Review of Fang Fang (2020). Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City . Trans. M. Berry
- PDF / 215,374 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 142 Views
Review of Fang Fang (2020). Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Trans. M. Berry New York: HarperCollins. 377 pp. ISBN 9780063052659 (E-Book) Petar Jandrić 1,2 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Wuhan Diary . Covid-19 . China . Quarantine . Lockdown . Diary
‘Wuhan Diary is a knife handed over to foreigners and a bullet shooting at Chinese.’ (Davidson 2020)
A Bestseller Is Born On 25 January 2020, day one of the Lunar New Year and two days after the city of Wuhan entered lockdown, the famous Chinese writer Fang Fang started writing her online diary in her flat not far from the local Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market identified as a possible source of Covid-19 (Maron 2020). This powerful spatio-temporal symbolic, combined with Fang’s poignant writing and her 3.8 million strong social media following at the time of publishing her first entry, has soon launched her online Wuhan diary towards huge popularity. In early April, the ‘“Fang Fang Diary” has had 380m views, 94,000 discussions, and 8,210 original posts’ on Chinese social network Weibo (Davidson 2020) and was also mirrored on numerous other places throughout the web. On 24 March, after 60 consecutive days of writing, Fang published her last entry. On 15 May, English translation of Fang’s online diary was compiled into a book and published as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (Fang 2020). Following Fang’s huge online success, the book has become a best seller in less than a month after its publication, and translations to several other languages are on their way (Siqi 2020).
* Petar Jandrić [email protected]
1
Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
2
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
When she started writing the diary, Fang did not plan to compile her online entries into a book. This lack of planning clearly shows in text’s less-than-perfect transition from short online vignettes to a 377-page volume. Furthermore, the diary has been translated in real time, and such urgency left no time for deep editing. In translator’s afterword, Michael Berry describes huge efforts needed to publish the book in English mere 3 weeks after Fang wrote her last entry in Chinese. ‘So for 46 days, from February 25 through April 10, 2020, I translated roughly 5,000 words a day (minus a week’s break to recover from illness), living amid an unfolding pandemic’ (Berry in Fang 2020: 356). Urgent publication of translation of Wuhan Diary (Fang 2020) to English and other languages is fully justified by book’s relevance for the world locked down in anti-pandemic measures. Translating the book from his home in Los Angeles, Berry writes that ‘translating a diary written one month in the past, which somehow, simultaneously, offered glimpses into our future’ (Berry in Fang 2020: 356). As the pandemic slowly spread around the globe, this insight into Wuhan’s reality has become a window into the future for the whole world (see Jandrić 2020). It also opens up a myriad of questions for Western
Data Loading...
