Ground Zero jottings

This is a nuanced and in parts sinister record of the pandemic as it unfolded in Wuhan by Chinese author Fang Fang.

Pandemic is a word we did not use all our lives. And suddenly, in 2020, we are using this word at least 10 times a day. These are extraordinary times. Everything we have known and done is falling away.

Each day we come face to face with a new aspect of this tragedy. How serendipitous then to find — much in the style of the Great Plague chronicler Dr Samuel Pepys — an intimate 60-day account or journal of the outbreak in its nascent days at Wuhan by resident and writer, Fang Fang. This diary takes us to ground zero and is a nuanced and touching record of the disaster as it unfolded.

Nightmarish beginnings

Some aspects of the tragedy are truly sinister. There is the case of the father of a special needs child who is forced into isolation. Unable to feed himself, the child starves to death over five days. Peasants trying to return to homes outside Wuhan find their path blocked and are left to fend for themselves in the bitter January cold. The case of a director, Chang Kai, who along with three other members of his family who succumb to Covid-19, brings home exactly how deadly the effects are.

Meanwhile, hospitals in the city are overwhelmed. Severely-ill patients are being turned away for the lack of beds. Underlying the account is bitterness at how horribly the situation was mismanaged. The first government team had reported in early January: “Not contagious between people; it’s controllable and preventable.”

A fearless voice

Many aspects contribute to making this a seminal book and a special treat for the book lover who values nonfiction. The current Chinese dispensation is a notoriously difficult regime to critique or report. A dissenting and fearless voice is to be lauded not only for bravery, but also for the altruistic act of bringing to the world’s notice the mechanisms by which the virus proliferated and spread; if only for posterity to know what to avoid during future contagions.

One entry deals almost exclusively with the shortage of masks. In desperation, people wash and reuse disposable ones. N95 masks are almost impossible to find. And of course, the few available are open to price gouging. The author relates how she finds a store where they are being sold at 35 Yuan (about $5) and probably extremely pricey by normal Chinese standards. When she finds the shop attendant using bare hands to extract them from a carton, she chooses not to buy them and falls back on an unused mask from a trip somewhere. There is humour in the situation too: “Face masks have indeed replaced pork as the most precious commodity for the Chinese New Year!”

City under siege

That the author is a gifted storyteller is evident in how diverse and layered the short daily recollections are; almost a microcosm of life in a city under siege. They include unerring details about the actual disease and its spread as well as the government action alongside.

There are also fine sketches about family, close friends and their kind interventions, elements of social media that kept connections alive whether they are platforms like Weibo and WeChat or simply videos posted by other residents of Wuhan to transmit deeply felt individual experiences in isolation or in hospitals.

Vignettes of Wuhan come alive and underline how similar life is across the world. In the midst of the crisis, a street-side lemon seller shrugs off the dangers by saying they have to live too, indicating food will be scarce without that daily income. The author’s daughter bungs an entire head of cabbage into the freezer, never having cooked for herself before. With eateries closed, a new kind of crisis descends upon many citizens, including the elderly.

A close scrutiny

There are two streams that crisscross; the political and the medical. There is discussion about the Chinese face-off against the western world (especially the US) to escape closer scrutiny of processes that escalated a localised outbreak into this event that the world is still reeling under. There is a strand that is humanitarian and where medical knowledge and supplies have flooded in to aid the beleaguered hospital staff. Ethnic Chinese all over the world have sent across masks and essentials to the worst hit in Wuhan.

All those who translate, open windows to worlds otherwise inaccessible. The readability Michael Berry infuses into this book eliminates cultural distance and permits the story to emerge as a truly global voice. In his note, we also discover that these diaries were not written as much as transmitted as daily dispatches from Wuhan on social media platforms with millions of followers who would engage on a daily basis. True enough, there were vicious trolls as well. Ultimately, what the diary really does is showcase the remarkable resilience of the human spirit.