BENGALURU: The people of Wuhan are all locked up at home, bored out of their minds with nothing to do — we all need a release. We can’t get together to talk because of the risk of infection; we can’t open our windows and sing together because we are afraid airborne particles of saliva can still spread the virus; we tried to wail together to mourn the loss of Dr Li Wenliang, but it wasn’t enough; the only thing left for us to try is to start unleashing our curses on all those people who cause us so much pain. What’s more the Wuhan people have always had a special talent for putting people in their place.
Once you have got it out of your system, your entire body feels completely refreshed; kind of like the way northerners feel after they have spent time at the bathhouse on a cold winter day. One bit of news today left me particularly sad; that was the death of the famous master of traditional Chinese painting Mr. Liu Shouxiang. Even more heartbreaking was a photo that a doctor friend texted me. The picture was of a pile of cellphones piled up on the floor of a funeral home; the owners of those phones had already been reduced to ash. No words.
February 15: Last night the wind was howling and there was a thunderstorm and today it began to snow. It is quite rare to see such heavy snow in Wuhan. I heard that the wind ripped open a part of the roof at Leishenshan temporary hospital. February 17: The strictest government order on the quarantine has just been issued: Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times. For someone like me, staying at home is a fairly simple task.
My dog can just run around in my courtyard. It is a good thing that he is so old. February 18: Today there is something I want to get off my chest that has been weighing on me for a long time: Those ultra-Leftists in China are responsible for causing irreparable harm to the nation and the people. All they want to do is return to the good old days of the Cultural Revolution and reverse all the Reform Era policies.
They behave like a pack of thugs, attacking anyone who fails to cooperate with them, launching wave after wave of attacks.What I really just don’t understand is: How is it that they are able to publish these ridiculous things online and repeatedly turn the truth upside down, yet their posts somehow never get censored or deleted and no one ever stops their flagrant actions? Excerpted from Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry, published by HarperCollins.