Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Outside in the streets they are testing the buses before they start running again, and down by the subway station they are cleaning things up and disinfecting everything; everything is getting ready to start operating again. Everyone is passing this information around to each other and we are all excited to see the city coming back to life. And as for the numbers that used to terrify us each day, they are now at zero, as they have been for the past five days in a row.

First thing this morning, my second brother uploaded a photo to our chat group of someone offering 10-minute “quickcut” haircuts in his neighborhood. They were doing them out on the field right outside my brother’s window. The weather is sunny today and residents were lining up, at a distance of about one meter apart, in a long line. My brother said that they had been lining up like that all day long. His neighborhood was once the single most dangerous area in all of Wuhan. My brother has been locked up in his apartment for more than 60 days, but today he seems quite relaxed. For someone like my brother, who has a lot of medical issues, to get through these two months without getting sick is really a gift from God.

According to Mayor Zhou, just before the Lunar New Year approximately five million people left Wuhan. A few days ago there was a notification that most of these people can now reenter the city if they have a health QR code. My housekeeper also sent me a text saying that she should be able to come back sometime in the next day or two. Some of my former classmates who ended up staying on in Hainan island keep sending photos of themselves hanging out on the beach; we originally had planned to have seafood together before the outbreak. We have been trapped at home, they have been trapped outside the city; but now they can all start making their way back to Wuhan.

I’m told that right now it is relatively easy to enter Wuhan, but much more difficult to get out. This reminds me of those people who visited Wuhan just before the lockdown; I wonder what happened to them? Are they still here? I suspect that the two months they were detained here in Wuhan might be the most difficult period of their lives. How many people are there like them in Wuhan? I’m afraid there are probably no precise numbers. I’m just asking out of curiosity, but I discovered it must be a fairly large number; and most of them are still here. For the time being, none of Wuhan’s transportation services have resumed service outside the city; that means that no airplanes, trains, buses, or private automobiles are allowed to leave the city limits. I wonder how those people from elsewhere who have been stuck here in Wuhan and their worried family members have gotten through these two months; it must be so hard for all of them.

My neighbor Y told me that two of the volunteers in his Shadow Dream Team are actually out-of-towners who still cannot go home; one of them is from Nanning in Guangxi Province. When he saw the reports about the outbreak in Wuhan, he rushed here to volunteer. When he got here, the quarantine was imposed and now he is stuck here. The other volunteer is from Guangdong and he too has no way to get back home. The volunteer team takes care of their room and board and they also plan on buying them train tickets to get home once this is all over. One of my doctor friends who has been providing news on the coronavirus throughout this whole period told me today that a few of his friends came to Wuhan on a business trip just before the lockdown; they also got stuck here with no way of going home. All of a sudden it has now been two months; when they came it was still winter and now we are already in spring; they don’t even have the appropriate clothes. Another friend owns a company in Beijing; since he got held up in Wuhan, he has been unable to run his company.

During the outbreak, these unfortunate individuals from elsewhere who ended up getting stuck here in Wuhan during the quarantine were completely marginalized. For a long time no one even thought about them. It was only much later in the outbreak that a reporter discovered a few people who had been living in one of the city’s underground pedestrian tunnels without anything to drink or eat. Only after that article came out did people realize that there was a group of people like that here in Wuhan who were basically out on the streets. Their situation was really too tragic. After that report was published, the government stepped in and came up with some housing options for those people. But now, after all this time has gone by, it is hard to imagine that they are still here in Wuhan. They are even more anxious for the city to reopen than the other nine million residents of Wuhan. Sometimes I think that if there were more thoughtful people in the world, perhaps they could help the government to come up with some ideas to figure out how to get these people home a little sooner. For instance, we could do a census by scanning everyone’s health QR code, determine which province they are from, and then arrange one bus for each province to send them all home to their respective provincial capitals; they could then be quarantined in a hotel designated by the individual; then after 14 days, they could be permitted to return home. That kind of a policy wouldn’t be too difficult to implement. If you can dream it, you can do it. That would be an easy option for resolving this problem; and it could save a lot of people from this desperate situation, so what’s stopping us from trying?

Ever since yesterday, there has been a lot of news about Beijing refusing to let people from Hubei into the city. It is really hard for me to believe; even now I have trouble believing this is true. I just can’t fathom what the difference between a healthy person from Hubei and a healthy person from Beijing could possibly be. If Beijing really refuses Hubei residents entry into the city, it may be the people of Hubei who will be suffering, but it is certainly not anything they should feel shameful about. It is those people who suggested and adopted these policies of exclusion that should feel shame. Of course, it is also our entire civilization that should feel shame. One day we will look back and realize what level our civilization was still stuck at in 2020. For the time being, I’d like to hope this report is not accurate; but it is worth noting here in my diary.

There was also some bad news today: Several days back, a young nurse from Guangxi who had come to Wuhan as a member of one of the relief teams suddenly collapsed at the hospital. It was a good thing that there were several doctors present, so they quickly administered lifesaving treatment. At the time, all the media outlets reported this story; everyone was happy that she was able to escape death. But last night my doctor friend told me that, in the end, she still didn’t make it. She lost her life on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus. Her name is Liang Xiaoxia; this year she would have been 28 years old. Let’s forever remember her. I hope she is able to rest in peace.

For the past few days, the calls for people to assume responsibility for what happened have been growing weaker, so much so that even I have started to overlook this issue. There seem to be fewer and fewer in-depth investigative reports being published, and now there are nearly none. Last night I read one report entitled “The 41 Missing Coronavirus Reports,” which concludes with the following sentence: “By pulling away the deeply hidden thorns and accepting the pain hidden in these dark corners of society, the media uses its limited strength to reveal the truth and expose it to the light. While some reports may have temporarily disappeared, when all is said and done, there will certainly be a place for them in the manuscript of history.” Reading that, I was struck with a small revelation: I suspect that perhaps those groups that have suddenly been launching vicious attacks against me might have something to do with those deleted posts?