I was introduced to the narrator of this story, Zhang Wen, when I was looking for someone in Wuhan to speak to. Like many people, I was surrounded by news about Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak, but I did not personally know anyone who lived there. I felt out of touch with that place I was hearing so much about. One day, our neighborhood in Shanghai called my mother to ask where she was and if she was okay, only because she holds an ID card issued in Wuhan. That reminded me that both of my parents went to college in that city.[1] I then asked them to introduce me to their schoolmates in Wuhan who would be willing to speak to me about what was going on in their lives, and hence I came to meet Zhang Wen, a lifelong Wuhan resident. Having studied metallurgical machinery with my parents 30 years ago, he is now a steelworks design engineer.
Upon starting our conversation, Zhang Wen said, “I know why your mother picked me.” He then listed a few reasons why he was a good candidate for my interview, including the fact that he is logical and rational, and he speaks better Mandarin than most of their Wuhan schoolmates. “Maybe I’m just boasting,” he added, in his Wuhan-accented Mandarin.
We spoke on March 15, when his wife, a doctor who works in an intensive care unit (ICU), was still living away from home. He had been quarantined with his 15-year-old daughter for over 50 days, relying on barely enough food in the first weeks of the outbreak, during the Lunar New Year. Two weeks after our conversation, as Wuhan transferred the remaining coronavirus patients to the military-operated hospitals, his wife returned home and their life gradually returned to normal.
Zhang Wen’s perspective on what happened in Wuhan is probably not the most unique; the news has kept us informed on the difficulty that Wuhan residents went through. But there was something convincing about the way he told the story, maybe exactly because of its lack of uniqueness: his voice represents the voice of an ordinary Chinese citizen of his generation, who has developed some sort of resilience through difficult times, and the voice of an ordinary son, husband, and father, who shows his resilience by protecting his family through those times.
As someone born in the ’90s who grew up in a largely peaceful society and is much less concerned about material needs, I could not completely relate to him. But I am also a Chinese who knows too well the taste of egg fried rice and the significance of food during the Lunar New Year. For this reason, I wrote down his story.
*
My wife is a doctor. We heard the news at the end of December that SARS was coming back. Now we know that this was not accurate — it was not SARS, but a coronavirus similar to SARS.
My wife has a chat group with her college friends, who are all medical workers. They warned themselves about this, but not everyone took it seriously. We did take it seriously. My wife told me not to go out, not to gather with people. She also told me not to spread the information — weren’t the whistleblowers punished later? For days, I said nothing in the office.
I bought masks; smog is common in the winter. But my wife saw them and said that they were industrial masks, not the right kind. She then spent 20 yuan getting a box of surgical masks online, which would now cost 100 yuan. No one was buying them back then.
You know, Wuhan is very big. It has two rivers, the Yangtze and the Han. The Yangtze splits the city into north and south, and the Han splits the north into east and west, so we have Hankou and Hanyang in the north and Wuchang in the south. The rivers can run very wide, as wide as 1 kilometer in the summer.
The first cases were found in Hankou, near the South China Seafood Wholesale Market. That was far in physical distance, about 20 kilometers from where we live in Wuchang and 30-40 kilometers from where I work. There was even a joke going around then, “Laowai[2]watch the virus spread in China, China watches the virus spread in Hubei, Hubei watches the virus spread in Wuhan, and Wuhan watches the virus spread in Hankou.” We were not in the affected area. It was none of our business.
After all, the government had spoken: The virus was preventable and controllable, and it was not transmitted between people.
Our Lunar New Year plan was to go to Guangzhou. My parents were staying there with my brother. January 23rd was New Year’s Eve. Our train was on the 22nd. We had bought the tickets and were clearing out the fridge, ready to leave in just a few days.
*
The sudden change came on January 20th, when Zhong Nanshan[3] confirmed in his interview: Yes, there is human-to-human transmission.
In fact, back on the 18th or 19th, my wife’s college friends already told us that medical workers in several Wuhan hospitals were infected; that was a clear sign of human-to-human transmission.
I had been swimming every day for six years, until January 18th. On the 19th I still thought about going, but the weather suddenly changed. I was hesitating, and my wife said, “Better not go. The situation is not great.” So I gave up on swimming. Since then, I have not swum again.
My break would start on the 22nd. On the 21st, I left work early to buy groceries — we had nothing at home for the holiday. My wife works in the ICU. One of her colleagues had gotten a fever after treating eight patients in a day. She sensed then that we would not be able to leave.
What should I buy? The supermarket was offering some discounts, so I bought two of each kind of food. I bought 30 eggs. Actually, we still had some eggs left at home, and we don’t usually keep more than 30 eggs — we can easily buy more. But the egg seller said, “These are good eggs. Just get a box.” Is it necessary? I thought. But I bought them in the end. I also bought some meat for the dinner on New Year’s Eve. Just this much food, I ate for the following 10 days.
The same day, my wife decided not to come home after work. She went to stay at my parents’ place, just a few blocks away. But since January 21st, she has not stepped back in her own apartment once. Whatever she needed I brought to her. There was no food left at my parents’ except some sesame oil and a bit of white rice.
I cancelled our tickets on the 21st. I thought about cancelling them while cooking. By 6:03pm I had cancelled all three tickets. Later I learned that all the tickets cancelled after 6:05pm were fully refunded, but my cancellation was completed by 6:03pm and was charged 10%.[4] What bad luck! I almost made a complaint, but then I thought, just forget it, the country had enough of a mess.
