Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Written by Fang Fang and Michael Berry

Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

From one of China’s most acclaimed and decorated writers comes a powerful first-person account of life in Wuhan during the COVID-19 outbreak.

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing an online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang’s nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger, and hope of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation, and most tragically, the lives of neighbors and friends taken by the deadly virus. 

A fascinating eyewitness account of events as they unfold, Wuhan Diary captures the challenges of daily life and the changing moods and emotions of being quarantined without reliable information. Fang Fang finds solace in small domestic comforts and is inspired by the courage of friends, health professionals and volunteers, as well as the resilience and perseverance of Wuhan’s nine million residents. But, by claiming the writer´s duty to record she also speaks out against social injustice, abuse of power, and other problems which impeded the response to the epidemic and gets herself embroiled in online controversies because of it.

As Fang Fang documents the beginning of the global health crisis in real time, we are able to identify patterns and mistakes that many of the countries dealing with the novel coronavirus have later repeated. She reminds us that, in the face of the new virus, the plight of the citizens of Wuhan is also that of citizens everywhere. As Fang Fang writes: “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.” 

Blending the intimate and the epic, the profound and the quotidian, Wuhan Diary is a remarkable record of an extraordinary time. 

Translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063052666

Fang Fang

One of contemporary China’s most celebrated writers, Fang Fang was born into an intellectual family in Nanjing in 1955, and spent most of her childhood in Wuhan, where she witnessed many of the political movements of Mao’s China, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. She graduated from Wuhan University with a degree in Chinese literature, and her novels, novellas, short stories, and essays have appeared in nearly 100 different editions. She has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Lu Xun Literary Prize, and the Chinese Literature and Communications Prize for Outstanding Writer. 

Reviews for Wuhan Diary

[zoe6r2005 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read Fang Fang’s daily writing during Wuhan’s lockdown. Because of Michael Berry’s excellent translation, Wuhan Diary has reached readers in English. Fang Fang has been a novelist for over three decades in China. She lives in Wuhan where Covid-19 started. During Wuhan’s lockdown, the author began to write what she felt and knew about the Covid situation in Wuhan and her concern about the people. She started on Jan. 25 and posted her writing online, one piece a day, and finished her 60th piece on March 23. Her writing helped people in Wuhan and also over China to learn about how the deadly virus affected people and how the lockdown impacted the people’s daily life. However, Fang Fang received attacks of cyber-nationalism. When the news about her writing would be translated and published in English, she was called a traitor; the translator also went through that ridiculous online backlash. I admire Fang Fang’s conscience and brevity and Berry’s great sense of humanity.