Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

At the same time, today we also saw the Hubei government’s goodbye ceremony for the army of service workers who are leaving; they also appealed to everyone in China to treat the people of Hubei with kindness! That’s right, please treat us with kindness. Not everyone in Hubei was infected with this virus. Millions of people here in Hubei spent nearly two months quarantined in their homes in order to help control the spread of the disease; it is hard for outsiders to understand the stress and difficulties that they had to deal with. But the Hubei people’s strength and forbearance in the face of this calamity ended up being the biggest contribution to China’s efforts to contain this virus. And so it is important for me to say it out loud: Please, my friends from all over China, treat the people of Hubei well, be kind to these people who sacrificed so much for all of you.

The next step should be for people outside Wuhan to start returning. If you ask me personally, I’m already desperate to get my helper back; I really hope she can come back soon. After two months, my house is in need of a deep cleaning. My old dog is now dirty and smelly; and his old skin problem is starting to come back. My hand is also still badly injured; I’ve been trying not to wash it or get it wet. I wonder when the vet’s office will reopen. Every day when I let him out into the courtyard I tell him that he just has to wait a few more days and then he’ll be all clean again. All the businesses are waiting to reopen, and we wait too.

Just like always, I got out of bed today and ate breakfast as I looked at my cellphone. One thing I didn’t expect was for that “high school student” from yesterday to post yet another open letter to me. Besides her, today a bunch of her “relatives” also came out of the woodwork, and each one of them also published open letters to me. (Wow, she sure has a lot of “relatives”!) Naturally, a bunch of other people also wrote letters, including some university students, middle school students, and even elementary school students. I have to be honest; some of them made me laugh harder than I have in a long time. Now that we are down to zero, I guess it is finally an appropriate time to have a good laugh. My old classmate Yi Zhongxue jokingly referred to today as National Letter Writing Day; I really lost it when I heard that one!

The result of the investigation into what happened to Li Wenliang was also released today. I have no idea if people are pleased or not with the results, but I feel that I have said enough on this issue. Li Wenliang is gone; his Weibo page has become a wailing wall where countless people can go to forever remember him. Everyone knows that he was not a hero; he lived a normal life like everyone else, and the actions he took are the kind of actions you would expect any ordinary person to take if put in his position. All we can do is make sure he is remembered and do everything we can to support his family. As for the results of that investigation, I really don’t care anymore. To be honest, our commemorations are in some sense a way for us to commemorate ourselves, to commemorate this experience we went through, and there was one important man who was part of that experience—his name was Li Wenliang. That said, it appears that the younger generation are much angrier than I am. This afternoon one young man left me a message: One speck of dust from an entire era may not seem like much, but when it falls on the head of the Zhongnan Police Station it becomes a buck to be passed on to the next player. Just like the second letter I got from that “high school student,” this message also made me burst out laughing. But I still want to say that things might be a bit more complicated than we all think. They are complicated in a way that common people like us have no means to truly understand. Some things just take time, even though I’m not sure if time will help in this case.

Although we are still prohibited from going outside, virtually everyone knows that for the past several days now the city of Wuhan has been fairly safe. Even though everyone continues to reinforce that we should continue to stay on guard, psychologically we are all now much more relaxed. Whether it be the reality of what is going on inside the city or everyday people’s state of mind, we are now in a completely different place than where we were a month ago. I have faith that lives will soon get back to their old rhythm. When they imposed the quarantine it was as if they suddenly slammed on the brakes, but I’m afraid the process of opening the city back up will be slow and gradual. I figure I don’t have to necessarily stop my diary when some government leader proclaims that “the city will reopen tomorrow.” Perhaps such a day will never come; that’s because they have already gradually begun to reopen some parts of the city, so it will likely be a slow process of transition until the city is completely open again. That’s why a few days ago I told Er Xiang that I planned to stop writing once I completed my 54th diary entry. It’s like a perfect deck of poker cards, and now my hand will soon be finished. What I didn’t realize was that yesterday was actually my 54th entry. I decided not to reply to the open letter from the “high school student” who somehow already has more than 100,000 Weibo followers, which seems pretty fishy to me. Anyway, it now seems that I missed my chance to say some concluding words to close out this diary. But today I’m wondering when should I close up shop and bring this diary to a close?

I should, by the way, mention that all my diary entries have been uploaded to WeChat from the official account of the writer Er Xiang. The reason for that is quite simple: The day my Weibo account was frozen happened to be the same day that Li Wenliang passed away. I suddenly lost my one public platform. I’m not very adept with public posts on WeChat, but I often follow Er Xiang’s official account there, so I reached out to her to see if she might mind helping me forward my posts. As a fellow writer, Er Xiang immediately agreed to help out. At the time, besides the fact that I knew she was a novelist, I really didn’t know anything about her, and we have never met in person (of course, that isn’t even possible now). It was only later when I read an essay about her that I learned something about her background. In short, it just comes down to an author with a verified official public account on WeChat helping out an old writer who doesn’t know how to create an official account and share essays on that platform. Who would have thought that such a simple arrangement would lead to all kinds of conspiracy theories online?! I’m extremely thankful for Er Xiang’s help and I hope she is able to one day visit Wuhan where I look forward to treating her to the seafood here! Seafood is one of Wuhan’s specialties and there are a lot of talented seafood chefs in town.

I would like to digress again with a story from my youth. I was thinking back to many years ago when I was a member of the literature society in college; we would often discuss all kinds of literary topics. But after discussing things over and over, we could never seem to come to a mutual understanding. Later I grew a bit impatient with them and came up with a nickname I used behind their back; I called them the “Three Old Essays” [19] “The Three Old Essays” (“Lao san pian”) normally refers to three iconic essays by Mao Zedong, which were widely read in China during the 1960s and 1970s. These essays included “Serve the People,” “In Memory of Dr. Norman Bethune,” and “The Foolish Old Man Who Tried to Move a Mountain.” Here, Fang Fang is making a playful reference by using the same title for her group’s nickname. group. The three topics the group kept going back to were the tensions between praise and expose, comedy and tragedy, and darkness and light. More specifically, we found ourselves continually discussing whether or not literature should only be about works that express praise, are comedies, or shine light on the positive side of society. We also discussed whether or not those writers who expose social ills, portray human tragedy, and reveal the dark side of society were all reactionaries. This was back in 1978 into 1979. Since we never seemed to come to a conclusion about these questions, we for some reason just eventually stopped discussing them. Later we even organized a big discussion around the topic “Is Literature a Tool for Class Struggle?” but I don’t think we came to a conclusion on that, either. Eventually, time passed by, I graduated, I started working, and I became a professional writer; then one day I discovered that somehow not only my old classmates but also the entire literary world had already reached a common understanding about how to approach this question: Can you write about anything you want? The main issue came down to the quality of your writing. So sometimes when I deliver lectures I say that there are a lot of questions that really don’t need to be discussed, as time will eventually answer all those questions.