Wuhan Diary

by Fang Fang

  But what really moved me was seeing the sanitation workers still out there sweeping the streets. They were all out there, as always, on each and every street, even though Wuhan is now cold and rainy with a gusty wind.

  Thanks to all these hardworking people! Their ability to stay calm while working hard gives me so much comfort.

  January 25, 2020: Forwarded message: On the Eve of the Lockdown, 299,000 People Leave Wuhan

  Let’s be tolerant and understanding of the people who have escaped from Wuhan. They are all just everyday people who are scared and want to stay alive.

  I’m thankful that this year I didn’t leave early for Hainan. Otherwise my daughter would have been left alone here in Wuhan and I would have been a nervous wreck. If I had left I would have made sure to come back to her, even if I had to walk to get here! But things are okay now; mother and daughter are each self-quarantined in our own apartments for the New Year. I feel much better this way.

  I did see reports of some people from Wuhan who had been in other provinces who are now suddenly facing all kinds of prejudice and no hotels will take them. My god, what a world we live in!

  The way of the world is in a state of constant flux; there are warm-hearted people and cold-hearted people. That’s the way it’s always been. We need to just accept that. The best thing we can do is take care of ourselves.

  January 25, 2020: Forwarded message: Please Spread the News: Wuhan City Taxis Allocated Accounts Based on Districts

  Forwarding for a friend. A few days ago my colleague went in for surgery and she needs to go back to the hospital tomorrow to change her bandages. We already reached out to the community workers for assistance, and they said that they should be able to help arrange transportation.

  Everyone feels helpless right now, but at least things are starting to get a bit more organized. It is good to know that the country is stepping up and there are people now taking the reins, so hopefully things wouldn’t be as chaotic as before. After all the rumors and gossip that had been exploding over the internet, it seems that, starting today, people are beginning to calm down.

  The first day of the Lunar New Year has come and gone in an instant. But I would still like to wish everyone a happy Chinese New Year. I hope that all the bad demons will disappear with last year; and here is hoping that things start to get better each day.

  January 26, 2020: Forwarded message: Seeking Emergency Help: Appealing to All Hotels Nationwide to Accept Guests from Hubei and Wuhan

  Forwarding to help get the word out. Everyone in China, please take in the people of Hubei, including those from Wuhan. No matter how they got out of Hubei, they all need food and a place to stay. Your enemy is the coronavirus and not these people from Hubei or those from Wuhan who are truly suffering.

  I preserve these early posts on the coronavirus for the record.

  March 7, 2020

  Who could have imagined that a second catastrophe would befall the people of Wuhan?

  It is a clear day and even a bit hot for this time of year. Nature seems to be quite pleased with itself; as soon as the sun emerged, it seemingly completely forgot how gloomy and cold it was just yesterday, which didn’t feel at all like early spring weather. I had a headache yesterday and took a sleeping pill, which allowed me to get an extra hour of sleep. I didn’t get up until noon and when I awoke I was feeling much better. The express delivery company delivered a package; someone sent me a fitness smartwatch. Even after racking my brains, I still couldn’t figure out who the kind soul was who had sent it; looking at the return address didn’t help. Friends, next time you send me something, please leave a note, okay? I won’t mention you in public, but I would at least like to be able to privately express my thanks. After taking some time to figure out how the watch works, I’m now using it. Not bad.

  This morning one of my doctor friends sent me a message that was brimming with positive news. The new cases of coronavirus in Wuhan on March 6 finally fell below 100. “After four days of seeing new coronavirus cases linger at just over 100, we have finally entered a new phase which will allow us to start getting things back to a basic operating level. The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is now seeing a tangible breakthrough. Our health management resources are now replenished and now even presumptive cases are able to receive in-patient treatment at the hospital. Specialized clinics and departments at various hospitals have begun to reopen; there is a very good chance that we will be able to get numbers down close to zero by the end of the month. We can now see the light at the end of the tunnel! Let’s keep going!” Those are his exact words. Just yesterday we were still worried about the deadlock we were in with the number of new patients, but now things seem to have suddenly turned around. In some ways, it is just like the way yesterday’s gloomy weather unexpectedly cleared up.

