"Diaries in the Lockdown City"The Year in China Chen Shen (bio) The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of 2019 greatly impacted the economy, politics, education, and nearly every aspect of public and personal lives in China. As a result, in 2020, online diaries and digital autobiographical narratives with hashtags related to the pandemic were posted extensively, recording their writers' experiences and thoughts during this crisis. This was especially so during the initial phase of the pandemic, when the government called on people to stay at home, and implemented a nationwide lockdown policy for many weeks after January 23. Trapped in this unprecedented situation, overwhelmed by the grave consequences, and doubtful about an unknowable future, Chinese writers responded by producing "Diaries in the Lockdown City" (封城日记), which became a heated hashtag on Weibo, WeChat, and other social media platforms.1 Personal narratives posted by people in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, attracted special attention at that time, and long after. These diaries were often examples of what Philippe Lejeune has called the "crisis diary" (195). When personal and national suffering collide, the crisis diary can offer a space for thinking about the meaning of the present moment in the face of defeat, as the future opens up in new ways, and diarists feel they are living through history. This essay will examine several typical crisis diaries, all of which were tagged "Diaries in Wuhan Lockdown," produced during seventy-six days from January 23 to April 8, 2020. By means of multimedia formats, including online daily entries, video blogs, and other content, these diaries provided multi-perspective narratives about the pandemic, emerging from different people with different identities, such as medical workers, patients, volunteers, and local residents. Unlike the "ordinary diary," which is assumed to be more secretive and continuous, these pandemic crisis diaries were posted publicly, often in response to specific public events, and out of a specific time and space. Although many of these diarists had not been in the habit of writing diaries before, when they realized that they were in a phenomenal historical era, they began posting. Instead of following [End Page 38] the common practice of recording dates by day, month, and year, these diaries identified entries as the first, second, or third day of lockdown. While Wuhan city policy prevented the virus from spreading more widely, because the disease threatened the lives of each individual, and changed daily life entirely, great psychological stress was generated during the unprecedented quarantine, in many cases triggering strong emotional fluctuations and the desire to voice present experiences. Lejeune claims that the first function of writing a diary is to express oneself as a form of release: "to unload the weight of emotions and thoughts in putting them down on paper" (194). Many patients and their relatives wrote diaries about their suffering during the pandemic, which not only allowed them to rehearse their illness experiences and to rethink their actions and responses, but also to expel feelings of bereavement or severe depression. For example, Wuhan Girl Anian's Diary (武汉女孩阿念日记) was written by a patient, who delicately recorded how her family confronted COVID-19, how she and her grandma contracted the disease, and how they received treatment in a shelter hospital and Huoshenshan Hospital. In addition to the precious historical value of such a record of a patient's perspective during the COVID-19 pandemic, abundant emotional expressions in the diary also reflected her mental changes and the traumatic aftermath. Like most people, she and her family members in Wuhan did not take it seriously when the National Health Commission first told people to be aware of a possible pandemic of a novel pneumonia. When her grandma later had symptoms of illness and was confirmed to be infected, the girl and her parents fell into a sudden panic. She soon become the second infected case in her family, and all four members were then quarantined or received treatment in different places, as an atmosphere of fear of this dangerous disease combined with loneliness hung over the whole family. Anian gradually became calmer when she received good treatment in the shelter hospital. But when nursing her grandma...
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 2021
Hui He + 3
Open Access
