Wuhan Diary

Introduction: The Virus Is the Common Enemy of Humankind

I

When I first logged on to my Sina Weibo account to write my initial diary entry, I certainly never imagined that there would be 59 more entries to follow; nor could I ever have imagined that tens of millions of readers would be staying up late each night just waiting to read my next installment. So many people have told me that they could only finally get to sleep after reading my entry for the day. I also never imagined that this collection of diary entries would be collected in book form and published overseas so quickly.

Just as I completed my final installment of the diary, the government coincidentally announced that on April 8, 2020, the city of Wuhan would reopen.

Wuhan was under lockdown for a total of 76 days. April 8 also happened to be the date that websites in the United States uploaded presale information for the English edition of Wuhan Diary.

The whole thing seemed something like a dream; it was as if the hand of God had been silently arranging everything from behind the scenes.

II

Starting on January 20 when the Chinese infectious disease specialist Dr. Zhong Nanshan revealed that the novel coronavirus was being spread by human-to-human transmission and news broke that 14 medical workers had already been infected, my first reaction was shock, but that later turned into anger. This new information was completely at odds with what we had seen and heard earlier. Official media sources had been consistently telling us that this virus was “Not Contagious Between People; It’s Controllable and Preventable.” Meanwhile, even more rumors were circulating that this was in fact another SARS coronavirus.

Once I learned that the approximate incubation period for this virus was around 14 days, I started to calmly make a list of whom I had been in contact with over those previous two weeks to see if there was any risk that I might have been infected. The scary thing I discovered was that during this period I had been to the hospital three different times to visit sick colleagues. I wore face masks during two of those visits, but one time I didn’t. On January 7th I attended a friend’s party and later went out to dinner with my family. On January 16th I had a serviceman come to my apartment to install a new heater. On the 19th my niece visited Wuhan from Singapore, so my big brother and his wife took us all out to dinner, including my second brother and his wife. It was a good thing that there were already all those SARS rumors floating around by then, so I made sure to wear a face mask every time I went out.

Given my occupation and what my normal schedule looks like, it is actually quite out of the ordinary for me to have gone out so many times during such a short period. I suppose I was going out more because this was the time just before the Lunar New Year when people hold a lot of parties and host get-togethers to celebrate. Once I put everything together, it was really hard for me to say definitively whether or not I might have been infected during that period. The only thing I could do was work backward to try to rule out an infection by counting down, day by day, until I had passed that two-week period. During that time, I was feeling quite depressed.

My daughter returned from Japan on January 22, the night before the quarantine was announced. I went to pick her up at the airport that night at 10:00 p.m. By that time, there were hardly any cars or pedestrians on the streets. When I got to the airport, almost everyone standing outside waiting to be picked up was wearing a face mask; there was a heavy feeling in the air and everyone seemed extremely stressed out. There were no signs of the hubbub, chatter, and laughter that you normally see there. Those few days were when panic and fright were at their very height in Wuhan. Just before going out I left an online message for a friend of mine, telling her I was reminded of a line from that old poem, “the wind whistles by as a chill descends on Yishui.” Since her plane was delayed, my daughter didn’t come out of the terminal until after 11:00 p.m.

My ex-husband had dinner with my daughter the previous week. Then, just a few days before I picked her up, he called to tell me that something was wrong with his lungs. My guard immediately went up; if he was infected with the novel coronavirus, then there was a possibility that my daughter might also be infected. I told my daughter and we decided that she had better self-quarantine at her apartment for at least one week before going out. That meant that we wouldn’t spend the Lunar New Year together. I told her I would bring her some things to eat (since she had been on vacation abroad, she didn’t have any fresh groceries in her apartment). We both wore face masks in the car and although she is usually always excited to tell me all about her trips, she barely said a word about Japan during our drive. We were both silent the whole way there. The anxiety and stress that were permeating the entire city were also there in the car with us.

I dropped my daughter off at her place and then had to stop for gas on the way back to my apartment. I didn’t get home until 1:00 a.m. As soon as I returned home I turned on the computer and immediately saw the news: The quarantine would be imminently going into effect. Although a few people had suggested shutting down the city, I remember thinking “how are you supposed to lock down a city as big as Wuhan?” So when the order came down, I really didn’t expect it. The quarantine order also made me realize that this infectious disease that had been spreading must have already gotten to an extremely serious point.

