Wuhan Diary

by Fang Fang

  Another important benefit of using WeChat Pay and Alipay is that we can not only pinpoint the whereabouts of carriers, but we can also track down everyone they had close contact with during a given time frame (from November 1, 2019, until now). We will be able to track everyone using this system!

  I copied the above text directly from AD; I’m not sure if it is practical, but I’m putting it out there for specialists to consider. AD’s father is actually the lyricist of the famous song Yellow River Cantata, Zhang Guangnian.34 (As a matter of coincidence, my colleague Dao Bo, whom I wrote about before, has an aunt who is the composer of Yellow River Cantata, Xian Xinghai.) Back when I served as editor of Celebrities Today magazine, I once serialized several selections from Zhang Guangnian’s diary. Later, when he published his diary as a book, he sent me a copy. Inside the book was a letter in which he mentioned the fact that his son AD was actually my classmate. Since Mr. Zhang is such a senior figure I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to directly respond to his letter, so I never wrote back. At the time I was quite young and had very high expectations for myself; I didn’t want to be perceived as someone taking advantage of the fact that I was editing a magazine about celebrities to try to get close to them. Instead, I always tried to keep a respectful distance from the famous people we featured. But later when I learned that Mr. Zhang had passed away I really regretted never having written back to him.

  This afternoon I read a report by a journalist with Caixin Media about the situation that many retirement homes and nursing homes are dealing with amid this coronavirus outbreak. Even without the outbreak, the elderly are already in a particularly weak and marginalized place in society. I suspect that a lot of them live in circumstances that are already well below the average, compared with most people in China today. But once this virus started hitting many healthy young people, you can only imagine what it is doing to the elderly.

  It was probably around 10 days ago that I heard about a string of deaths at a state-run retirement facility. I never mentioned it in my posts because I was not able to further authenticate the accuracy of the story. I need to be careful, with so many people just waiting for the opportunity to tear me down, not to mention the constant threat of censorship hanging over my head. But now that I have read the reporter’s meticulous interviews, which include locations, times, and actual names of people featured all clearly laid out, I don’t see any reason to continue avoiding this issue. Saying things like “I don’t have any tears left to cry” doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the true pain I have been feeling inside when I see these stories.

  The Caixin Media reporter’s essay stated: “Yesterday some family members received a telephone call from the retirement home where their relatives live to inform them that some of the elderly residents needed to be quarantined. The family members responded with a flurry of questions: ‘Where should we bring them to be quarantined? Who will take care of them there while under quarantine? What are the standards that qualify someone to be quarantined or receive treatment? Have other patients in the retirement home also been infected? Will they receive effective treatment? Can you share their test results with us? Will the management at the retirement home be willing to share all information with us in a timely manner? Will the government be willing to increase staffing for those retirement homes, including nurse support and medical resources?’” Family members were extremely upset and worried as they anxiously awaited the retirement home’s response to their inquiries. As I see it, since the government has already agreed to take care of these people, they will naturally see things through and make sure these elderly patients are not neglected; the people running things are, after all, human too.

  But what really needs to be said is that the true test of a country’s level of civility has nothing to do with building the tallest skyscraper or driving the fastest car, nor does it matter how advanced your weapons system is or how powerful your military might be; it is also not about how advanced your technology is or even your artistic achievements, and it is especially not related to how lavish your official government meetings are or how splendid your firework displays are, or even how many rich Chinese tourists you have buying up different parts of the world. There is only one true test, and that is how you treat the weakest and most vulnerable members of your society.

  There is one final thing I want to talk about today: A few days ago, they finally unfroze my Weibo account. At first I was reluctant to go back on Weibo; I guess you could say I was disappointed in them. There are also a lot of bastards out there on Weibo, and several of my classmates suggested I stay away from that site in order to protect myself from getting hurt. But after thinking it through, I decided to start using my account again. I heard a recording a few days ago that ended with the following words: “Don’t leave the world in the hands of the bastards!” It is for that same reason that I decided not to leave my beloved Weibo in the hands of those bastards. At least Weibo has a way of blacklisting people who don’t follow proper online etiquette, so I can report each and every one of those people who come after me. That blacklist is a biosuit, it is my N95 face mask that I use to quarantine those infectious bastards!

  February 25, 2020

  Once the music has ended, we will seek out a cure.

  The weather is remarkably beautiful; it must have gotten up to around 20 degrees Celsius in the afternoon. With the heat on in my apartment it actually started to feel hot. But with nightfall, it began to suddenly rain, a strange and unexpected turn of events. Not that it really matters, though, since we can’t go outside anyway; instead, staring at my cellphone has become my required homework each day.