  Such a bright beautiful day. Everyone has played a role in turning the tide against the coronavirus. More and more people online are calling for the quarantine to be lifted. There are many hospitals in Wuhan that are beginning to resume normal operations, and their various departments are opening back up. But a lot of people unable to get treatment for other ailments have also passed away during this outbreak. This is a secondary catastrophe brought on by the coronavirus. Two elderly people in my complex died from non-coronavirus illnesses during this lockdown period. If they had access to normal medical care, they both may have made it. Besides this, there are a lot of people facing economic hardships; they have no income coming in and are unable to support their families. This is another monumental problem we need to address. Today I heard that the Nanjing poet Han Dong9 has been stuck somewhere in Hubei and was forced to stay in a hotel for more than 40 days. It’s hard to imagine how he got through this period; I hope I will one day get to read Han Dong’s record of his time under lockdown.

  Yesterday I was chatting with a few of my old schoolmates. They were telling me about what happened to Shen Huaqiang, the Secretary-General of the Wuhan-Ningbo Business Association. Two of my classmates were very close to him: H was his former supervisor and X was his classmate in college. Speaking of classmates, H and X were my classmates from elementary school all the way up through high school. I once wrote about the Ningbo businessman Shen Zhusan; Shen Huaqiang must have read that book because when he visited Wuhan with the Secretary-General of the Ningbo government, he told H that he was a big fan of mine. Shen Huaqiang wanted to meet me, so he asked H to introduce us. Shen Huaqiang was also the editor of the book Natives of Ningbo in Wuhan and he took care of a lot of the general affairs in his office. Who could have imagined that Shen Huaqiang would catch the novel coronavirus and all five members of his family would also be infected? He fell ill on the second day of the Lunar New Year and died on February 7—the same day his mother also died from the novel coronavirus. The other three people in his household were all under hospital quarantine. It is truly a tragic story. Neither Shen Huaqiang nor his mother was ever officially diagnosed with the coronavirus, so I’m afraid their deaths are not even counted in the official government tally. We kept saying we should meet so we could talk about Shen Zhusan, but we never got a chance. But I wanted to say something about this friend whom I had corresponded with numerous times but never got the chance to ever meet face-to-face.

  I was talking with a classmate about all the cremations taking place and we were wondering how they are going to manage all these funerals; right after that I followed up with a professional psychologist I know about this issue. I asked her: “I’m afraid that there is still one more big obstacle ahead for the people of Wuhan. Once the outbreak is over, there will be thousands of families that will need to hold funerals. How are we going to get through this? This will be another large-scale collective trauma that people will have to face.” My psychologist friend responded: “Since all these people died at the hands of an infectious disease, the funeral homes immediately cremated all the bodies; but all the ashes will be preserved until after the outbreak. At that time, they will inform family memb
ers by telephone that they can come and pick up their relative’s remains. At that time families can make arrangements for various memorial ceremonies. But because arrangements will need to be made for thousands of deceased individuals, I suspect that the government will have to get involved to help with some of the logistics. Because part of what went wrong was due to human error, if we want people to get over their pain, they will need some kind of explanation. If there is no accountability, it will be very difficult for people to truly get past this. There are so many families that have suffered losses; but how they get through it will be up to each individual family’s network of support and their level of functionality. Disadvantaged families will need more hands-on support from the government; psychologists will not be able to provide for all the practical needs that many of these families will have.”

