Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry (HarperCollins)

It began in the city of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market. Of the 41 patients who first were treated for the virus that would bring the world to its knees, two-thirds of them had visited that market in December. By January 1, 2020 the market was closed and rumors that SARS had returned were sweeping Wuhan where city officials advised residents to wear masks and stay home. This was followed by the announcement that this new illness was  “not contagious between people. It’s controllable and preventable.” But by January 20th, officials admitted there were cases of  human-to-human transmission. Two days later the city was masked and streets had little traffic. On January 23rd,  Wuhan was under quarantine and the city of 11 million people would remain that way for 76 days.

In 2020 the Lunar New Year festivities began on January 25th  but in the weeks before that, “approximately five million people” had left Wuhan to travel during the long public holiday. The first cases outside of China appeared in the popular vacation mecca of Thailand on January 3rd, quickly spreading to Europe and eventually moving on to the US. In Wuhan, three days before the quarantine was announced, over 40,000 families had clustered together indoors for a public banquet and on the following day the city government had put on a “song and dance” concert. The virus couldn’t have appeared at a worse time.

Fang Fang, a prolific author in her sixties, began to keep a public journal of life under lockdown that she published on China’s social media platforms, always finding an outlet for her news reports even when the major media sites blocked her from posting. From January into March of 2020, she chronicled life in her city, candidly and in detail.

Wuhan, she reports, banned motor vehicles in the downtown area and shut down all public transportation. People who became ill walked from one overcrowded hospital to the next, desperately seeking treatment. Within days, Wuhan had built temporary hospitals which were quickly filled to capacity. Face masks were soon in short supply and people began to reuse disposable ones, washing them and disinfecting them with a hot iron. But, Fang Fang says, there was little need for mask wearing since people left home only to buy food and soon even those outings stopped. Neighborhood volunteers brought food to the quarantined. Families were cooped up together and there were no people on the streets. The city was “quiet and beautiful, it’s not a purgatory,” Fang Fang says, “until someone falls ill.”

“We need to get through fourteen days of isolation,” she says at the outset, and then “I need to bear another week.” This refrain quickly changes to her realization that “hunkering down at home and following this through to the very end” is the only way to survive. “There are too many sick people and not enough beds...The people don’t have enough tears to mourn all these deaths.” 

As translator Michael Berry says. Fang Fang’s reports were “dispatches from the future,” that were ignored by the West. Her posts were on “public platforms from the beginning, a virtual open book.” Berry began his translation on February 25th and by March, he says, “my life gradually began to mimic Fang Fang’s,” with one major difference. By April 8th 2020, coronavirus cases had fallen close to zero in Wuhan. In the US, deaths were raging in New York City. By December 13th of this year, US deaths had reached nearly 300,000. In Wuhan on December 11th, the Guardian reported, there had been no recorded cases of community transmission since May.

The tragedy is that every mistake, every cover-up, every shortage that had occurred in Wuhan was later replicated in the US. If Fang Fang had only been listened to, if Wuhan’s measures had been instituted worldwide, how different would life be now?~Janet Brown