapshot that reflects the experience of most people in Wuhan.

1. I actually already went downstairs once today to pick up some donated vegetables. Miss X called earlier to remind me to pick them up. At first we felt like those donations were only for low-income families and elderly people who need extra support; although we are both over 60 and don’t have any children living with us, which fits the qualifications, we kept feeling like we shouldn’t accept any donations since our overall situation isn’t too bad. So the first few times that they called, we decided not to go down to pick any donations up. We didn’t intend on picking up any today either, but then our building manager personally called to tell us there was already a bag for us waiting at the first floor entrance. She told us to hurry down to pick it up. After hearing that, I bundled up with all my protective gear and went down to the first floor. There were two huge bags of vegetables and a stack of plastic bags so you could load up as much as you wanted. I took four heads of lettuce, just enough for two meals if I stir-fry them. I repeatedly thanked them, but didn’t dare stay too long and quickly took the elevator back up to my apartment. Although four heads of lettuce doesn’t amount to much in terms of cost, that feeling that someone is thinking of you and cares was worth so much more.