Peter
McMillan teaches English part-time and writes part-time.
Several books (fiction and non-fiction) published under
his name and a pen name (Adam Mac) are licensed under the
Creative Commons and available for free download as PDF
books.
”It
was like Chernobyl,” says Zhang Zhan. “The whole
city was deserted. Not a single person in sight. No vehicles.
The skyscrapers looked like giant monsters silently observing
me. It felt like all that was left on earth was just me and
those monsters.” [on arriving in Wuhan from Shanghai
on February 1, 2020]
Murong
Xuecun's Deadly Quiet City relates true accounts
of several Wuhan residents during the coronavirus outbreak
in early 2020. The stories are based on interviews mostly
conducted in his hotel room. On being interviewed, Yang Min,
the despondent mother whose only child died alone in a Wuhan
hospital, asks instinctively, "Is this room bugged?"
Murong, of course, could not be certain at the time, but he
did send backups of his interviews to a trusted friend abroad
after each session and assured anonymity to the interviewees.
(The names used in the book are fictitious, and incidentally,
Murong Xuecun is the pen name of Hao Qun.) Obviously, the
room was not bugged or the book would never have been published.
Anticipating the worst, Murong abruptly caught a plane to
London in August 2021 before the book was published. It was
first published in Australia, Murong's country of exile, in
2022.
Deadly
Quiet City follows the tradition of Chinese dissident literature
wherein the author collects first-hand accounts of living
in contemporary China from ordinary Chinese people. A similar
approach was used by the exiled author, Liao Yiwu—referred
to as 'China's Solzhenitsyn'—in recording the oral histories
of China, including the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, which is
the subject of his book, Bullets and Opium: Real-Life
Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre
published in English in 2019 and banned in China.
Murong
chooses the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak because it too represents
a pivotal point in modern China's history and fills a gap
left open by official histories. Like Liao, Murong relates
a different kind of history—an oral history from "the
people whose voices were drowned out by the deafening noise
pumped out by China’s vast propaganda machine . . .
voices of people who were unable or too scared to speak out."
For Murong, "[h]erein lies the significance of this book."
Nonetheless,
the interview material gathered and preserved by Murong furnishes
the evidence for much broader questions about the Chinese
Communist Party and its government, which Murong hopes "will
inspire deep reflection." In the 2023 Preface to the
US edition of the book, Murong writes what—if he were
still in China—would get him more than just 'an invitation
to tea' by the guobao (secret police):
We should not forget it was the Chinese government’s
deliberate cover-up and misleading information that caused
an epidemic in Wuhan to spread rapidly around the world.
Nor should we forget that the same government’s
refusal to openly investigate the origins of the virus
caused its provenance to become an unsolvable mystery.
To this day, we do not know how it started and how it
spread to humans. And we may never know.
After
all this, how does the world see this dishonest and irresponsible
government? When the Chinese government next ratifies a treaty
or signs an agreement, will it fulfill its obligations? Are
the Chinese government’s promises believable? If there
is another disaster like COVID-19, will the Chinese government
behave honestly and responsibly?
For
those outside China who believe that Xi Jinpeng's 'Zero Covid'
policy was successful, even if draconian, Murong counters
with the following Buddhist parable:
A
barbaric doctor binds a hunchback between two planks,
then jumps hard on the planks. The patient’s plaintive
wails continue until he expires. When the family seeks
out the doctor, he argues matter-of-factly: ‘He
came for treatment of his hunchback, and I cured his hunchback.’
In
this collection of stories, Murong's 'hunchbacks' are Lin
Qingchuan, a Wuhan doctor; Jin Feng, a hospital cleaner, who
as a young girl had already gotten to know hardship during
Chairman Mao's 'Great Famine' of 1959-1961; Li, a 'black taxi'
motorcycle driver with a checkered past; Liu Xiaoxiao, a substitute
teacher who after many misadventures, including working for
the Red Cross (dubbed the 'Black Cross Society' by social
media), smuggles his disabled father into a locked-down Wuhan
to get him medical help; Zhang Zhan, a Shanghai lawyer turned
dissident citizen journalist who is described as a persevering
irritant to the authorities in the manner of an idealistic
Don Quixote; Li Xuewen, a critic of the government who escapes
Wuhan but not the guobao; Wang Gangcheng, a middle
class conformist whose quest to get the elusive coronavirus
test results leads him to No. 7 Hospital where he witnesses
the bizarre scene of doctors signing death certificates on
one side of the corridor as young nurses on the other side
are making a Douyin video; and Yang Min, a grieving mother
desperate for a 'just explanation' from a Party and government
she has trusted implicitly all her life. In what follows,
three of the stories will be fleshed out a bit more.
First,
there is Lin Qingchuan, a doctor with 20 years of experience,
who works in a small community hospital in Wuhan but in early
February 2020 is transferred to a busy isolation centre ("a
concentration camp" in Gangcheng's words ) where the
overflow of patients from the hospitals stay until a bed comes
free. Lin's role as a physician is severely restricted by
lack of medicine and orders not to treat patients—treatment
was deferred until a patient is admitted to a hospital.
