by Fang Fang
There was a time when Wuhan was clearly trying to build up Hankou into a business district, Wuchang into a cultural district, and Hanyang into an industrial district; this was part of a plan to emphasize the different qualities of each town.
The most bustling areas in the city are all north of the city in Hankou. Places like Jianghan Road, Six Crossings Bridge, and the somewhat famous Hanzheng Road are all located here. I remember back a long time ago that when people living in Wuchang and Hanyang wanted to buy gifts for their family, they would always have to take a bus or a ferry to Hankou. These days the business districts in Wuchang and Hanyang are quite robust, yet people still can’t shake the idea that things in Hankou are still better priced and of better quality, so everyone still likes to go north of the river for shopping.
Compared with the bustling Hankou district, Wuchang, located south of the river, is much more subdued. What attracts the most attention about this district is its large number of universities and high-level research facilities. My alma mater, Wuhan University, with its long history and beautiful campus, is located here in Wuchang. Wuhan University has always been highly ranked nationwide for its high level of academic achievements. But following the evolution of the market, several commercial outlets have also popped up in several corners of Wuchang; the district is no longer playing second fiddle to Hankou.
But as for Hanyang, which has always been the industrial district, even today it continues to lag behind Hankou and Wuchang. Sandwiched between the Yangtze and the Han River, it seems to always get less notice than other parts of the city. Its most famous claim to fame was the construction of the Hanyang Arsenal back in the early 20th century. Everyone who ever served in the army is familiar with seeing “Made in Hanyang” stamped on their equipment. Even today, Hanyang continues to be most famous for its manufactured goods. A few years ago Wuhan started developing a brand-new modernized industrial zone and it too is naturally situated in Hanyang.
I’m not sure what year the decision was made to give each district a distinct character; it may have been back when Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) was the governor of the region. But over time, modernization has transformed all three towns dramatically; yet somehow what makes each district unique has remained, even if those remnants of the past continue to fade over time.
There are few cities out there that have the kind of scenery that Wuhan has been blessed with; the rich Jianghan Plains frame Wuhan on all sides. The plains surround the city with an openness that is adorned by countless beautiful lakes, leaving the entire region with a feeling of brightness and freshness. Those two great rivers—the Han and the Yangtze—rumble through the center of the city and converge, while countless rolling hills adorn both sides of the river like chess pieces in formation. Wuhan is a city with a strong modern sensibility, yet it remains framed by the mountains and rivers and decorated by the scenery of those hundred lakes. The crimson water and the green hills, gulls from Liudi Lake and high-rise buildings, bridges and cableways, mast-like towers and massive flashing LED screens—all converge and blend together in a moving tapestry. Wuhan has been bestowed with incredible natural gifts from the environment; with a bit of careful planning and some reasonable construction projects, Wuhan could easily become one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Like a lot of other well-known urban cities, Wuhan is not just a commercial hub; it is also an industrial center and a major site for research and education. It has endured the vicissitudes of history and witnessed its share of blood and tears; it has been through the insult of having foreign concessions established here and it has been home to legendary tales of resistance; it has been through a construction boom and also the ridiculous Cultural Revolution; it has been home to heroes and prostitutes; just as the water never stops flowing, so the traffic never ceases and the neon lights never dim; it boasts of luxury hotels and bustling markets; it has beautiful scenes of green trees against both red walls and environmental pollution; it has its quiet, beautiful side; and it is home to both the nouveau riche and the poor and destitute. All the amenities enjoyed by every modern city, along with all the urban problems that big cities face, are all right here in this place called Wuhan.
Translator’s Afterword
Reading Wuhan Diary in English is a very different experience than how Chinese-speaking readers experienced it when it first appeared online. The diary was initially released in daily installments that were uploaded to various Chinese social media platforms and microblogging sites like Weibo and WeChat. Fang Fang’s dispatches were blasted out each night, offering real-time responses to and reflections on events and news reports that had transpired just hours earlier. As the outbreak in Wuhan spread and began to attract more attention both within China and globally, Fang Fang’s readership began to grow. More and more Chinese readers from around the world found their way to Fang Fang’s postings, which provided a platform to understand what was happening on the ground in Wuhan. Whereas we often think of diaries as an especially private literary form—a place where you record your innermost fears and desires, often alongside a more mundane record of events from everyday life—Wuhan Diary was a public platform from the very beginning: a virtual open book.
