As the old Chinese proverb says, it takes coincidence to make a story. Earlier in the day, on the subway train, he had thought of Pang, and of his trip to the Wuhan literature forum. Pang would not have called for a ‘no-news-is-good-news’ chit-chat, he assumed.

  More likely, Pang’s message could be read as a cue for him: To call him back on this new number for secrecy’s sake. Chen, too, should therefore use a phone registered under the name of somebody else. He took out a different phone, a deep-green phone he used for confidential communication among his small circle of trusted friends. The phone held a new SIM card recently secured for him by Peiqin, wife of his long-time partner Detective Yu in the Shanghai Police Bureau.

  It was government policy that people had to purchase SIM cards under their own names, with their identification checked and double-checked. This meant a phone call could be easily traced to the caller. And tapped as well. The same was true for posts or comments written online. Much more so with the politically sensitive names on the CCP’s blacklist. He was pretty sure that his name was placed on such a list. The noose of government surveillance and suppression had been increasingly tightening. The trouble from a phone call could not afford to be overlooked. Whistling like one who’s lost his way in the dark woods, Chen dialed out from his green phone.

  Pang picked it up on the first ring and, as always, came straight to the point.

  ‘Things in Wuhan are far more horrible than has been reported in the official newspapers. We’ve been locked up in our subdivision for weeks. Visitors cannot come in, and we cannot get out. Only once a week is one member of a family allowed to step out to a designated building within the subdivision, where they may shop for the necessary food and groceries in limited supply – and that comes with an exorbitant price tag.’

  ‘Yes, we’re in a sort of lockdown, too,’ Chen replied, ‘but I can still get out of the guarded, surveillance-camera-installed subdivision entrance. Things in Wuhan must be far worse than in Shanghai.’

  ‘Many families have had their doors nailed and sealed shut under an official notice because they are possible Covid positives or their close contacts in the building are. There’s no escape. The authorities are now desperately trying to crack down on the virus outbreak, but they should have informed people much earlier about how serious Covid can be. Instead, they tried with all their might to cover the facts up. For days, the official newspaper kept saying that the virus is controllable and not transmittable from human to human. Why? It’s all for the appearance of social stability.’

  It was just like Pang to keep gushing on and on, Chen knew, but he thought he detected a different, desperate note in Pang’s agitated narration.

  ‘People are being driven crazy by the insane lockdown. At the very beginning, quarantine and lockdown might have been necessary, but why is it continuing now that the number of deaths caused by collateral damage is surpassing the number of deaths from the virus itself?

  ‘My next-door neighbor Zhang, who worked in the Wuhan wet market, very close to the Wuhan virus lab, was one of the nameless victims in the first wave of the pandemic. She had never been admitted into any hospital, and she died without having been properly tested, diagnosed, and treated. Her body was not even cold, yet the government had already begun demanding that the media sing the praises of the victories of China’s zero-Covid policy.

  ‘I got into trouble initially because I forwarded a post that raised the issue of the virus lab being located so close to the wet market that witnessed the first Covid case in Wuhan. The post wanted the government to probe the possible connection between the two. What that could have meant to the Party authorities, you may easily imagine.

  ‘And I got into further trouble because of my support of Doctor Wen. As a writer who’s a Party member, I am supposed to speak in tune with the Party authorities all the time. Instead of writing anything in accordance with the CCP propaganda, however, I put a like emoji on a courageous post about Doctor Wen. The next morning, the Party Secretary of the Wuhan Writers’ Association asked me to have a cup of tea in his office. It wasn’t even my own post, remember! You know what a cup of tea means in today’s China, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Chen said.

  ‘Back to Doctor Wen. He’s a young man in his early thirties who works at Wuhan Central Hospital, and he’s a netizen fond of posting humorous, self-satirical things, like how eating a chicken steak makes him feel so blessed, or joking that his occasional silence in cyberspace means he’s venturing out to save the real world. At the beginning of the year, he sent a message to his WeChat friend group: “A number of patients seemingly infected with a SARS-like virus are reported in the hospital. Highly infectious. Take good care of yourself. Keep social distance.”

