Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

A lot of people in my friends group have been forwarding an essay by the writer Yan Geling; [17] Yan Geling (b. 1958) is a well-known Chinese-American writer and screenwriter currently living in Berlin. She is the author of numerous novels, including The Banquet Bug, The Lost Daughter of Happiness, and Little Aunt Crane . Her fiction has also been adapted into numerous television miniseries and feature films by top directors like Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yimou, and Joan Chen. a few friends also sent it directly to me. The title of the essay is “To Borrow Three Words from the Great Southern Song Poet Tang Wan: Conceal, Conceal, Conceal.” Yan Geling, who lives in Berlin, has been closely following the events in Wuhan from afar. Many years ago the Hubei Writers Association organized a conference of women Chinese writers from around the world. Yan Geling came to Wuhan to attend; we even invited her to deliver a lecture at Wuhan University. I wasn’t there for her lecture, but I heard it was a full house. Yan Geling has a great sense of intuition; she was able to latch onto the most important keyword that has been in play from the very beginning of the outbreak up through the point it transformed into an unmitigated disaster. That word is: Concealment. While a lot of effort went into controlling the outbreak later on, if you pull apart and examine the key points in the development of the outbreak, you will discover that there is one concept that is ever-present: Concealment. But why did so many things need to be concealed? Were they concealed on purpose or due to some kind of oversight? Or was there some other reason? But let’s put that discussion off for the time being. Dear Geling, I read your essay and was quite moved; it also gave me a lot to think about; however, before I had time to forward it to my friends group online, it was deleted from the internet. You probably also already know that here in China concealment is the brother of censorship. We’ve already been tortured by this brother named “censorship” to the point that we are wooden and numb. You never know when it might happen or why it happens or what rules you may have broken to be censored, because no one ever tells you. You have no choice but to just accept it.

Another piece of shocking news in the literary world today is that all of Mario Vargas Llosa’s books have been ordered to be taken off the shelves of bookstores. Could this be true? It is really hard for me to believe. I started reading Llosa back when I was still a teenager. Almost all writers from my generation back then were reading him. A lot of people really liked the tone of his writing and his experiments with structure and form. But actually, I don’t think I have read more than three of his books, and those were all his most popular novels. When I heard this news, I went through the same emotional cycle as a lot of other writers: I started out shocked, then I was angry, and finally I just felt depressed. I just don’t know what else to say anymore. Besides grumbling about it a bit, what else can you say? No matter what Llosa may have said, he’s not a politician; he is still a writer. I remember reading an essay a few days ago that used the following words to describe what a writer is: “The greatest and most fundamental mission of a writer is to vanquish falsehoods, bear testimony to the truth of history, and restore dignity to mankind.” I’m not sure who originally spoke those words. Llosa must be in his 80s now. Is this really necessary? Conceal, conceal, conceal—those three words are from the love story between Tang Wan and Lu You; it is a story that most Chinese know. But here I would like to borrow three words from the poet Lu You: Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Today I learned that the medical personnel who came to Hubei to help with the aid effort have already begun to leave in groups. Yet when it comes to when the city might reopen, there is still almost no news. There are all kinds of sensational things floating around the internet. There are a lot of rumors too. But no matter how fierce this virus may be, there is something even more terrifying that is now rushing out in front—there are a lot of people who simply can’t go on anymore. Today a reporter in Beijing sent me an appeal written by someone here in Hubei. It reminded me of that telephone recording I heard a few days ago. Rereading this appeal now, I feel it is actually quite objective and sensible. Part of the appeal mentioned some issues that the author hopes the government might consider. I would like to cite a portion of that appeal here:

I take legal responsibility for everything I am saying here. As you fought the coronavirus, average people like us were extremely supportive and gave you our full cooperation. But after having been locked down for so many days, more than 50 days, even those who may have been sick to begin with should have recovered by now. You should arrange some chartered buses for us, but how come you government people haven’t taken any action?

We keep staying at home wasting time every day and you won’t even give us a clear answer as to when it will end so we can at least have a target in mind. The end of March? The end of April? Whatever the case, you need to give us a time frame! Right now, without any time frame for when the quarantine will end, we have nothing to hope for; instead we just sit at home waiting. Day after day, we all have living expenses and we have families to raise; how is a breadwinner supposed to make money to support a family?

Each and every day we need to eat, drink, we need oil and salt for cooking, and all this costs money. Of course, everything ends up in our stomachs, but it still adds up as part of our expenses. Every morning we get up and the first thing we look at are the headlines from all the major newspapers; we check whether the number of infections has gone up or down. We look at the statistics all over, but it only seems to be here in Wuhan that the number of sick people is higher. But that doesn’t mean that all the other cities in Hubei Province also need to go through the same torture as Wuhan; it really doesn’t.

I returned home on January 21; you can calculate just how many days that it has been now. Every day since then I have been sitting at home eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping. The main thing is that I just don’t know when this will all end. At first they said the quarantine might be lifted on March 1, then they pushed it back to March 10, then March 11; later they said March 15; now Zhong Nanshan is saying it might last until late June.

If you continue on like this, where is the end?

You can quarantine the sick; however you want to quarantine sick people, we will cooperate. But you need to quarantine the virus, not the people of Hubei Province! What’s more, since you have us all quarantined at home, and if we leave Hubei we would also be quarantined, then why not just let us leave and be quarantined somewhere else? We could leave Hubei, self-quarantine for 14 days, let local officials confirm we are healthy, and then let us get back to work! We need to create income; things need to get back to normal! Instead you have us quarantined at home, you want us locked down until late May or late June, then after that we’ll have to be quarantined for another two weeks; are we going to get any work done at all this entire year? What kind of people waste their time like this?

You people in charge need to hear what the people are saying; you need to pay attention to what we are requesting. I’m not speaking just for myself; most members of the public all feel the same way, and I am speaking for all of us. We are not trying to cause trouble; we are just trying to make a living. We need to put food on the table. You need to try to think about the situation from our perspective, the perspective of ordinary citizens.