Part of that openness meant that Fang Fang’s diary entries were not read as they are presented here in this volume—that is, compiled into a book-length narrative dominated exclusively by the author’s voice and perspective. For Chinese readers, Wuhan Diary came delivered in many forms—as daily installments on Weibo and WeChat; as excerpts that were cut, pasted, and forwarded via text message; as memes that were culled from entries and paired with photos; and even as PDF compilations that individuals who wanted to document Fang Fang’s entire narrative forwarded to friends via email. Most significantly, on Fang Fang’s primary platforms of Weibo and WeChat, the posts would be accompanied by a comments section, which would variously include remarks, criticisms, links to articles, photos, and embedded videos uploaded by an army of actually millions of readers. According to a Guardian article from April 10, 2020, “On Weibo, ‘Fang Fang Diary’ has had 380m views, 94,000 discussions, and 8,210 original posts, peaking last week.”1 At the height of the diary’s popularity, many of her posts were getting between 3 and 10 million hits in just the span of two or three days; those message boards emerged as a virtual biosphere of vibrant social debate—a place for readers to converge, share, sometimes argue, and often cry.
While no book, print or electronic, can encapsulate the rich social dimension of Wuhan Diary’s sprawling digital footprint, readers will be able to sense the presence of that world because as the diary unfolds, Fang Fang increasingly interacts with her many supporters as well as with the trolls who attack her, both of whom become an increasingly important part of the narrative that she weaves. Indeed, even as Wuhan Diary offers manifold insights into the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it offers an equally rich dive into the complex world of the Chinese internet. As the quarantine drags on, Fang Fang finds her life increasingly intertwined into a virtual world of texts, online news clips, and social media posts. But what makes Wuhan Diary such a remarkable document is the way in which Fang Fang merges the firsthand perspective of someone going through the uncertainty, fear, and isolation of life under the shadow of a strange new virus, with online reports, news coverage, texts, and messages received from relatives, friends, colleagues, former classmates from her youth, and neighbors. The result is a hybrid form that alternates between the quotidian and the epic, the mundane boredom of life under lockdown and the ever-expansive network of the World Wide Web. Fang Fang’s diary at times serves as a clearinghouse for suggestions and recommendations on everything from online shopping tips to how to actually save the lives of people with chronic health conditions unable to get care amid the outbreak.
Another remarkable facet of Wuhan Diary consists of Fang Fang’s repeated calls for action and appeals for accountability. This is another area where how we in the West read the book is different than how Chin
ese readers read it. In the United States and many other Western countries, media thrives on pundits, politicians, and activists criticizing one another, often along party and political lines. Many American and European readers of Wuhan Diary therefore may not fully appreciate the extraordinary courage that Fang Fang displays in her repeated, unflinching calls for local and national officials and specialists who “dropped the ball” to stand up and take responsibility for their missteps. In a society where “keeping your head low and staying out of trouble” serves as the guiding principle for many writers and intellectuals, Fang Fang dared to speak out—and when her critics came after her, she spoke even more loudly.
This also marks a major shift in the tone of the diary itself; for as the COVID-19 outbreak gradually comes under control in Wuhan, Fang Fang goes from chronicling the coronavirus to calling out officials and specialists for their negligence, mistakes, and lack of action. Eventually, Fang Fang homes in on the topic of accountability. Of course, a price must be paid for her outspokenness; as Wuhan Diary progresses and Fang Fang’s calls for justice grow stronger, so too do the attacks of the invisible army of “internet trolls” who have been hounding her. These two forces are, of course, connected. And, for the final third of the diary, much of her focus is spent deflecting the myriad online attacks that she confronts each and every day.
The ultra-leftist groups attacking Fang Fang in China first came after her in 2017 after the publication of her award-winning novel A Soft Burial. The novel offered a penetrating exploration of amnesia as an allegory for suppressing lost pages in modern Chinese history—in this case, the era of the country’s land reform campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Because of that novel’s refusal to read that history along black-and-white binary lines, it became the target of a fierce smear campaign by ultra-leftist groups in China. The novel was eventually pulled from shelves and Fang Fang herself became the target of countless online attacks. Fast-forward to 2020, and those same ultra-leftist groups have now found a new target—Wuhan Diary. The depth and vitriol of these attacks were such that, even as this HarperVia edition of the book was being prepared, leftist attackers waged a media war in China, claiming the book was to be “weaponized” as a tool for the United States to criticize China!
As I was translating Wuhan Diary, “weaponizing” the book, or using it as a tool to criticize China, was surely the last thing on my mind. In contemporary Chinese literature, Fang Fang has been the single most powerful voice to emerge from Wuhan in decades. When the coronavirus outbreak occurred, many people looked to her for solace, information, and a path forward. She became, more than anyone else, a voice that people could look to for an honest appraisal of what was happening every day in Wuhan during the age of COVID-19. Even as the world slumbered, Fang Fang’s voice was crying out daily. Her cries needed to be heard around the world, both as a personal testament to the horrors the people of Wuhan were enduring and as a warning of what might come to the world if precautions were not taken. So, instead of weaponizing Wuhan Diary, I instead felt the pressing need for the United States, and the world for that matter, to learn from Fang Fang. Part of that lesson comes from Fang Fang’s compassion and bravery, but another side comes from her audacity—the audacity to bear witness, the audacity to refuse to be silenced even when thousands of vicious attacks are raining down on her head, and the audacity to speak truth to power.