  Another friend of mine who is well-versed in the field of psychological trauma told me: “Currently, most of the public is still in a state of psychological stress, but more serious psychological problems will start to emerge after this period of initial stress has passed. Once the outbreak has passed, we will start to see large numbers of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many families suddenly lost loved ones and they were not only unable to perform their filial duty of taking care of their relatives before they died, but they were even prohibited from paying their final respects; no matter what people do, this type of trauma will always leave behind a deep scar. I suspect that there will be a very high ratio of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder among these surviving family members. And then there is a group of people who will suffer from traumatic reoccurrence disorder, which will cause them to replay the events that happened over and over like a nightmare they cannot wake up from. Still others will respond by going numb and shutting themselves off, and finally there will be others who will respond by becoming neurotic and overly sensitive.”

  While I am hoping this outbreak will end quickly, I am at the same time terrified about the day that all those thousands of Wuhan families will have to hold funerals for their lost loved ones. I’m not sure if there are other psychologists out there who can provide other useful and practical measures that can make things even a little bit easier for these grieving families.

  Today the word appearing most frequently in online chat groups is “gratitude.” The political leaders here in Wuhan have requested that the citizens provide a public expression of gratitude toward the Chinese Communist Party and the nation. Their thought process is really strange. The government is the people’s government; it exists to serve the people. Government employees are servants of the people, not the other way around. These government leaders spend all their time studying political doctrines; how could they end up getting this so backward? Professor Feng Tianyu10 from Wuhan University said: “As for this question of gratitude, let’s not mix up the relationship between the people and those who hold power. If you are going to take those in power as gracious benefactors who require that their people get on their knees and thank them for their benevolence, I think you had better go back and listen to what Marx said during a speech in 1875. Marx despised Ferdinand Lassalle’s notion of state supremacy and argued that: ‘the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people’ (Critique of the Gotha Program).” I’m sure that all the political leaders in Hubei and Wuhan very much respect the views of Professor Feng; if this current group of new leaders are educated, I wonder if they will really hear what Professor Feng is trying to say.

  That’s right, the outbreak is now basically under control and we should indeed express our gratitude for that. But it should be the government standing up to express their gratitude. The government should start off by expressing their gratitude to the families of those thousands of victims; their loved ones were the wrongful victims of a terrible scourge. They weren’t even able to say goodbye to their family members or have a proper funeral; all they could do was keep the pain inside and bottle everything up and, meanwhile, virtually no one uttered a word of complaint. The government should express their gratitude to the more than 5,000 people still lying in hospitals beds as they struggle for their lives against the god of death; it is their stubborn will to live that has slowed down the number of deaths. The government should express their gratitude to all the healthcare professionals and 40,000 angels in white who came to Wuhan from around China to save people’s lives; they worked in the face of great peril, pulling people from the grip of death, one soul at a time. The government should express their gratitude toward all those workers and laborers who hustled all over the city during the course of this outbreak; they are the ones who kept this city functioning amid the crisis. And the government should save their biggest thanks for the nine million residents of Wuhan who locked themselves in their homes, even though it meant facing all kinds of difficulties; without their cooperation this virus would never have been brought under control. No compliments or beautiful words would be considered excessive in describing the contributions that all these people made. My dear government, please suck in your pride and humbly extend your gratitude to your masters—the millions of citizens of Wuhan.

  Next the government should make haste and beg for the people’s forgiveness. This is the time for reflection and assuming responsibility. A rational government with a conscience that listens to the needs of its people and understands how to console them should, at this very moment, quickly establish an independent investigative team to piece together the full details surrounding the outbreak, who was responsible for delaying the response, who decided to withhold information about the outbreak from the public, who were the leaders that in order to save face decided to twist the truth when reporting to their superiors and hide the truth from the public, who was it who put political correctness above the lives of our people, how many people contributed to this disaster? Whoever had a hand in this should take responsibility; the people need someone to assume accountability. At the same time, the government should urge officials from various departments whose actions misguided the public, leading to massive numbers of deaths, to resign. Individuals to be investigated should include high-level government administrators, top officials from the Ministry of Propaganda, those in the media who helped cover things up, and top officials from the Department of Health. If any of them are criminally liable, let the courts decide their punishment. However, based on my observations, most Chinese government officials are lacking when it comes to self-reflection, not to mention those willing to take the blame and resign. In a situation like this, citizens should, at the very least, draft a public call for all those officials who took politics as the center of their world while treating people like trash to resign. How can we let these people with blood on their hands continue strutting around in front of the people of Wuhan, gesticulating as if they are heroes? Supposing that 10 or 20 officials stand up and resign as a result of this, at least we will know that there are at least a few officials left who still have a conscience.