  ‘The message spread out among his friends, one of whom took a screenshot of it and put it on WeChat for his own friends. It took the Netcops only an hour to trace it to Doctor Wen. It’s another irony that the date of the WeChat post coincided with the opening session of the Conference of Wuhan People’s Congress, and the news of a suspicious virus outbreak could have thrown people into a panic. In other words, it would disrupt the regime’s political stability. So Doctor Wen was immediately called out to the police bureau, where he was reprimanded and forced to sign a confession saying that he repented from the bottom of his heart for spreading untrue information online, and that he pledged that he would never make the same mistake again. He was confounded, humiliated, but he knew he would never be able to get out without signing the document detailing his guilt. He considered the fact that so many patients were waiting for him at the hospital, and he signed the statement knowing it would remain forever a political black mark on his archive record.

  ‘Netizens then began whispering online,’ Pang said at the conclusion of his story, ‘that Doctor Wen, too, got infected while working under pressure – which has damaged his immune system, you know.’

  ‘What a shame!’

  ‘I was so upset. I started working on a series of WeChat posts about the things that were happening in Wuhan. It’s nothing but snapshots of the suffering that Wuhan people are experiencing, written in sequence. I’m not up to the task of writing about the tragedy with an omniscient perspective, but as one of the Wuhan residents being tightly locked in, I could record the catastrophic collateral damage from inside the city, first-hand and at a closer range.

  ‘I started with a piece about my next-door neighbor Fang. A one-hundred-percent true story. Fang was a successful screenwriter. His father got sick, coughing non-stop and with a high fever, but the old man was turned away from the hospital because he had not had a Covid test done within the previous twenty-four hours. This was demanded by the zero-Covid policy formulated by the CCP. Back home, with just some over-the-counter pills to reduce his fever, his father soon infected his mother.

  ‘While the two old people were dying at home, Fang himself started to exhibit similar Covid symptoms. Like them, he could not get into the hospital for the same reasons. His pregnant wife was away, having a meeting in another city, and the only thing he could do was to forbid her from hurrying back home. The old couple died in the chilly night. He could feel that the curtain would soon fall on him, too, so he wrote something like a short script, in which he told the tragedy of his family, breathing his last breath …’

  ‘It’s a meaningful job you’ve been doing, compiling these real-life details,’ Chen said. ‘One of these days, eventually, the pandemic will be over, but the suffering of the people should never be forgotten.’

  ‘But the government and the government-paid fifty-cent “writers” are so furious with my posts that they are attacking and threatening me like mad dogs, accusing me of splashing dirty water on the immaculate image of the CCP government during the Covid outbreak, and of writing things full of negative energy.’

  That was true. Another of the newly minted terms, the phrase ‘negative energy’ had been gaining circulation fast in the Chinese political discourse. Whatever you do or say or write, in the light of the People’s Daily, carries a sort of energy. Whatever sings the praises of the CCP, or contributes to political stability under the CCP, would be termed as positive … and otherwise, negative.

  In other words, any writing about the seamy side of Chinese society was considered to contain negative energy. A piece about people suffering from the Covid epidemic in Wuhan would definitely fall into that category …

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that they are attacking you like that, Pang,’ Chen said.

  ‘It’s nothing. If only …’ Pang said, breaking down, ‘if only it could reach more people.’

  ‘So it’s about what you have seen, heard, and done in your neighborhood? Something like a diary about life in the Covid days?’

  ‘Not just in my neighborhood, and not exactly like a personal diary. Anyway, I put several pieces like that online, but most of them got blocked immediately. It won’t be published here; I should have known better. Not unless it was in another language … for example, translated into English or Italian—’

  Could that be a subtle hint to him? Chen had his English-language poetry translations published outside of China; Pang knew that only too well.

