by Fang Fang
But this time I suddenly realized that I was wrong. Even though 42 years have passed, time hasn’t completely answered those questions. Our views of literature seem to have somehow returned back to those same old questions. Those people who endlessly attack me—aren’t they doing that just because I refuse to approach this catastrophe with praises, make it into a comedy, and shine a light on the positive things being done? When I think about how things have come back full circle like this, it is quite a strange feeling.
As I get to this point, a friend just forwarded me an essay from the website “Investigative Web” entitled “A Wuhan Diary Brimming with Malicious Intentions” by Qi Jianhua. I would like to begin by sending out a warning: “Mr. Qi: You can curse me if you like, but your essay is spreading false information and lies, in an attempt to portray me in a way that does not reflect the truth. I suggest you delete your post and publicly apologize. If your post is not deleted and an apology is not issued, I will use legal means to resolve this issue. This notice also pertains to the website ‘Investigative Web’; you have the freedom to criticize me every day in your posts, but by posting essays like the one authored by Qi Jianhua that attempt to publicly slander me and spread rumors and untruths, you will force me to take legal action. I don’t care about your background, or which government officials you have backing you, or how much support you have behind the scenes; I will pursue legal action against you, as well. China is a society based on the rule of law. I can tolerate your vicious curses and attacks—after all, all they do is speak to your lack of character. However, once you slander me, invent rumors, and try to frame me with lies, you are breaking the law. Here I make a special announcement to ‘Investigative Web’ and Mr. Qi Jianhua: Please get yourselves in order, or I will see you in court!”
Can’t you see? Wuhan is on the verge of reopening. I may be retired, but I still have enough energy to take you to court.
March 20, 2020
Let’s see if I’m scared of you!
Another clear day. By the afternoon the temperature was already up to 26 degrees Celsius. I still haven’t turned the heat off, and I suddenly realized that it was the same temperature inside and outside. When I opened the window to get some fresh air, I was surprised to discover a few magpies that had flown into my courtyard. They were hopping back and forth between the branches of the camphor tree and the magnolia tree; one of them even came into my doorway to drink from a puddle on the stone mortar. Just watching them was enough to really fill me with joy, and I wonder if this might be a sign of some good news coming.
There isn’t much more to say about the coronavirus. The numbers are still holding at zero. We hope that continues; if it can continue for another 14 days, we will all be able to go outside again. Yet there is some other news online that is quite concerning; it has also been spreading very quickly. One news item is claiming that there are 20 new patients at Tongji Hospital who are sick with the virus, but the hospital is afraid to officially report these cases. I sent this information to two of my doctor friends to get their opinion. One doctor said that it was simply a misunderstanding. Now that there are a lot of patients being discharged from the hospitals, some of the remaining patients are being transferred to other, larger hospitals designated for coronavirus treatment. But those are not new patients, they are just newly transferred patients. My other doctor friend was more direct: “In a strict system you either speak the truth or get out of class.”
There is a post that everyone has been forwarding like mad. A patient recently tested positive for coronavirus after being released from the hospital and is now having difficulty getting readmitted. This incident has also triggered a lot of fear. So I again reached out to two doctor friends to get their input. One doctor friend confirmed that there was indeed a case of reinfection, but that is extremely rare. The other doctor started out by saying almost the same thing as the first doctor, but he actually had a more concrete understanding of this particular case. He explained that because they had already changed which hospitals were designated as coronavirus treatment centers, the patient ended up going to the wrong hospital, which was not one of the designated treatment centers. Later he got in touch with an administrator he knew and convinced them to admit him anyway. My doctor friend wanted to confirm two points: There are very few patients who test positive again after recovery, as some of them have no symptoms and are not contagious; besides that, hospitals are keeping track of all patients, so if any of them start to feel sick again, they just need to return to one of the designated hospitals (there is no such thing as patients not being able to get admitted anymore). I’m not going to check if the doctor’s interpretation matches up with the patient’s account; I am just providing an accurate report on what the physicians told me.
For most Wuhan residents right now, no matter whether they have been infected or not, they are all in a relatively fragile state of mind and prone to anxiety. Since they have changed which hospitals are now designated as coronavirus treatment centers, I suggest that this information be made clear to the public so everyone knows. If there are any changes like this, information should be immediately updated. As for patients who are feeling sick, they should double check which hospitals are currently accepting coronavirus patients in order to avoid showing up at the wrong hospital. There is no way around it: Spending several hours in the middle of the night trying to get treatment at an ER is always a torturous experience.
More bad news just came in from Central Hospital; Medical Ethics Committee Member Liu Li died this morning from the novel coronavirus. She is the fifth doctor from Central Hospital to pass away from this illness; I still don’t know how the hospital’s administrators are able to continue on in their current posts.
