The documentary maker and gender-studies scholar Ai Xiaoming went back to her hometown of Wuhan in January 2020 to spend the Lunar New Year holiday with her elderly father. During the coronavirus lockdown she posted a series of diary entries on the Matters website, in the form of audio clips, photographs, poems and prose, as well as the script for a play composed entirely of telephone messages, illustrated by a photo of high-rise apartment blocks. Here we publish an excerpt from the first entry. footnote¹

I returned to wuhan from Guangzhou on January 16th. By that time, I had heard about a viral cold—or something—but shrugged it off, thinking that it was winter after all, and no winter passes without viral colds. On the 17th, I had to find a new carer for my elderly father, because the person who had been looking after him was going back to her hometown. On the 17th and the 18th, I made several trips to the hospital to inquire about this, but didn’t notice anything unusual. Had I known the grave situation at the time, I probably wouldn’t have dared go.

On January 19th, a friend came for dinner. She told me what she had heard about the spread of pneumonia in Hankou.footnote² She showed me some pictures, saying that some medical staff had been infected, and that patients had been admitted to Intensive Care Units, where the daily cost of saving a life was very high. By then I still didn’t take it seriously. January 20th was a turning point, when all of a sudden the coronavirus took hold. Three days later, the city was locked down—three days of immense upheaval.

Traffic at Wuhan Railway Station has come to a halt. Residents are being engulfed in an avalanche of information on a daily basis. The epidemic has suddenly become frightful, shocking and confusing. Like everyone else, I rushed to the pharmacy to buy the most basic care and hygiene products for my father—cotton swabs, glycerine enema, disinfectants, rubbing alcohol and so on; prescribed medicines were still only available at the hospital. I managed to get a few bottles of disinfectant, but rubbing alcohol was only available in small bottles of 100ml. There were no 500ml bottles left. Some pharmacies had run out of masks. Those who still stocked them had raised the price from 12 to 16 yuan. Even a normal cotton mask cost 16 yuan now. Surgical masks were not available at all. I was learning that the N95 masks came in many different types.footnote³

I cleaned the house with disinfectant. With just two days to go before the Lunar New Year, it hit me that gatherings and dinner parties would no longer be possible. The rumours were beginning to sound scary. From the lockdown on the 23rd to New Year’s Day on the 25th, the year began in such a strange way that I felt disoriented. I thought about the risk I’d taken in having hired the carer from the hospital without any awareness of the epidemic—and what risks we would be running if, say, she had been infected. The whole thing was a muddle.

On January 29th, I accompanied a team of volunteers. With fifteen cars, the team delivered 6,500 sets of personal protective equipment (ppes) to 21 hospitals and institutions. There were between ten and twenty people in the coordinating group, checking updates on social media all the time, even when they were eating. One of them announced that he had just got hold of 2,000 sets of ppes: immediately they were ordered and paid for, with 80,000 yuan in donations. Volunteers on the ground in Wuhan would be responsible for receiving the ppes and getting in touch with hospitals. If the hospital were not able to send someone to collect the ppes, the volunteers would deliver them themselves.

One of the volunteers was a graduate of Fudan University, part of a chat group of over 400 Fudan graduates living in Wuhan. When they heard the news before the New Year, they decided to do something and started to contact each other. They collected donations of over 600,000 yuan; many hospitals had been appealing to the public for donations. The Fudan graduates mobilized their network of contacts to search for emergency equipment. When someone learned that a county-level non-woven fabric supplier still stocked ppes, they drove there and bought the ppes with cash before transporting them to Wuhan. Other volunteers would then send these donations to hospitals according to the requests of the donors. For example, if I were a graduate of the University of Hong Kong and I happened to know a fellow graduate who worked for a hospital that was running out of equipment, I could request that my donation be sent to that specific hospital. The volunteers on the ground would transport the equipment to the hospital.