Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, by well-known Chinese literary writer Fang Fang, has been published by HarperNonFiction as an ebook on Friday (May 15). The audio book will be followed on May 26. Wuhan Diary has been translator is Michael Berry. The book is a compilation of the author’s diary entries and social media posts that document 60 days of lockdown during the COVID-19 epidemic.
On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, 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 neighbours and friends taken by the deadly virus.
Since 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 pandemic have later repeated. She writes in her introduction: “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.”
Wuhan Diary is to be translated into 15 languages.