Murong
contends that the official coronavirus statistics are manipulated
as part of China's public relations strategy.
The
newspapers are energetically praising China’s victory
in the antivirus battle. According to the official narrative,
from 18 March there are zero new cases (except for three days,
each with one confirmed case), and people are eagerly waiting
for the lockdown to be lifted. The government wants to fulfill
people’s expectations and make the numbers look good.
Lin
explains how this works at his isolation station. "They
wanted us to kick patients out of the isolation station as
soon as possible, the more the better," says Lin, but
he refuses to sign off on the transfers. The government assigns
a two-person team to evaluate the cases, and they determine
that 40 patients can be released. But that isn't enough for
the government reports, so another expert team arrives and
sends home 20 more patients. Even that is insufficient. Lin
is off duty for two days—he works 24-hour shifts—and
when he returns he finds the isolation centre empty. Voilà!
No more overflow of coronavirus patients in the medical system.
Second
is Li for whom no given name is provided. Li is a picaresque
character who nevertheless compels admiration in the story
related by Murong. For 20 years leading up to the early 2010s,
"Li gambled heavily, even visiting Macau, where he boozed,
gambled and did some things he’d prefer not to talk
about. He blew several million RMB [yuan]." His demolition
business failed. Juggling credit cards and gambling just increased
his debt. Too old to do manual labour any longer he bought
a used electric motorcycle and set up an illegal motorcycle
taxi service.
Li
tells the story of a destitute deaf mute who is trying to
catch a train out of Wuhan to attend his mother's funeral.
The man doesn't have the proper certificate so he is not even
allowed in the train station. In attempting to obtain a certificate,
he is passed along from the Civil Affairs Bureau to the Labour
Bureau and then to his work unit which is outside Wuhan and
therefore inaccessible without a certificate. Li takes pity
on the man and arranges for him to be smuggled out of Wuhan
at no charge. In the interview, Murong mentions that this
sounds like Kafka's The Castle, to which Li responds,
not having read Kafka, that "If there had been a black
motorcycle taxi in the story every problem would have been
solved."
Asked
about his plans after the pandemic ends, Li answers "At
my age, I won’t be able to find other work. I’ll
just keep on riding a motorcycle taxi until I can’t.
Then I’ll do whatever I can." When Murong asks,
"What then?" Li laughs pulls down the brim of his
hat and says "There is no then."
Third
is Yang Min. She is the mother of Tian Yuxi, who is dying
from coronavirus complications as she recovers from what should
have been a routine breast tumour operation followed by chemotherapy.
The day after a chemotherapy session, Yuxi develops a high
fever. It is relevant to bear in mind that this was happening
just days ahead of the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year—the
most important holiday in China.
[Yang
Min] does not know that she and her daughter are in the eye
of a raging tempest. In that perilous time, the Wuhan Union
Hospital is one of the most dangerous places in China. Concerned
to avoid panic, the government has forbidden doctors and nurses
from wearing personal protective equipment and prohibits them
even more strictly from saying anything about the virus. On
that same day, 19 January, an official confirms at a press
conference that the novel coronavirus is “not highly
transmissible.” “The risk is low,” he says.
“It’s preventable and controllable.”
Yang
Min is told to take her daughter to a specialist fever clinic,
but the Red Cross Hospital she goes to next is "crammed
with patients and exhausted doctors and nurses" and is
almost out of medicine and supplies, so she has to keep searching.
Finally, Yang Min brings her daughter to Jinyintan Hospital,
but she has to leave Yuxi alone in the hospital, because the
staff tell her that the hospital is a "disaster zone"
and relatives are not allowed to stay with their loved ones.
Meanwhile, "On TV, the [New Year's] gala program reaches
a climax. ‘Shout it, shout it loudly,’ sings Jackie
Chan on the glittering stage. ‘Does my country look
sick?’" At this point in the narrative, Murong
interjects that "Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital might be the
most deadly place in the world . . . Chinese media call it
‘ground zero of ground zero.'"
Yuxi
does not survive and to compound the misery, Yang Min is not
told for many days. She experiences a reverse epiphany, which
makes her question her lifetime fidelity.
Gradually
she sees through words like ‘wise,’ ‘great’
and ‘correct,’ as if awakening from a dream. ’I
too am Chinese. I have been obeying the Party, I have been
obeying the government, I followed your policies to have only
one daughter, but due to your concealment of the truth, my
daughter died in vain. What is to become of me in later life?
Is my life worth nothing? Only later did I know that it was
all false.’
All
Yang Min is left with are her memories one of which is a conversation
about Yuxi's career choice. Yuxi had studied bioengineering
and works in the Shenzen Economic Zone, outside Hong Kong.
Yang Min didn't approve, but Yuxi tried to console her by
saying, "‘Mummy, I want to make a lot of money
so that when you get sick, I won’t have to sit crying
outside the operating theatre.’"
And
so ends Murong's collection of Wuhan stories with the heart-wrenching
story of a mother and her only child. "‘She was
the hope of the first half of my life, my sustenance for the
second half of my life, she was my life.’"