The next day, I went out to buy some face masks and groceries. The streets were very quiet. I don’t think I’d ever seen the streets of Wuhan so wide open and deserted. Seeing those desolate streets made me very sad; my heart felt as empty as those abandoned avenues. That was a feeling I had never before experienced in my life—that feeling of uncertainty about the fate of my city, that uncertainty about whether my family members and I had been infected, and all the uncertainties about the future. All that left me with a strange feeling of confusion and anxiety.

I went out again for the next two days in search of face masks, but the only people I encountered out on those empty streets were a few solitary street sweepers. Since there were so few pedestrians out, the streets were not even very dirty, but they kept frantically sweeping. For some reason, that scene gave me a strange sense of consolation and really set my heart at ease.

On my way home, I kept wondering, since I had first heard about this virus back on December 31, how come everyone had such a lax attitude about it for the following 20 days? We should have already learned our lesson from the SARS outbreak back in 2003. This “why” is also a question that a lot of people had been asking themselves. Why?

To be perfectly frank, part of the reason is that we had been too careless, and there are also objective life situations that contributed to that. But more important is the fact that we have placed too much faith in our government. We had faith that there was no way that the governmental leaders in Hubei Province would adopt such a lax and irresponsible attitude when it came to such a critical event where lives were in the balance. We also had faith that they would never hold fast to their “political correctness” and old ways of doing business in the face of a new threat that could affect the lives of millions of people. And we had faith that they would have better common sense and exercise better decision-making skills when a real threat was afoot. It was owing to that faith that I even sent a message to one of my WeChat groups saying: “The government would never dare to try to conceal something so huge.” But in reality, as we now see how things have evolved, we know that a portion of the blame for this catastrophe lies with human error.

Deeply ingrained habitual behaviors, like reporting the good news while hiding the bad, preventing people from speaking the truth, forbidding the public from understanding the true nature of events, and expressing a disdain for individual lives, have led to massive reprisals against our society, untold injuries against our people, and even terrible reprisals against those officials themselves (a group of high-ranking Hubei officials have already been dismissed from office, while others who should bear additional responsibility still remain in office). All this, in turn, led to the city of Wuhan’s falling under a 76-day quarantine, with its reverberations affecting untold numbers of people and places. It is absolutely essential that we continue to fight until those responsible are held accountable.

III

Beginning on January 20, Wuhan would be gripped by a cloud of fear and anxiety for the next three days as we quickly approached the quarantine order. Locking down an entire city with a population of millions in order to stop the spread of an epidemic was a historically unprecedented action. It was certainly also a very difficult decision to make on such short notice, because a quarantine order would certainly affect the lives of every citizen in Wuhan.

However, to impede the spread of this virus, the city government of Wuhan gritted its teeth and made the hard choice that needed to be made. This was also a decision that was unique in Wuhan’s thousands of years of history. But, looking at it from the perspective of how we changed the course of the virus’s spread, this was clearly the correct decision, even if it came a few days late.

During the five-day period lasting from three days before the quarantine order went into effect through the first two days after the restrictions were imposed, most people in Wuhan were in a state of utter panic. Those were five terrifying days that seemed to last forever; meanwhile, the virus was quickly spreading throughout the city, and even the government appeared as if it was at a loss as to what to do.

On January 25, Day One of the Lunar New Year, people finally started to settle down a bit. The media reported that China’s top-level leaders were closely following the outbreak in Wuhan and that the first team of medical experts from Shanghai had arrived in Wuhan. Those reports gave the people of Wuhan some solace and helped calm their spirits. That’s because everybody knows that once something in China is taken up at the national level, everyone will step up and do what needs to be done. From that day forward, the frantic and confused people of Wuhan could dispel all their fears. And that was the day that I began my diary.

But that was also when the period of true suffering arrived here in Wuhan—the number of people infected with the coronavirus exploded during the Lunar New Year. Because the local hospitals couldn’t cope with the surge of new patients, the entire system was brought to the brink of collapse. As it happens, that was precisely the period of the Chinese New Year when families normally come together for the holiday; it is a time of year that is usually filled with joy. But instead the world froze over; countless people became infected with the coronavirus, and they ended up traipsing all over the city in the wind and rain searching in vain for treatment. After the quarantine was imposed, all public transit in the city shut down, and since most residents in Wuhan don’t have their own automobiles, they had to walk from one hospital to another in search of a place that might admit them. It is hard to describe how difficult that must have been for those poor patients. That is also about the time that short videos of patients appealing for help began to appear online; there were also videos of people lining up all night long outside hospitals, hoping to get admitted, and clips of doctors on the brink of exhaustion. We all felt completely helpless in the face of these patients crying out, desperate for help. Those were also the most difficult days for me to get through. All I could do was write, and so I just kept writing and writing; it became my only form of psychological release.