Yesterday there were a lot of people writing letters in response to a certain “high school student,” and that seems to have continued all the way up until today. And today there was even a letter that appeared online entitled “A Letter from a Group of High School Students to Another High School Student.” At first I didn’t pay much attention to it; I just thought it was some kind of prank. So I was quite surprised when a friend told me it was written by a group of real high school students. This piqued my curiosity and I decided to read it. The first thing I noticed was that these high school students were indeed quite different from that other “high school student.” Not just in terms of their writing level, but they were on a different level entirely. There was one sentence that was so good that I can’t help but quote it here: “What we really want to say is that in many cases the problem does not lie with someone paying too much attention to the dark side of things, it is actually due to our overemphasis on bright and positive things—sometimes that brightness can be so blinding that it damages our ability to see things clearly.” I suppose these kids are not all as vulnerable as I imagined them to be. They really do have strong, independent thinking skills; and they reveal very strong powers of observation. From that letter I can see that, on many issues, they actually have a deeper understanding of things than many adults.
Yesterday I started off intending to write about literary debates from back in the day; I got some of that down on paper, but then I saw that article published in “Investigative Web” that derailed me for a while. I even contacted a lawyer to provide evidence in case I need to file a defamation lawsuit. This afternoon I received several messages telling me that the essay published on “Investigative Web” by Qi Jianhua has already been taken down. He surely knew what he had published was illegal and the fact that he deleted it in some ways indicates that he knows he was wrong; I will consider whether or not I want to forgive him. Then in the afternoon some ultra-leftists from Shanghai seemed to have trouble accepting this outcome; they started screaming and hollering that Fang Fang wouldn’t dare to sue, she wouldn’t dare! That is quite an interesting response; okay then, don’t delete the essay, and let’s see what happens!
Originally I really wanted to continue the discussion about literature from
yesterday; I wanted to pick up from where I left off and cover the period up to the present day. But then I received another essay forwarded from a friend, which interrupted me again. It’s a good thing that the discussion about literature is an old topic that I can come back to anytime.
It seems that Peking University Professor Zhang Yiwu20 has now personally come out to address what has been happening. Zhang Yiwu is a really big name in the field. Is he the one who has been supporting the group attacking me? Or is he the one who has been directing their attacks? This is something that I cannot ignore. I heard that Professor Zhang uploaded an essay on Weibo, but I haven’t yet had time to read it. Instead I will just post an excerpt that one of my friends just forwarded to serve as a record. Professor Zhang writes:
There is an author who has been focusing specifically on a diary about the outbreak. She has been raising all kinds of criticisms and suspicions about these [letter] writers, saying how dark they are and hinting that they may all be following orders from somewhere; there was also a letter from an anonymous high school student that she criticized for being so stupid, etc., etc. To be perfectly frank, if you want to know why people don’t trust her diary, it’s because when the outbreak was at its peak, she employed a reportage literary style to describe a photo of a pile of cellphones on the floor of a crematorium; it is said that the photo was sent to her by one of her doctor friends. This brought widespread attention to her diary and became the incident that garnered her a lot of followers.
But a lot of people have suspicions about this incident; some are asking if this photograph even exists. The author has consistently been unwilling to address this question; instead she repeatedly brushes it under the rug while telling everyone that there are people out there trying to incriminate her. But the crucial issue here is that every writer should abide by a basic fundamental standard when it comes to the pursuit of truth. You cannot sacrifice the basic principles of human dignity; you cannot fabricate information to deceive naive readers who trust you; moreover, during a crucial time like this, fabricating facts will certainly not be tolerated; such acts are only committed by those without a conscience and shall become a mark of eternal shame on a writer.
Reading Professor Zhang’s comments makes it clear to me that he has not even read my diary; perhaps he just read a summary that someone prepared for him? A summary tailor-written for his specific tastes at that. Take, for instance, the sentence “there was also a letter from an anonymous high school student that she criticized for being so stupid.” I clearly never said anything like that. He also wrote, “if you want to know why people don’t trust her diary.” I wonder about these “people” he is referring to; how many people are we talking about here? Is he referring specifically to the people in his circle? How would Professor Zhang know anything about how many people trust me? If we follow Professor Zhang’s methods to make judgments and inferences, then I could say that I have basically never met anyone in the field of literature or academia for that matter who trusts Professor Zhang. Moreover, there is that line about fabricating “information to deceive naive readers who trust you.” I wonder if in using such categorical language Professor Zhang might be going a bit too far with his own fabrications? But that’s okay, he has always been quite fierce in the way he pushes his viewpoint. When he was complimenting Zhou Xiaoping on what a wonderful example of a model youth he was, Professor Zhang’s language was also quite over the top; he used language that was so exaggerated and laudatory that one would think Zhou Xiaoping was even more qualified to teach at Peking University than Professor Zhang himself.21 Actually, Professor Zhang likes to use his own petty mind to speculate about other people, and in the past he has also paid a price for that. Didn’t Professor Zhang once accuse a famous novelist of “plagiarism” but only ended up losing the case and embarrassing himself so badly that he could barely show his face?