  First thing this morning I saw a few videos that I really need to say something about. The videos I saw fall into two categories: The first category was videos documenting the disastrous results of several vegetable donations from other provinces coming into Hubei. There were videos of deliveries being confiscated on the road, entire bags of vegetables being thrown in the trash, and other footage of vegetables just rotting away in storage facilities. There was an entire series of videos about this. The other set of videos was of citizens complaining about the price gouging going on in those grocery delivery services for vegetables. A lot of people right now are being especially thrifty with their money. Even during normal times, they are often very careful when they go shopping. When they drop the price for soy sauce by 2 fen, there is a line wrapping around the block to get in on this great deal! You ask “why?” Because in their minds they have only just enough cash to get by, so people save any way they can. Most people feel those grocery delivery groups are quite expensive for vegetables of mixed quality that you can’t even pick out yourself. How can you expect people not to complain? Moreover, after being stuck at home for so long, everyone is more irritable than normal.

  These videos were all sent to me by friends, so I can’t confirm their authenticity. But no matter whether they are real or fake, I still feel that there has to be a more suitable way to distribute all the donated vegetables that have been coming into Wuhan. Right now we have a situation where the donated vegetables aren’t getting into the hands of the right people, while the vegetables being sold in stores are way overpriced. Somehow, we are failing on both ends. Moreover, it is a real insult to those kindhearted people who have been making these donations. I really can’t think of a better option than donating all those vegetables to a vegetables wholesaler that can evenly distribute them to all the major supermarkets. They can require supermarkets to sell them to the public at a deeply reduced rate; whatever profit is made can then be refunded, donated, or used to subsidize other food items. This would allow the public the opportunity to purchase affordable vegetables while, at the same time, freeing up community workers so they aren’t spending all their time transporting these donations. Of course, those work units or districts that have arranged for their own direct donations are a separate matter. The weather is warming up and it is becoming increasingly di
fficult to preserve all these fresh food donations. We should keep everything as practical as possible.

  Let me get back to the coronavirus. This morning one of my doctor friends sent me a message saying that, besides Wuhan, outbreaks in most other cities in China are now more or less under control. Wuhan is the only city where the virus has continued to spread and is still not under control. The stress on hospitals that had too few beds is now finally starting to ease up, but the reason the virus continues to spread is not something I fully understand. Wuhan has been under quarantine now for more than a full month, which means that, assuming the coronavirus has an incubation period of up to 24 days, everyone infected should have already started showing symptoms by now. With everyone locked up in their homes, there should be very few, if not zero, new infections by now. So then why are there still so many new cases of infection that keep popping up? My doctor friend was also confused by this, and he really couldn’t explain the reason behind these new confirmed and suspected cases. What is the source of all these new infections? This is something that needs to be investigated; they need to do research on how these new patients are getting infected and then enact new prevention measures based on what they find. Although we have paid a huge price, the end result of this long period of quarantine has fallen short of our initial hopes. My doctor friend again used the word “strange” to describe this novel coronavirus. He even said that we need to hold our ground against this disease; but we should be prepared for its lasting even longer than we thought.

  If what he said is true, that means we will need to be prepared to remain quarantined at home even longer. I’m afraid that at this point no one really knows exactly for how long all this will last. It has been one long and bitter quarantine. Even those comedians and meme writers have fallen silent. It has been really hard on the people of Wuhan. First we had to go through that initial period of fear and anxiety, which was quickly followed by a period of unprecedented sadness, pain, and helplessness. And now, although we are no longer living in terror and the sadness has dissipated a bit, we must face an indescribable boredom and restlessness, along with endless waiting. But there is nothing else we can do. All I can do is tell everyone, as well as myself, that we need to hang in there and wait. It is something we simply have no control over. We have already hung on so long, I’m sure we can get through the remaining days ahead. I’m sure it won’t be too long now. The entire world knows that we are making this sacrifice for them; we have closed our doors so that everyone else can continue on with their lives. Just put on the loudest and most vulgar TV show that you can find to pass the time, something like Sunny Piggy, that sappy adaptation of Journey to the West. What else can we do?

  This morning I saw another video of a woman who insisted on going outside even though she wasn’t wearing a face mask. No matter what people said, she refused to go back in and insisted on talking to people without putting her face mask on. Community workers and public officials are all left in a tough place when they encounter people like this. Then there was a video of a small street filled with people and all the shops were still open; it was bustling as usual, as if there were not even an outbreak. The person shooting the video kept narrating as he walked down the street, saying: “Look at how free everyone looks! It doesn’t look at all like Wuhan!” I saw some people I knew in the video and even recognized the street where he was filming. With people behaving like this, it feels like this entire quarantine doesn’t really mean anything! Most of those people feel like the coronavirus has nothing to do with them; however, the difficulties we are seeing in controlling this outbreak and the fact that we have all been forced to remain quarantined for so long have everything to do with the behavior of people like that!

