Wuhan Diary. Notes from a City Under Quarantine

The book by one of the most famous and esteemed writers in China, an impressive first-person narrative about life in Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. On January 25, 2020, after the government imposed a total quarantine in Wuhan, renowned Chinese writer Fang Fang began keeping an online diary. In the following days and weeks, Fang Fang published notes online every evening, expressing the fears, disappointments, anger, and hopes of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the Internet – a lifeline and means of connection for the entire society and a source of misinformation, – and, tragically, about friends and neighbors who became victims of the deadly virus. A gripping eyewitness account of events unfolding. The book highlights the issues of daily life, mood swings, and experiences during quarantine in the absence of reliable information. Fang Fang finds solace in mundane details and is inspired by the courage of friends, medical workers, and volunteers, as well as the patience and perseverance of nine million residents of Wuhan. However, stating that a writer's duty is to document, Fang Fang speaks out against social injustice, the abuse of power, and other problems that hindered a timely response to the outbreak that turned into a pandemic, which provokes fierce backlash from her opponents online. In real-time, Fang Fang documents the beginning of a global health crisis, allowing for the identification of patterns and mistakes that many countries later repeated when faced with the new coronavirus. She reminds us that in the face of the new virus, the plight of Wuhan's citizens reflects the plight of people around the world. As Fang Fang writes: "The virus is a common enemy of humanity, this is the lesson for the entire world community. The only way to defeat this virus and free ourselves from its grip is to unite the efforts of the whole world." Interweaving the personal with the epic, the author of "Wuhan Diary" writes