Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City
Fang Fang
HarperVia: 2020
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The world froze over, the Chinese novelist Fang Fang writes in the preface to Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Millions around the world now feel as the author felt at the beginning of February—stranded, isolated, frustrated, angry. The pandemic has frozen our lives.

Honest and resilient in the face of tragedy, government failure and censorship, Fang Fang’s diaries, originally published in sixty instalments on social media, captured the public imagination and became a source of solace for millions through the seventy-six days of lockdown for Wuhan. Back then, as spring unfolded quietly outside my apartment window in Beijing, my social media feeds were flooded with reposts of her diaries. They were a site of collective emotion. Friends commented that the daily entry was the one thing they had to read to get to sleep at night. Others would engage in conversations in the comment boxes. Her readership reached tens of millions.

• Tags: China, Fang Fang, Issue 20, Tom Baxter