Wuhan’s system was falling apart. When the lockdown on the 23rd was declared, three of my colleagues from other provinces were still around. One of them got up at 5 that morning. He took a shower, saw the news, and immediately notified the other two. He then fled the city. Before 10am Wuhan was still open. There was a traffic jam all the way — everyone in Wuhan was fleeing.
My wife had also suggested that I go to Guangzhou with our daughter. “You two leave,” she said. “Leave in a car.” But would it be right to let her stay here by herself? A family shouldn’t split up like this. And what if my daughter and I were carriers with no symptoms? Wouldn’t that pose a threat to my elderly parents? In the end, I decided to stay.
Thinking back now, that decision was completely right. Everyone who left Wuhan met plenty of trouble. They had nowhere to stay and nothing to eat. They were labeled and discriminated against, even those who just had Wuhan’s ID numbers. Later the government forced some hotels to accept people from Wuhan. But even then, what did they eat for so long? How did they feel? After all, they were floating around, with no home.
*
After I decided to stay in Wuhan, a very practical problem came up — we were running out of food. How long could the things I bought for my daughter and me last? I had no idea. I could no longer think for my wife. She ate on her own.
My wife just ate rice porridge every day, three times a day. There were some frozen dumplings and glutinous rice balls left in the fridge, but mostly she lived on porridge for the first 10 days. Her hospital gave them an energy pack, similar to hardtack. She ate that when she felt hungry.
As for me, I put a lot of thought into what to eat with my daughter. We only had so much food. I had to make the very best of it. For the main meals, we couldn’t have more than two dishes. Many people started to have two meals a day — no breakfast, lunch at 10am, and dinner at 4pm. What I often ate with my daughter was a sausage plus something else for lunch and egg fried rice for dinner. Our dinner on New Year’s Eve[5] was egg fried rice. Just egg fried rice. We couldn’t eat more. We could eat more today, but what would we eat tomorrow?
At first I thought we only needed to survive the seven-day holiday, but then the holiday was extended, and we ate egg fried rice for 10 days.
I didn’t dare go to the supermarket. There were constantly people getting infected there. My wife said, “Rather eat plain rice than go to the supermarket.”
Now that I think about it, the 30 eggs I bought gave me tremendous support! Thirty eggs! I needed to take care of my daughter’s diet. Meat was limited, so eggs were the most nutritious food we had. I needed to make sure that she had enough eggs to eat. Those 30 eggs sustained us for many days.
As the situation worsened, people donated food and medical supplies to the hospitals. My wife also received some at her hospital. On the fourth or fifth day of the New Year, she left some food near home and I went to pick it up. Other than that, there was nothing. The community staff had fallen into a panic and all deliveries had stopped. The whole society was in chaos.
The only thought I had then was: endure, endure, endure. As long as there was white rice, I would not go out.
*
Since January 21st, except for one trip to the rooftop, my daughter has not left the apartment. Stuck in a small space, she constantly enters this door and exits that door — the bedroom door, the balcony door, the kitchen door, the bathroom door — just coming in and out of these few doors.
I tried to play with her. We played chess and Connect Five. We played badminton and ping pong in the living room. We even fought with each other and I played her punching bag. That was how we had some fun.
Otherwise it was too depressing. Every day thousands of people were infected and hundreds of people died. We saw news like this all day long.
The period during the Lunar New Year was the most difficult. There was a whole week in which I did not go out. I was afraid to go out, very afraid. But I could not be afraid. It wouldn’t be good to be afraid in front of my daughter. I had to let her know that we needed to be mentally strong, and we needed to turn this crisis into an experience, so that when she meets similar situations in the future, she will remember how she spent this Lunar New Year with her father.
At the peak of the outbreak, there were no hospital beds available in Wuhan. They reported more than 2,000 deaths in the hospitals, but many people died at home. Getting a hospital bed was like getting on a lifeboat, but even if you managed to get on it, you wouldn’t necessarily get off it alive. Everyone was terrified, seeing whole families of four or five dying, just among their relatives and friends. Such tragedies were endless in the month of February.
Everyone who lived through the outbreak must have had strong mental strength and survival skills. That’s my conclusion.
Now the virus is contained, but we are just starting to face other problems: patients with chronic diseases not getting treated, people unable to go out to work, the economy suffering… This entire year will be difficult for us.
I just want to live well the rest of my life. There aren’t so many peaceful times. Every period has its own challenges. But once a challenge comes, there is no way out. The only way out is to turn bad into good. When I am already starving, I can only think about how to starve a little less. Instead of filling my stomach today and starving it tomorrow, I would rather starve it a little bit every day. Then life might be better in the end. Then we can find an optimal solution where there is no solution. To live on is the optimal solution. How to live on? We have to think: I could eat 100 grams of rice, but if I just eat 60 grams, don’t I then have 40 grams more of life to live?
[1] The government just began implementing the ID system while they were in college. Thus, despite coming from other parts of the country, they received their ID cards in Wuhan.
[2] Slang for “foreigners.”
[3] Chinese pulmonologist, known for his expertise in respiratory diseases including SARS and COVID-19.
[4] Starting on Jan. 21, 2020, the state railway company offered free cancellations for Wuhan bookings to encourage people to stay home.
[5] The most important meal of the year for many Chinese, where families typically reunite and share an extravagant amount of food to celebrate the Lunar New Year.