A year ago, on January 23, 2020, China imposed an absolute lockdown in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
For more than two months, nearly all of its 11 million residents could not leave their apartments. Anyone displaying symptoms was taken to hastily-built quarantine centers to prevent family infections.
The legacy of the lockdown has splintered Wuhan’s residents, who have conflicting memories of those 76 days.
For many, Wuhan is largely back to normal, and most of its residents want to move on. Song Feifei, who’s in her late 20s and works at a snacks store along Wuhan’s famous Jianghan promenade, thinks the lockdown was worth it.
When I recall the anxiety of the lockdown, I am very sad. Especially because people who told the truth were arrested and even jailed. What has this world come to, where officials get to escape blame for such a tragedy?,” says Wang, crying.
Wang remembers the only cars she saw on the streets for weeks bore the logo of the local mortuary. Her elderly father was in the hospital during the pandemic and had COVID-like symptoms. That sent the family into a panic until he tested negative. In the meantime, two other relatives died from chronic illnesses for which they normally received regular treatment that was interrupted during the lockdown.
“We’re still living, by some fluke,” says Wang. “But who knows what could happen the next minute? What will tomorrow bring?”
For some, the severity of the lockdown is a point of pride. It showed how well China’s top-down political system could work.
“Wuhan people are the safest people. Every one of us have all been tested at least once,” says Huang He, a masseuse in Wuhan. Her business was shut down for nearly half a year during and after the lockdown but she applauds the strict lockdown measure: “The virus could not possibly come here again.”
Then there are thousands of people like Zhong, who lost her son. They bore the brunt of these measures.
“All officials see is a statistic of total deaths. But each was a sacrifice made by us common folks. A pointless sacrifice,” she says, quivering with grief, her dry eyes fixed on some distant point in the past. “Who wants to be a hero in that case?”
