THE WUHAN DIARY

On January 25, 2020, the writer Fang Fang began publishing an online blog documenting life in Wuhan during the height of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Her short essays are written each night and published the following morning, reflecting on various aspects of daily life under quarantine, online discourse about the virus, stories about how friends and family are coping with the tragedy, and the political response within China.

Wuhan Diary (Also referred to as Diary from a Quarantined City, or Fengcheng riji) collects Fang Fang's writings on the COVID-19 outbreak, which have become one of the most important sources for insight into how the impact of the virus has reverberated through various aspects of Chinese society. Originally posted on Fang Fang's Sina Weibo and Wechat accounts, each entry is forwarded by an army of readers and most of the entries have in excess of 10,000,000 readers. Her diary is also gaining widespread coverage in the media, her writings have been one of the most trending items on Chinese-language social media since she began the diary, users have produced audio-book style videos of many of the entries and posted them online, and every mainstream western media outlets have begun to take notice of Fang Fang's impact.

Fang Fang is the pen name for Wang Fang, one of contemporary China's most celebrated writers. Born into an intellectual family in Nanjing in 1955, Fang Fang spent most of her childhood in Wuhan, where she witnessed many of the political movements of Mao's China, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Fang Fang began writing poetry in 1975 and was recognized with numerous prizes early in her career. She graduated from Wuhan University with a degree in Chinese literature in 1982, the same year her first novel was published. Over the course of the next 35 years, she has remained one of China's most prolific writers. Her novels, novellas, short stories, and essays have appeared in nearly 100 different editions, including translations into English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, and Japanese.

She is currently a writer with the Hubei Province Institute of Literature, Director of the Contemporary Chinese Fiction Research Center at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Director of the Hubei Province Writer's Association. Her novellas Scenery and The Broken Zither were awarded prizes for Best Chinese Novella and she has been the recipient of numerous other honors, including the Lu Xun Literary Prize, and the Chinese Literature and Communications Prize for Outstanding Writer. Her works in English include Three Novellas by Fang Fang: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers V (Various translators, Panda Books, 1996), Children of the Bitter River: A Novel. (Tr. Herbert Batt. Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge Books, 2007), and Walls of Wuchang (Tr.by Olivia Milburn, ACA Publishing, forthcoming) Although she is celebrated in China alongside other contemporary writers of her generation, such as Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, her work has not been largely underrepresented in English translation, with many of her major novels still unavailable in English translation. Moreover, in recent years Fang Fang's work exploring the first decades of communist rule in China has been targeted by government censors for addressing "politically sensitive content."
Generally considered her most important novel of the past 20 years and a landmark work in contemporary Chinese fiction, A Soft Burial has faced a particularly precarious fate in China. The novel was originally published to great critical acclaim and accolades in 2016 by the People's Literature Publishing House, however, not long after publication the book became the target of political criticism. In May of 2017 Soft Burial was banned in China and all reviews and mention of the novel was swiped from the internet within the People's Republic of China.