As for that photograph, I have already explained that in great detail in an earlier post. So it is a real shame that Professor Zhang seems to have never taken the time to read what I wrote. Actually, Professor Zhang should really come out to Wuhan to understand the true situation firsthand: Then he would understand things like just how many people died each day, how the dead bodies were transported from the hospitals to the crematoriums, what happened to the personal articles of the deceased after they died, what kind of situation the hospitals and crematoriums were in, why lithium batteries cannot be burned, what kind of sterilization methods are being used, and why so many crematoriums all over the country have been supporting Wuhan. But I will have to stop here. For Professor Zhang and others who are willing to understand what is happening, all the information is here; if you don’t want to see the truth, that is your choice. I’m sure that one day everyone will see that photograph; but it won’t be from me, it needs to come from the person who took that photo. I really recommend that Professor Zhang visit Wuhan so that he can conduct his own firsthand investigation; of course, I should add that all these things occurred during the early stages of the outbreak, not later and not now. I think it would be more in keeping with Peking University’s standards if Professor Zhang first took some time to understand the true situation before rushing to make categorical conclusions. I’m sure that will also make the parents of the students he teaches feel much more at ease.
I’ll stop here for today, but I want to emphasize one thing: The presence of those ultra-leftists represents an existential threat to China and her people. If the entire Reform Era is destroyed at their hands, it would be the ultimate slap in the face to my entire generation. So come at me with all you’ve got, bring out all your dirty tricks, and tell all your big-name supporters to show their faces too! Let’s see if I’m scared of you!
March 21, 2020
The coronavirus outbreak seems to have stabilized, but people’s hearts have not.
We are now 59 days into the quarantine. It has been such a long time.
The sun was so bright yesterday but today it suddenly turned cloudy. There were even some light afternoon showers; but this time of year, my plants and trees in the courtyard all desperately need that rain. Two or three days ago the cherry blossoms on the Wuhan University campus blossomed; and although the campus is empty, I suspect there must have been some reporters there taking pictures, because everyone in my classmates group was forwarding photos of cherry blossoms in bloom. There is something so perfectly beautiful about seeing cherry blossoms in full bloom, devoid of any humans in sight.
The sky was extremely dark and when I went down to the main gate at dusk to pick up a parcel, there was a light spring drizzle; I didn’t bring an umbrella, but it felt great to let the rain fall on me. Just as I got back to my front door the rain suddenly turned into a downpour; if I had arrived home just a moment later I would have been soaked. I guess I got lucky.
The coronavirus outbreak seems to have stabilized, but people’s hearts have not. People are scared that patients who have recovered from the coronavirus might get reinfected; they are scared that hospitals will not report new cases because they don’t want to spoil the perfect new record of “zero” new infections. Since people are talking about these issues, I decided to ask my doctor friend and he gave me a clear answer. However, online I see that a lot of people are still very worried about this. This virus works in strange ways; it is crafty, it is elusive, and there are still a lot of unknowns concerning how it works. People are extremely scared, especially those of us here in Wuhan. We have all witnessed the tragedy firsthand during the early stages of the outbreak, and I think the fear we felt is still lurking deep inside us. But no matter what happens, we need to stay calm and collected. It is no use to get panicky; I think that the terrible situation early on was, to some extent, related to the state of panic we were thrown into. Anyone who had even the slightest fever rushed straight to the hospital; that led to a situation where a lot of people who didn’t have the novel coronavirus ended up getting infected by going to the hospital. That, in turn, put even more
stress on a medical system that was already on the verge of collapse and led to even more deaths.
Now that the outbreak has gotten to its current point, things have more or less stabilized and there is no need for us to be in panic mode. The hospitals now have enough experience treating patients of novel coronavirus so patients who are newly infected or recurring cases don’t need to be as anxious as before; you just need to go in for treatment. We are, after all, not made of steel; people often get sick and, just like always, we need to seek out treatment when we fall ill; it just takes time to go through the treatment. During the period between winter and spring, it was already flu season, which is also contagious; but didn’t we all get through that? According to a doctor in Shanghai named Dr. Zhang Wenhong,22 the death rate from novel coronavirus is less than 1 percent. If that’s the case, there isn’t that much to be scared of. Except for those few lethal cases, we shouldn’t be so terrified of infection; weren’t those patients in the temporary hospitals singing and dancing? Once they got discharged, they all seemed happy as can be, as if this illness is no different than any other.
But, on the other hand, I am having trouble understanding this desire to keep all the numbers at zero. Just how big is the difference between one and zero, anyhow? I feel that neither the government nor the people need to be so fixated on this issue. During normal times, there are always various infectious diseases out there; we just need to be cautious and if we get sick, we seek out medical help. Don’t tell me that if we are at zero we can all go back to work, but that even one confirmed case will affect our ability to return to normal? Can’t we just solve the problem by sending that one patient to the hospital for quarantine? We can’t necessarily always get a perfect zero; sometimes perfection simply isn’t practical.