  ‘It’s horrible!’ Chen said, changing the topic instead of responding further. He had once been so viciously bitten by a snake that he would be scared of something coiled up like one forever. ‘If there is anything I can do for you, let me know, Pang. I’ll have some face masks and medical gloves shipped to you. I may still have some left at home.’

  ‘The government should have told people the truth much earlier,’ Pang went on, without responding to Chen’s offer. ‘But the façade of everything being fine and stable in China has to be maintained at whatever cost— Oh sorry, I have to accept another phone call, Chen. But I’ll send you some sample posts from what I’ve tentatively titled “The Wuhan File.”’

  Putting down the phone, Chen remained standing by the window, taking out a cigarette absentmindedly but putting it back unlit. Another ambulance siren could be heard piercing the somber sky in the distance. Worrying about Pang, he could not help recalling some of the still-fresh, vivid details of his visit to Wuhan – just two months ago.

  Wuhan had been a large city of political and cultural significance in history – as early as the Three Kingdoms period of the first century – long before Shanghai had been ever mentioned in books. But what was more important to him, it was a city much celebrated in classical Chinese poetry, and when Pang had sent him an invitation on behalf of the Wuhan Writers’ Association, he’d jumped at the opportunity.

  He had met Pang, and had become friends with him, during earlier events arranged by the Chinese Writers’ Association. Especially memorable was a five-day ‘pen meeting’ by the Thousand Island Lake. It was an all-inclusive vacation for Shanghai and Wuhan writers who, like Chen and Pang, had been sponsored by the Chinese Writers’ Association. Chan and Pang stayed in the same hotel by the large lake, talking, writing, sharing, and discussing their poems and stories.

  At the hotel dining table, Chen raved about the well-known local lake fish-head pot they’d just had, but Pang contended that the Wuchang fish in Wuhan from the Yangtze River tasted far better.

  ‘Chairman Mao once wrote a couple of lines about Wuhan fish: “I’ve just drunk the water of the Yangtze River, and now I’m tasting Wuchang fish.” It’s unbelievably delicious, Chen. You are not a qualified gourmet without having tasted it.’

  ‘Well, there was a popular saying among the people during the Three-Kingdom period: “We would rather drink the Yangtze water, but not eat the Wuchang fish.” It’s because Emperor Wu wanted to move to the new capital of Wuhan, while the people complained and protested. Mao wrote his poem to portray himself as a greater emperor than Emperor Wu.’

  ‘Having said all that,’ Pang replied, ‘Wuchang fish is fabulous. For an impossible gourmet like you, you don’t have to be like Mao, but you will like the fish. So you have to come to Wuhan one day,’ Pang had said, grinning from ear to ear.

  In retrospect, he perhaps remembered that particular talk more because Pang had mentioned Mao with a touch of sarcasm. As the founder of the CCP, Mao remained untouchable after his death. So Pang could have been a different duck like him within the Party system.

  It was apparent that Pang, too, had remembered their talk by the lake. That’s why he’d invited Chen to the Wuhan literature conference, even though he could have heard something of Chen’s trouble in Shanghai. It was a conference sponsored and funded by the Party government with a general theme of how to tell China’s story to the world. Anything related to the theme was politically correct. In the light of his published translations of classical Chinese poetry, Chen had been a perfect candidate for the conference.

  Pang proved to be a gracious and thoughtful host. With generous funding for ‘big propaganda,’ Chen was driven around to a considerable number of Wuhan tourist attractions, including a visit to the celebrated Yellow Crane Tower. He incorporated the experience into his keynote speech, comparing Ezra Pound’s rendition of Li Bai’s poem about the tower with a Chinese scholar’s version. The speech was favorably received as a politically correct one in terms of ‘cultural confidence’ and lauded in the Wuhan newspaper.

