David Penberthy: Letters from Wuhan β what Chinese lockdown was really like
For months, David Penberthy exchanged emails with an old uni mate locked down in Wuhan apartment as the coronavirus erupted. Now heβs free β but for a while, it was rough.
Opinion
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The last time I had spoken to my old friend Simon Carter was around 1992. Almost 30 years on, I heard from him out of the blue on January 27 this year when a very welcome email popped up in my inbox with the very unwelcome news that he was living and working in Wuhan, China, at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak.
I got another email from Simon this week – having now exchanged dozens more over the past two months – which contained a bit of news that should give us all some hope. He went for his first walk in the park with his family on Monday of this week, after spending almost eight weeks cooped up with his wife Sunrui and their seven-year-old daughter Imogen in their 20th floor city apartment.
I spent a few hours re-reading our many emails this week to cheer myself up. They provide a reassuring trajectory, albeit one that begins with the truth that things will get worse before they get better, that you will feel like you are losing your mind, but then that things will also get good fairly quickly once the worst of this has passed.
A few words about Simon first. We met in our first year studying a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Adelaide in 1987. We used to drink Coopers Stout together and go and see foreign films and generally think we were pretty sophisticated. We had a lot of great times. We would have curry nights with friends and get roaring drunk.
We didn’t lose touch because we didn’t get on. We just came to move in different circles, mainly because he was super-smart and eventually became a geophysicist, which he now lectures in at a Wuhan university, while I focused all my energies on the student newspaper and failing my law degree.
In many of his emails to me in February we discussed the merits or otherwise of his boarding a repatriation flight back home to Australia, which he and his family were entitled to as Australian citizens.
He eventually decided to stay, figuring the state-run Chinese health system had always served him and his family well. But he was troubled by the accuracy of the infection statistics and some of the decisions being made locally, such as initially keeping the subway system open which helped spread the bug.
It was a sound decision in hindsight, as had he been evacuated to Australia to avoid infection and a lockdown, he would now be back home trying to avoid infection and bracing for lockdown.
The tone of his emails became morose once the lock-in began, with no end in sight, and with things still looking rosy in what was then corona-free Australia.
“The last five days has been much tougher,” he wrote on February 18 after the lockdown began. “Fortunately we have plenty of food, though now you more or less have to order food in and the price gougers are doing a fine business. The number of deaths was bad last week. I have always taken the number of cases and doubled it but a mathematician friend in Perth said his own rough calculations suggested tripling it was probably better.”
After two weeks of being locked down, by which time he was crawling up the walls, his wife cracked her head open in a bathroom fall meaning they were allowed out of the building to go to the local hospital. Even this became a welcome taste of freedom.
Both Simon and his daughter celebrated birthdays during quarantine. He managed to order a tiramisu cake for Imogen’s but they were running low on ingredients when it was his so he made a mangy cake using an old banana and some flour, and lit a cinnamon stick as the candle.
Simon was always a mad cyclist and has continued his passion for the sport to this day. He bought one of those bike racks with rollers on it that lets you turn your bicycle into an indoor bike. He has been keeping the kilometres up inside his flat, which helped him stay sane.
One thing I didn’t know about him – nor him about me – is that in the past three decades we have both become jazz nuts. He has learned the double bass, and his music has kept him entertained inside, even though early on Sunrui exploded at him and threatened to throw his record collection off their 20th floor balcony.
He sent me a great email on February 6, when he was getting real cabin fever, listing his top 10 jazz albums of all time and requesting mine. I had never heard of Horace Silver, and he had (unforgivably) never heard of Professor Longhair, so we swapped YouTube links and snippets from articles in jazz magazines. We spent days working on it together. It’s the kind of meaningless bulls**t that we all need to get ourselves through this.
As the news of the spread of coronavirus made it to Australia, and people started panicking here and stockpiling toilet rolls, Simon saw footage from Australian supermarkets through his international news coverage.
“Whatever happened to Aussie perspective?” he wrote in early March. “I am sitting here on the powder-keg in Wuhan by all accounts, and I have not seen anybody losing it like I am reading online about Australia.”
Clearly there are differences between our approach and Beijing’s, as evidenced most spectacularly by the decision of some local Chinese authorities to weld residents inside their apartments.
Simon says he has seen none of that harshness, only a bit of extortion, with the local strata people levying a weekly fee on people for the privilege of locking them in their homes.
Then this from him last Monday:
“FREEDOM!”
“I am out in the street.
“First time for almost two months.”
The end.