  Tonight around dusk a famous writer sent me a text. He wrote something that I found to be quite profound: “Who could ever have imagined that a second catastrophe would befall the Chinese language itself?” Gratitude is a beautiful word, but I’m afraid it has been forever sullied. I wonder if, moving forward, it will now become a “sensitive term” that we aren’t allowed to use.

  March 8, 2020

  When clues appear, shouldn’t we follow through with them?

  It’s raining again, quite a downpour, actually. It is also quite chilly and all day the sky has been as dark as it normally is at dusk. A certain Mr. Liu all the way out in Chengdu had his friend in Wuhan deliver some fresh fish to me; I tried to politely refuse, but in the end I wasn’t successful. The fish had already been prepared for cooking; in fact, he even sent over sliced scallions, ginger, and radishes so I could conveniently make fish soup. And because they figured out from my diary that I have diabetes, they also delivered some dried fruits. They left the package wi
th a letter at the main entrance to my compound. I felt quite embarrassed to accept their kind gift, but I was also quite moved. Thank you, my friends, for caring.

  Today is March 8, Women’s Day in China. Everyone is sending flowers to women online today. Every March 8 when I was a kid, my girlfriends and I would always sing: “March 8 Women’s Day, the boys will work, the girls will play, the boys will stay inside, doing their homework all day.” We would sing it in the Wuhan dialect, which created a certain melody and rhyme scheme that you could never get tired of. Thinking about it now, if feels like such a distant memory.

  In Wuhan dialect we called children ya. Boys are referred to as nanya and girls are referred to as nüya. When kids grow up, we replace ya with jiang, so men become nanjiang and women become nüjiang. These forms of address function irrespective of a person’s status, class, or title; everyone is either a nanjiang or a nüjiang. The word jiang often refers to a “general” in the military, but here there is no association with anything military. It is really an interesting way to refer to people; I’m not sure if other regions in China also use it.

  While it seems that in Wuhan the nüjiang always look like they are in charge, inside the home it is usually the nanjiang who calls all the shots. But what is interesting is that if a family runs into trouble, it is mostly the nüjiang who step up to deal with it. It’s not that the nanjiang is incapable of dealing with these things, it is just that the nüjiang seem to have an innate instinct to protect the nanjiang of the family. Sometimes, she takes the lead on things because the nanjiang has a profession of some social standing that doesn’t allow him to behave in certain ways in public; however, nüjiang never care about those things. Most women are relegated to a lower social status than men, which means that when trouble comes, the nüjiang are the ones who step in to put things back in order. Wuhan’s nüjiang speak quickly in high-pitched voices, and it is rare to see them lose an argument. And when you get two nüjiang arguing with each other, now, that is a quite a sight. During the Cultural Revolution, my former father-in-law was a professor at Huazhong Normal University when the Red Guards stormed his house to struggle against him. That’s when my former mother-in-law told him to sit tight and she brazenly strutted outside and started arguing with those Red Guards! Those Red Guards had nothing on my former mother-in-law—she was a real nüjiang—so, in the end, those Red Guards had no recourse but to scurry away. I’ve told this story before in other essays. But now in this age of the coronavirus, a lot of nüjiangs feel like it’s their duty to deal with things like all the complications of online shopping and dealings with the community. Since that is the case, you usually see more nüjiang taking care of these issues. Wuhan nüjiang are brimming with energy and tend to talk loudly; there have been a few videos of them circulating on the internet that have really shocked a lot of people. So at this time, I’d like to take a moment to wish all the nüjiang a happy Women’s Day!