  Yesterday I forwarded a suggestion made by AD, and quite a few people posted responses online. A lot of them thought that his suggestion was completely impractical because it would be too big of an infringement on people’s privacy. There were a lot of people who saw it like that. I sent some of those comments to AD, and he responded as follows: “That’s how things are. Of course an individual’s movements are part of their private information, but when it comes to the suppression of this coronavirus, some of those lines become a bit hazy; under this National Emergency Response System we need to utilize whatever means necessary to steer us out of this situation!”

  I actually thought of that very issue when I first posted his initial suggestion yesterday. The issue really hit home when I read the last sentence of his original post: “We will be able to track everyone using this system!” After reading that, I even hesitated for a few seconds, but in the end I still decided to send it out. That’s because I’m here in Wuhan and what I know is that the lives of nine million people are more important than their privacy. Right now our primary concern is a matter of survival. What is privacy when compared with the cost of a human life? Those patients lying on the operating table with a doctor working on them won’t give a second thought to things like privacy. If technology can create happiness and assume a heretical guise, it is only natural for us to harness it to expel evil. In Chinese martial arts novels, you always read about those evil villains who have mastered the art of poisoning their enemies—but they always have an antidote hidden up their sleeve. Right now privacy isn’t what’s most important for the people of Wuhan; survival is.

  Right now the god of the underworld is still playing his death fugue. Once the music has ended, we will seek out a cure.

  Today one of my classmates told me that he was getting ready to go outside when his three-year-old granddaughter pleaded with him: “Grandpa, please don’t go out. There is a disease outside!” I also saw a video online of a child, also around three years old, who wanted to go outside and asked her daddy for the key. She said that she just wanted to look around at Wal-Mart. But the most heartbreaking story is the grandfather who was dead for days, but his grandchild was afraid to go outside because of the coronavirus, so he just lived on crackers for several days. There are all too many stories like that. There are so many children who won’t dare go outside because their parents keep scaring them by saying: “You’ll get sick if you go out! You’ll get sick!” The virus has already found its way into their hearts, living like a devil inside them. I wonder if when the day comes that they can finally go outside whether or not there will be children too scared to go out. Who knows how long the dark cloud of this will linger on inside them? These children have never committed any crimes against this earth, yet they too have to endure this suffering along with the adults. This afternoon a few colleagues and I chatted online, and we each reflected a bit on what we were doing in our lives before January 20th; we ended up all cursing those people we felt were the biggest culprits behind all of this, which made us all feel a bit better. We have all been traumatized by this in different ways; looking back, none of us feel lucky—we just feel like survivors.

  This afternoon, Headlines Today had an article that tried to cover up for the Yangtze Daily; it was highly likely that it was the work of one of those “sophisticated critics” who specialize in saying nasty things in nice ways. The article quoted some lines from a Yangtze Daily reporter who had attacked and mocked Professor Dai Jianye35 and me, calling us “internet trolls.” I’m not going to even bother engaging with the devious motives of this “sophisticated critic.” But that reporter from the Yangtze Daily is really in a weak position; she lacks even the most basic understanding and judgment. When I discussed the article “Seven Final Words That Left Everyone in Tears,” I just focused on one small aspect of the story; I thought it should have been titled “Eleven Final Words That Left Everyone in Tears.” It would have been a great article if they had just changed that number. And I doubt that it was even the reporter’s fault; based on my experience, I would bet that it was actually an editor behind a desk somewhere who came up with that headline. All I did was raise a few questions about the article from the perspective of a reader, and now that suddenly makes me an “internet troll”
! Frankly speaking, I have always had a good impression of the Yangtze Daily. When I was a teenager I actually wrote several articles for the former editor with whom I actually collaborated on some stories. For many years now, the paper has managed to maintain a very high editorial standard and level of reporting. Did its high level of professionalism and quality reporting ever before result in such an embarrassing spectacle as we are seeing today? The fact that it is now being targeted for criticism is something for which they have only themselves to blame. The good reputation the paper had was destroyed by those people who keep writing articles that fawn over what the officials are doing, the people who ignored the second half of those “final words,” and those other “sophisticated critics.” We should all reflect on this together. As I get to this point, I feel that I might as well do some “trolling.” But on second thought, forget it. Some of my classmates work in the newspaper industry; I’d hate to embarrass them.

  Finally, there are a few bits of news I want to record here:

  Twenty-six medical professionals have now died in the fight against the coronavirus. I hope they rest in peace. The reason we take care of ourselves and stay locked up is so that their sacrifice will not be in vain.

  I heard from a professor friend that representatives from the World Health Organization in Beijing said that, to date, the only medicine proven to be effective in fighting the novel coronavirus seems to be remdesivir.

  There are more than two million face masks coming into Wuhan every day. Every morning starting at 10:00 a.m. you can reserve masks using your ID card or other forms of identification. You can search for the details on how to purchase them online.

  February 26, 2020