In a country with 1.4 billion people, crowded with hundreds of satellite television stations, newspapers, websites, and state media, somehow this lone figure cut through all the noise and emerged as the voice of Wuhan. Her words became the city’s heartbeat and its conscience. Her diary became a lightning rod for activism and criticism, compassion and malice, love and hate— all playing out every day in the seemingly endless comments thread that trailed behind her every post.
I first encountered Fang Fang’s fiction back in the mid-1990s when I read several of her stories and novellas, including Black Hole. I followed her career for more than two decades before a mutual friend put us in touch regarding the translation of her controversial novel A Soft Burial. I fell in love with the novel and had actually been translating that work for her when news of the novel coronavirus began gaining attention all over the world. Knowing that Fang Fang is a longtime resident of Wuhan, I texted her several times to check in on her and make sure she and her family were okay, but she never mentioned anything about her diary. It wasn’t until mid-February—roughly two weeks into the diary—that a close friend recommended that I take a look. By then, the diary had already “gone viral,” so to speak, in unfortunate synchronicity with the virus, and was all over the Chinese internet. I read a few entries and was immediately drawn in.
I had been closely following news of the coronavirus outbreak since January; I even co-organized one of the first public forums on COVID-19 in the United States with members of the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. But, frankly speaking, as someone with no medical training, I felt quite helpless in the face of the coronavirus. What can I do, what can any individual do, in the face of a global threat like COVID-19? But as soon as I read a few entries from Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary, I immediately knew what I could do. This was something I could contribute.
I immediately wrote to Fang Fang, suggesting that I temporarily table my translation work on A Soft Burial and, instead, translate Wuhan Diary first. Fang Fang initially hesitated; after all, her diary wasn’t even finished, and the coronavirus events were still playing out in unpredictable ways. Eventually, however, we both agreed that this was a story that needed to be told and that the world needed to hear Fang Fang’s testimony. The writing was on the wall, so to speak; the virus was spreading; and I felt an urgent need to get Fang Fang’s words out as quickly as possible. I put other projects aside and started to furiously translate, often producing more than 5,000 words a day. At the time, I had no way of knowing that this would evolve into one of the more simultaneously rewarding and excruciating projects I had ever undertaken. It was also, in many ways, the strangest.
Let’s start with the strange. Over the course of my translation, it was as if I were living simultaneously in three different temporalities. When you delve deeply into a translation, part of your psyche becomes embroiled in the author’s world. You swim in her language, breathing it, internalizing it, before rendering it into English. This is especially the case for a time-sensitive project like this one, on which I was translating for more than 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, always a month behind Fang Fang, although racing desperately to catch up. Yet beyond the language was Fang Fang’s inner world; translation allows you to enter that world in a much deeper way than simple reading. But Fang Fang’s world was of the past—I started translating Wuhan Diary on February 25, exactly one month after she began writing. So, everything I was translating was already a month behind, yet as coronavirus cases began to rise in the city of Los Angeles where I live, Fang Fang’s words increasingly felt like they were dispatches from the future. She was showing us where we were going, anticipating how society was likely to respond, and warning us where the many pitfalls lie.
So for 46 days, from February 25 through April 10, 2020, I translated roughly 5,000 words a day (minus a week’s break to recover from illness), living amid an unfolding pandemic, translating a diary written one month in the past, which somehow, simultaneously, offered glimpses into our future. Along the way, I experienced many moments when these different temporalities seemed to clash, in eerie and jarring ways. Take, for instance, Fang Fang’s outrage about the 40,000-person Lunar New Year event held in Baibuting, which resulted in widespread infections throughout Wuhan. Fang Fang published that entry on January 28; the day I was translating it, which was over a month later, on March 7, one of the headlines in the United States was “Trump Says Campaign Rallies Won’t Stop Over Coronavirus Fears.” How I wish that the people attending those rallies could read Fang Fang’s diary. Even at the time of this writing on April
11, mass church gatherings are still being held in many American states. On January 27, Fang Fang wrote an entire entry about the scarcity of face masks (there was no debate about the need to wear them, as that was already an obvious fact); however, the United States didn’t officially recommend that face masks be worn in public until April 3. And then an eerie incident occurred that still haunts me: On March 4, I had a doctor’s appointment and happened to just mention Wuhan Diary to my physician. At the time, I had recently translated the February 15 diary entry about Liu Fan; I told my doctor about how the coronavirus had wiped out this entire family of four in a matter of days. My doctor looked at me with skepticism and asked, “Isn’t it just like the flu? I’ve never heard of anything like that.” Almost exactly two weeks later, news of the coronavirus ravaging the Fusco family of Freehold, New Jersey, made headlines—four family members were lost in less than a week. I had grown up in Freehold and even went to high school with Peter Fusco; he lost two brothers, a sister, and his mother to the novel coronavirus, while three additional members of his family were also infected. Shocked, and still feeling helpless, I quickened the pace of my work.