“Why has the outbreak turned so deadly?”

Abstract

What are the form and function of the lockdown diary during COVID-19? This essay explores Chinese writer Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020), which was published online (25 January–24 March 2020) for a mass audience of Chinese readers during lockdown in Wuhan. The text became an instant bestseller in COVID-19-traumatized Euro-American countries when it was published as a book in English translation in 2020. This essay considers the diary as an outbreak narrative whose goal is the containment of the pandemic before considering the online medium used to publish these entries, a medium that reshapes the traditional diary genre itself. Fang Fang’s performance of the self in public assumes a crucial function, as do the participatory dynamics involving multiple audiences which profoundly shape this online diary. Ultimately, Wuhan Diary functions as a social text which engages its multiple audiences rhetorically in helping navigate and contain the pandemic. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Irene Gammel and Jason Wang;individual chapters, the contributors.