A review in The New York Times: ‘Wuhan Diary’ Offers an Angry and Eerie View From Inside Quarantine. Excerpt and then a comment:
The next Chinese New Year will begin on Feb. 12, 2021. It will be the year of the Ox. The first real publishing season since the pandemic started will begin at about the same time. In America and elsewhere, I suspect, it will be the year of the Diary.
Writers in lockdown are, like everyone else, feeling pale and postoperative. The pandemic has thrown a spanner into best-laid plans. A diary, as soldiers, prisoners and invalids have long understood, can be a good way to write oneself out of a bad spot.
The Chinese novelist Fang Fang lives in downtown Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. After that city went into quarantine in January, she began keeping an online diary about her experience. Wuhan remained shut down for 76 days, and is still struggling to return to anything resembling normalcy.
In her diary, Fang Fang wrote about quotidian things: food, pets, sleep, friends. She talked about weeping, and about her country’s mental health. Her diary provided a daily catharsis. She monitored newspapers and the internet, keeping tabs on what was happening outside her small housing project.
She told uncomfortable truths about China’s fumbling response to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Censors regularly squelched her. Chinese nationalists mounted a trolling campaign against her, claiming she was besmirching Wuhan’s rosy-cheeked image. Her entries began to seem like samizdat.
She kept at her task. She gradually became a national hero, read by millions starving for something other than the dissembling and patriotic gruel issued by the government and by Chinese media conglomerates. Her diary has now been published in English as an e-book, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches From a Quarantined City.
Fang Fang captures the shock and panic at the start of the quarantine; people in Wuhan had been told that the coronavirus was “not contagious between people,” that it was easily controllable and not to worry. The truth hit hard.
The author is in her mid-60s, and lives alone with her old and increasingly stinky dog. (When she runs out of pet food, she feeds her dog rice instead.) She takes the quarantine seriously. She has diabetes, and is aware the virus could kill her.
She finds much to admire in people’s response to the shutdown. Neighbors form grocery collectives. When the food arrives, they lower buckets from their apartment windows and reel it up, as if it were minnows in a net. She notes the performance of many small kindnesses.
She has a fascination with the eerie, empty city, which is “quiet and beautiful, almost majestic,” as long as you aren’t sick. Watching the sanitation workers stoically going about their tasks fills her with emotion.
At the same time, she writes, “You begin to see things you never imagined humans were capable of.” With hospitals full, the sick wander the streets looking for help. Some of those trapped in Wuhan from elsewhere end up living in tunnels.
I've just bought and downloaded a copy.