Once we got through that most difficult period, several top officials in Hubei and Wuhan were removed from office, 19 provinces from all over China sent medical relief teams to provide aid to Hubei, and we constructed a series of temporary hospitals to handle the influx of patients. Eventually, the new quarantine procedures that were put in place helped to completely turn the tide away from the tragic and chaotic state that things had been in. All patients were divided up into four groups: patients with severe symptoms, confirmed coronavirus patients, suspected coronavirus patients, and those who had close contact with confirmed patients. Those with severe symptoms were admitted to the main hospitals designated to treat coronavirus patients; those confirmed patients with mild symptoms were sent to the temporary hospitals; all suspected cases were admitted to local hotels where they would be kept under quarantine; and close contacts were also quarantined in hotels or other facilities, such as school dormitory rooms. All these methods were immediately put into place and quickly began to yield results. Once they got into the hospital system, a good majority of the mild cases were able to see a quick recovery. Day after day, we were able to personally witness the situation improving here in Wuhan. You can see that gradually taking place in my diary.

During the early stage of the quarantine, the challenge of taking care of the daily needs of nine million people was taken care of by neighborhood groups that self-organized and used online services to make group purchases in order to provide daily necessities. Later the government mobilized all its civil servants to each and every community to help serve the needs of local residents. Wuhan’s nine million residents worked together to cooperate with all the government’s requests; their restraint and patience helped to ensure that Wuhan would be able to contain this virus; they are deserving of whatever recognition we can muster to acknowledge their collective sacrifice. Spending a full 76 days in quarantine was not an easy thing for people to do. But the amount of energy the government later put into the quarantine and various other measures was indeed extremely effective.

By the time I got to my 60th diary entry, the situation in Wuhan had already completely turned around. And then on April 8, the 76th day of the lockdown, Wuhan officially reopened. That was an unforgettable day. The moment the quarantine order was lifted, there was barely a dry eye in the entire city.

IV

What I never imagined was that just as the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was starting to ease up, the virus began to spread throughout Europe and the United States. These tiny virus droplets that are invisible to the naked eye quickly brought the world to its knees. The entire world, both East and West, were all tortured in horrific ways by this coronavirus.

Meanwhile, politicians from both sides pointed fingers at each other, while never facing up to the fact that everyone had taken missteps along the way. China’s lax attitude early on and the West’s arrogance shown in its distrust of China’s experience fighting the coronavirus have both contributed to countless lives being lost, countless families being ripped apart, and all humanity having been dealt a heavy blow.

A Western reporter asked me: “What kind of lesson should China learn from this outbreak?” My response was: “The spread of the coronavirus is not limited to China; it is something affecting everyone all over the world. The novel coronavirus has not just taught China a lesson, it has taught the entire world a lesson; it has educated all of humanity. This lesson is: Humankind cannot be allowed to continue on lost in its own arrogance, we can no longer think of ourselves as the center of the world, we can no longer believe that we are invincible, and we can no longer underestimate the destructive power of even the smallest things—like a virus.”

The virus is the common enemy of humankind; that is a lesson for all humanity. The only way we can conquer this virus and free ourselves from its grip is for all members of humankind to work together.

V

I would like to extend special thanks to my four doctor friends; throughout the course of my diary, they provided information and medical knowledge about the coronavirus.

Thanks to my three brothers for their assistance and love, along with all my family for always lending me their full support. When people started attacking me online, one of my cousins said: “Don’t worry, your family always will have your back.” Another one of my cousins kept constantly sending me information. My extended family’s support warmed my heart along the course of this journey.

I also thank my old college and high school classmates. They too provided so much strong support to prop me up throughout this process. They sent me all kinds of information about what was going on in our society during the outbreak, and during those moments when I wavered, they were the ones who cheered me on. And then there are my colleagues and neighbors; I thank them all for providing help with my everyday life affairs throughout the process of writing this diary.

Finally, I would like to thank my translator, Michael Berry. If it hadn’t been for his suggestion, I never would have thought of trying to publish this book overseas; and it certainly never would have been brought out at such a rapid speed.

This is a book dedicated to the people of Wuhan. It is also a book for those people who came to Wuhan’s aid during my city’s darkest hour. All my proceeds from this book will be used to aid those people who put their lives on the line for this city.

Fang Fang

April 13, 2020