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Deadly Quiet City

True Stories from Wuhan

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Economist and Kirkus Reviews
From one of China's most celebrated—and silenced—literary authors, riveting portraits of eight Wuhan residents at the dawn of the pandemic
When a strange new virus appeared in the largest city in central China late in 2019, the 11 million people living there were oblivious to what was about to hit them. But rumors of a new disease soon began to spread, mostly from doctors. In no time, lines of sick people were forming at the hospitals. At first the authorities downplayed medical concerns. Then they locked down the entire city and confined people to their homes.

From Beijing, Murong Xuecun—one of China's most popular writers, silenced by the regime in 2013 for his outspoken books and New York Times articles—followed the state media fearing the worst. Then, on April 6, 2020, he made his way quietly to Wuhan, determined to look behind the heroic images of sacrifice and victory propagated by the regime to expose the fear, confusion, and suffering of the real people living through the world's first and harshest COVID-19 lockdown.

In the tradition of Dan Baum's bestselling Nine Lives, Deadly Quiet City focuses on the remarkable stories of eight people in Wuhan. They include a doctor at the frontline, a small businessman separated from his family, a volunteer who threw himself into assisting the sick and dying, and a party loyalist who found a reason for everything. Although the Chinese Communist Party has devoted enormous efforts to rewriting the history of the pandemic's outbreak in Wuhan, through these poignant and beautifully written firsthand accounts Murong tells us what really happened in Wuhan, giving us a book unlike any other on the earliest days of the pandemic.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 23, 2023
      Novelist and opinion columnist Xuecun (Leave Me Alone) offers a harrowing snapshot of life in the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Noting that “many people died silently” during the 76-day lockdown imposed on Wuhan by President Xi Jinping on Jan. 23, 2020, Xuecun focuses on eight residents. These include Dr. Lin Qingchuan, who was assigned to an isolation station where admission and discharge decisions were made by Communist Party officials “who know nothing about medicine and have almost no contact with patients.” Lin’s account also reveals that the government deliberately used less accurate tests to generate lower infection rates and spread misinformation by promoting traditional Chinese medicine as a treatment. When Jin Feng, a 64-year-old cleaner at the Wuhan Central Hospital, got Covid-19, she couldn’t get a bed in the hospital that employed her; though she eventually recovered, her husband died of the disease after local officials delayed his treatment because he couldn’t show them a positive test result (the news had been delivered over the phone). Elsewhere, Xuecun profiles Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer turned citizen journalist who spent months reporting on the “violent isolation” in Wuhan before she was detained for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Throughout, Xuecun pulls no punches in blaming the Chinese government’s “deliberate coverup and misleading information” for causing the pandemic. This is a masterful exposé.

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  • English

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