  Pang did not forget about his being a gourmet, either, taking him to various local restaurants as well. With platters of spicy crawfish and steamed crabs in front of him, he had to wear a pair of disposable gloves for tearing off the shells. The stinky fried tofu tasted so hot and spicy that he had to keep on drinking cold water; the tofu skin stuffed with three treasures melted on his tongue like a colorful dream. And the special Wuhan hot dry noodles mixed with ‘secret recipe’ oil, sesame butter, peanut butter, and green cucumber slices was so mouth-watering that Chen thought he could have devoured them for the whole day. In addition, Pang arranged a special cruise along the river for the speakers, with magnificent views stretching along both the riverbanks and, needless to say, with deep-fried Wuchang fish on their plates.

  The conference had also led to his current – unexpected – poetry translation project, which was being handsomely funded by the Wuhan Tourist Bureau. In recent years, a lot of international tourists had come to Wuhan. A number of classic Chinese poems wrote about the tourist attractions of the city, so the Tourist Bureau’s view was that a readable English translation of these poems might function as a sort of guide for international tourists to the city’s culture and history. In fact, Pang went out of his way to push the translation Chen’s way. For a project approved in terms of big propaganda, the royalties could be four or five times higher than usual.

  Chen’s thoughts then wandered back to ‘The Wuhan File’ that Pang had just discussed with him.

  Indeed, life in China could be stranger than fiction. And more tragic and sudden, too. It was mind-blowing that the CCP’s attempted cover-up of Covid, for the sake of social stability, could have led to a catastrophic pandemic all over the world.

  But even if it was presented as fiction, something like ‘The Wuhan File’ could not be published in China. With those WeChat posts, Pang was already under heavy fire. For the Beijing government, what happened in Wuhan, and in other cities, had to be represented as nothing but a heroic, patriotic anti-Covid battle under the CCP’s great and glorious leadership. Any mention of the negative sides – particularly of the collateral damage caused by the zero-Covid policy – had to be shut down. In short, Chen thought, the CCP cannot be wrong, and governmental propaganda is the one and only truth.

  Moving to the window, Chen thought he could hear another ambulance siren cutting through the shroud of the somber sky. It was not any of the ambulances he had seen earlier in the day.

  He made a cup of coffee for himself, sank down in the armchair, and started reading some of the latest information about the situation in Wuhan.

  Would more cities fall helplessly, following Wuhan … including the city of Shanghai?

  Long after the phone call with Pang, Chen could not get rid of an immense apprehension weighing heavy on him. On a lot of people, too, he supposed.

  In the age of WeChat, what was happening in Wuhan could only leak out a little in this post and a little in that post, in defiance of the Netcops blocking and deleting them in a frenzy.

  The room suddenly became stuffy. He rose and looked out of the window, wiping the foggy pane with his shirt sleeve. The last leaves on the trees in the subdivision appeared to be trembling, sighing, and falling.

  When the SARS epidemic broke out in China several years earlier, things had followed the same pattern: the government covering things up for the sake of the great and glorious CCP image. Covering, covering, and covering, until it was too late …

  A glance at the clock told him that it was lunchtime. Having skipped breakfast, he thought about going out for some kind of street snack, but recalling the fit of coughing he’d experienced earlier near Renji Hospital, and the mysterious phone call that had followed demanding that he take a Covid test, he thought better of it.

  Again, he looked out of the window without seeing anyone moving in or out of the guarded subdivision gate. The CCP rules and regulations could be very effective the moment the Party’s interest became involved.

  A few snowflakes began to swirl in the cold wind, fluffing and clinging. He turned to a small spot shimmering on the window. It was a blue-headed fly circling around the upper corner of the pane. Every time he raised his hand, it droned away, only to return buzzing to the same spot, inexplicably, like those haunting lines.

  You have to be a snowman

  to stand still in the snow, listening

  to the same somber message

  of the howling wind, not trembling …

  The snow scene was rare for the city of Shanghai.

  The next moment, to his surprise, a slender young girl was moving into the scene toward him, light-footedly, as if stepping out of a mural in the once so familiar Beijing subway station, carrying a large bunch of grapes, her arms bare, her hair wet, fragrant, light as the summer in grateful tears …