Wuhan: One year after the pandemic began

Few want to remember lockdown, death, despair

WUHAN, China — If it weren’t for the face masks, one would never guess that a pandemic had started here.

Jianghan Street, a famous pedestrian shopping avenue lined with colonial buildings, was bursting with Chinese New Year cheer. Red lanterns hung from street lamps, storefronts displayed holiday sales, families snacked on hawthorn candy skewers and bought clothes and gifts for the season.

One year ago, these streets were a barren landscape of fear. Wuhan’s residents shrank indoors, forbidden to leave, as a virus killed thousands. Hospitals were overwhelmed, patients struggling to breathe in waiting rooms and parking lots, while relatives cried for help on the internet and through government hotlines that were often impossible to reach.

Few in Wuhan — a factory city on the Yangtze River — want to remember that time. Similar scenes have replayed across the world as COVID-19 spreads, killing more than 2.3 million. But here where the pandemic began, life has returned to familiar rhythms. Fewer than 10 infections have been reported since April. Beijing has turned Wuhan into a symbol of its victory over coronavirus, arresting and silencing those who question its narrative and blame the government for mishandling the initial outbreak.

So much on the surface suggests the city has healed: Two young women sat on the sidewalk, chatting about boyfriend problems. An old man in an orange coat and white beret nudged his wife’s wheelchair into the sun, offering his arm to her as she gazed at the laughing crowds. But a sense of disquiet lingers beneath.

“It’s like we’ve all taken an anesthetic,” said Mary Xu, 56, a therapist in Wuhan. “People don’t want to face it. They are numb and avoidant.”

No one around her wanted to talk about the anniversary of Wuhan’s lockdown, she said. Whenever it came up in conversation, someone would quickly change the subject, sometimes proposing a toast: “Cheers! We’re still alive!”

“People have built up a shell to protect themselves,” Xu said.

She has counseled many patients still racked with guilt and grief, especially those who lost loved ones in Wuhan’s early lockdown days. A shortage of tests and hospital beds meant many died without confirmation of whether they had COVID-19.

One woman’s mother and husband died within days of each other. A wife had panicked when her husband was quarantined. She threw away everything he had touched at home. Sitting alone, she felt unable to breathe, afraid of dying with no one knowing. Xu counseled her over the phone.

Another woman had spent days begging for an ambulance — at that time private cars were also barred from Wuhan’s streets — for her father, but once it came, she could not get him a hospital bed. She took him home, where he lay on the first floor because she didn’t have the strength to carry him up the stairs.

“He passed away there in front of her. She was making congee for him,” Xu said.

To ease such trauma may take years. It is easier for many of Wuhan’s residents to block memories of the darkest days. There is also a shortage of good psychologists, Xu said. Many are too quick to diagnose problems rather than explore the anger, sorrow and fear patients feel. Shame is prevalent.

“There is a kind of stigma,” she said. Even she felt embarrassed asking relatives who’d lost family members last year how they were doing. Those who had been infected with the virus and survived did not talk about it. “It’s a feeling of guilt, and the fear that people will shun you,” Xu said. There are also political reasons to forget. “Chinese people have always been living through crises. Why should they react any differently this time?” asked Ai Xiaoming, a prominent retired professor of literature and women’s studies and a documentary filmmaker in Wuhan. Her documentaries often cover censored social issues including “reeducation through labor” camps and village uprisings against corrupt party officials.

Time and again, China’s laobaixing, the common folk, survive tragedy caused by government irresponsibility and tell themselves just to be thankful they are alive, Ai said.

“This is a remnant of the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine,” she said, referring to Mao Zedong-era social upheaval and mass starvation that killed tens of millions in the 1960s and ’70s. Many older Chinese people contrasted today’s wealth and stability with the cannibalism that became common during the famine, and felt grateful for where they were.

Others want the government to be held accountable for not reacting quickly enough to contain the virus in the early days, she said, but dare not demand it: “The cost is too high.”

Ai has struggled with how much to say to journalists. “Everyone is taking a risk to speak, and then you can’t say all that you want to say. Is that how an intellectual should behave?” she asked. “I am ashamed.”

One of the first Wuhan residents to post videos from its hospitals revealing the scale of the outbreak was Fang Bin, who spoke with the Times after an initial arrest on Feb. 4, 2020, then was reportedly arrested again five days later and has been missing ever since.