WUHAN DIARY
Dispatches From a Quarantined City
by Fang Fang ; translated by Michael Berry
An urgently written account of the emergence of COVID-19 in China. Fang Fang, a Nanjing-born novelist, became accidentally famous when, as she records, she first logged onto her blog to record her notes on the outbreak in her adopted city of Wuhan. “I certainly never imagined that there would be 59 more entries to follow,” she writes, “nor could I have imagined that tens of millions of readers would be staying up late each night just waiting to read my next installment.” Her chronicle will sound familiar to American readers. When an infectious disease specialist first reported the appearance of COVID-19 on Jan. 20, 2020, it had been spreading for at least three weeks, with the government first insisting that it had been taken unawares and then following up with assurances that the virus was “controllable and preventable.” Sounding a note familiar to environmentalists everywhere, the author chides her fellow humans for imagining that they’re really in control of the world and for failing to be more prepared for the current pandemic after experiencing SARS in 2003. She then begins reporting the grim news: The father of a family friend, already suffering from liver cancer, was taken to hospital with the virus, but “there was no one available to treat him and he died three hours later.” Cheap, black-market face masks began to appear while usable ones were sold at price-gouging rates. Wuhanese tried to survive isolation by imagining the meals they would eat when the plague ended: “Wuhan people love discussing which restaurant makes the best food in town, and that is even more the case now than ever.” Then came the cabin fever and the growing demand that officials reopen the city for business, even as the death toll continued to rise. Finally, the quarantine lifted, and, the author writes hopefully, “Wuhan will be coming back to life again quite soon”—albeit forever changed and fearful. Essential reportage with hard-won lessons for residents of every place on the planet on how to survive the pandemic.