With its hilly terrain, Wuhan, located at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze rivers, could mean a myriad things to the people of China. But in India and other parts of the world, the city became the epicentre of a boisterous campaign, when it was revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had spread across the globe from this very megacity, otherwise known as the “Chicago of China."
With a population of 11 million people, Wuhan witnessed one of the strictest lockdowns during the pandemic. It was during this period that Chinese author Fang Fang, with a following of 3.8 million people on Weibo, undertook the task of posting a long sketch of her days on the Chinese microblogging site. Later, a 3-month series (between January and March) of Weibo posts and a few anonymous interviews and personal accounts were compiled into her book called Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from the Quarantined City (2020)—originally written in Chinese (Mandarin) but later translated to English by Michael Berry.
In this personal account, Fang Fang explores the events, bureaucratic decisions, (mis)management, myths, and most importantly, the disappearance of quotidian mundanity in her native city. The book is her attempt to sketch an exhaustive chronicle of Wuhan라이브 바카라 city life during the COVID lockdown, juxtaposing it with her memories of the city before Corona. It is this contrast that makes this otherwise monotonous book an interesting read. The almost 400-page book begins with the onset of strict quarantine in Wuhan and the problems that the author had to encounter during this period.
Being a single woman during the pandemic, Fang Fang grappled with the uncertainties of the future, where her concerns lay at both ends of the spectrum—from daily groceries to the mental and emotional impacts of the pandemic. Yet, through all these challenges, she attempts to humanise the crisis by delving into the nexus of the sociological, psychological, and political world around her. This world includes a range of characters—from the person who delivers her groceries, her neighbour, her relatives, her friends, to public health workers, people in positions of power, and most importantly, herself.
Fang Fang reveals the vicissitudes of this period in her account: from the farcical instance when President Xi Jinping was about to visit Wuhan라이브 바카라 hospitals, and overnight the hospitals were tidied up and presented in the morning as idealised institutions, to the emotionally draining episode of the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor who attempted to warn the Wuhan authorities about the pandemic, only to be silenced eventually.
At a time when people around the globe were desperately seeking the means to cope with the pandemic, Fang Fang communicated a sense of purpose to a largely unknown community, by being empathetic and expressing concern for the people around her. Her writing emphasises a renewed appreciation for things that she previously took for granted—such as a park near her house, the lake beside it, the pavements around, the usual faces who were no longer to be seen, the flowers, the birds, the air, and the freedom to adore a city that grew up with her.
In addition to being a voice of comfort for many, the book also becomes a site of questioning the authority and holding bureaucrats accountable for their decisions and mismanagement. In a country that imposes severe clampdowns on the press, people searched for newer avenues to register their disenchantment, and Fang Fang라이브 바카라 social media posts provided that space for many kindred spirits. Through an honest account of Wuhan라이브 바카라 plight during the pandemic, she captures its civic life, the nostalgia of its beauty, and the much-hidden bureaucratic intricacies.
Although, for a reader who has to read such a voluminous book, the narrative becomes slightly repetitive at times, but when one looks at it as a collection of social media posts that were posted at a day라이브 바카라 interval, the schema of its structure is rationalised. The Corona pandemic, being an unprecedented crisis, had pushed us to our primitive instincts. World over, people were condemned to lead a life of seclusion, marinating in our own misery. It is within such a context that monotony and repetition emerge within this account. But fixating on predictability as the defining feature of this book would be a dishonest thing to do; rather, the book takes up its own identity of historicising and documenting the events within its reach.
Through her writing, the author plays an ideal citizen, who is on a quest for answers and holds people accountable using the means at her immediate disposal, i.e., the internet. However, for the uninitiated non-Chinese reader, she may very well be on a quest to bust stereotypes and conspiracy theories. For instance, the book chases the theory of the virus being spread from Hunan Seafood Market in a non-racist manner, looking at it through the lens of discovering the truth rather than framing a truth. Conspiracy theories—apart from feeding one라이브 바카라 ego and spreading disinformation—can take a huge toll on the people at the receiving end. Such theories erase the sacrifices and suffering of the affected community, thereby weaponising a disease to create a xenophobic binary of us vs. them.
Here, Fang Fang라이브 바카라 work helps in assuaging the impact of such conspiracy theories by chronicling the raw information emerging from the region. While unearthing it, she discusses the perplexity of the healthcare professionals, who initially thought the virus to be SARS—only to be proven wrong later; or the helplessness of Wuhan라이브 바카라 residents who became objects of suspicion—their travel and accommodation outside of Wuhan were viewed as spreading a disease.
Her narrativisation of the people라이브 바카라 encounter with the virus put me in a strange spot as a reader because, firstly, the diary was a rewind of the times that are best left forgotten, and secondly, it showed how human reactions could be uncannily similar across cultural and geographical boundaries. Uncertainties, clubbed with pain, fear, and death tolls, push this work to defy its own localisation and become a historical documentation of us all.
The impact of her social media posts was such that she had to face censorship and a barrage of trolls multiple times. Her Weibo account was shut down by the authorities in February 2020, but was later reinstated. This consistent clampdown on Fang Fang라이브 바카라 writing led her to famously say, “Dear internet censors, you should let Wuhan speak." The author, who has been a controversial figure in China because of her political leanings and an "anti-radical left" stand, has been criticised and labelled as an “American agent in China."
She believes these critics and bullies to be "ultra-leftists.” However, at the same time, she is appreciated for her civic life portrayal by the liberals in China and around the world. Because of the nature of this work, these appreciations and criticisms came in real-time. As Fang Fang mentions in various chapters, she has often denounced these bullies and has, on some occasions, also been confrontational with them. There was a moment, by the end of the book, when she even threatened to sue a few people—a threat that successfully worked in some quarters.
What this book offers a reader—whose mind is not clouded by sinophobia—is a glimpse of the civic life and political conditions of a country about which the world knows very little. Rather than searching for answers to archaic concepts like the “Chinese miracle" or “Chinese fear,” the reader can navigate this work to delve into the oft-missed ideas about the Chinese community and altogether shed the commonly-held misconceptions and stereotypes. People on both ends of the ideological scale—for whom China is either an idyll or a bête noire—could take cues from the book and reorient their perception of the Chinese society. One may not be in ideological agreement with Fang Fang, but we can certainly find a point of convergence through her writing, making it an account about us all.
Shashank Sourav is a post graduate in Sociology and an independent writer and researcher.
