rapidly spread there, becomes available in English on Friday as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Bits and clips of Fang Fang's writing on the situation in Wuhan made it out of China and into English as the outbreak was unfolding, but now the full account will be available in English.
Memory is central to Fang Fang's diary. So is making sense of the complete absence of things: of life as we knew it; of any and all economic activity. Like tens of millions of other readers, I read Fang Fang in the monotony of self-isolation, looking for a common understanding of how the pandemic ha
By early February, China's Internet censors were working overtime, during the height of the epidemic, to erase critical content. Fang Fang's diary thus often serves as an archive, describing videos and news items usually deleted by the time she managed to publish her daily entry. As her online diary
"You have that whole connecting universe extending from her diary entries...of course, reading it now, after the fact, is a very different experience," Berry, who is also translating Fang Fang's last novel, Soft Burial, told NPR. Still, readers in the U.S. will likely find many of her gripes about l
"Imagine this: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today's Wuhan...What would we have heard? What would we have seen?" asked writer Yan Lianke in a widely-shared online talk in late February. Memory, Yan goes on to say, is the most basic hedge against future injustice: "While memories may not give
aising questions does not make one popular in China these days. Nearly immediately after she began publishing her entries, an online army of ultra-nationalists deluged Fang Fang, indignant that in airing doubts about the superiority of China's coronavirus containment she was betraying her motherland.
One anonymous letter, allegedly written by a high school student, lambasted Fang Fang for airing China's dirty laundry out for everyone to see. "My child, I also want to tell you that when I was 16 years old, I was much worse off than you are. At that time, I had never even heard of words like 'inde
Voices like Fang Fang's who remember well the brutal decade of the Cultural Revolution, when adolescent Maoists tortured, persecuted and beat to death the politically incorrect, as well as the subsequent prosperity of economic reform and opening are increasingly rare in China. But in the context
