The Pain of the Others

I moved into a ground floor flat early last year. It was the only place with a backyard among the three places I had stayed in Edinburgh. When people were told to stay at home because of the virus, I felt it was such a blessing that I had made this decision, although it meant being much further from the city centre where the neighbourhood was not as nice.

When the economy stopped, my decision paid off. It was preferable to grow your own food, cook by yourself, eat and drink alone. I did a lot of cooking, made my first ever batch of sourdough bread, read and wrote a lot. Part of me had to thank the quarantine which removed many unnecessary distractions and I could finally focus on the real writing work I needed to get done now that I was alone. Without that, I would have become so incredibly bored.

There was so much sunshine during the whole of spring that I had never experienced before, after soldiering through two difficult springs with endless windy and rainy days in Edinburgh. Nature returned its favour after the humans reduced their footprint. I started enjoying my breakfast tea in the backyard.

In March, the only big tree in the garden was still bare and there weren’t any leaves to cover my head. I couldn’t help notice that there were many eyes behind the windows from the high-rise near my backyard. I felt like I was being watched, like an animal in the zoo. It was understandable that when people were locked up in their houses, they became interested by moving objects outside their windows, by a person, a bird, or a cat. Other than that, everything was quiet and peaceful. I once heard someone singing in an emotional but terrible way. It made me smile. This whole period was emotional and terrible.

Then things grew worse. Three nights in a row I had a nightmare in which I heard a woman screaming. The sound pierced my head. I woke up in the middle of the night and felt very upset. I pondered how I felt during the day and tried to trace back what might have triggered my inner craziness but I had no clue. Then the other night I woke again and went to the bathroom. On my way back to the bedroom, I heard that scream again. It was everywhere at once and it became clear that it was not my voice. There was a real person screaming at the full capacity of her lungs out of desperation. That brought back all my fears and worries.

I was born in a small town three hundred kilometres from Wuhan. When the virus broke out in December, I first heard of it from my social media. It wasn’t surprising to see a cluster of flu patients filling up the hospital in the winter. Wuhan was also very far. Some of my family still lived in the same province. But none of them had any serious relationships with the provincial capital.

Wuhan had been a powerful industrial city. It had a few highly ranked universities. Some of my friends went to study there. The street food and the avenues flanked by cherry blossoms in spring were charming. When I was 16, I attended a science camp in Wuhan in the summer during which we were taken to visit a steel mill one afternoon. The steel industry was a landmark industry of the city, the epitome of its strength and pride. That day I saw bloody red molten steel from the furnace cooled with water sprays. I saw two male workers walking about and I had a frightening picture of the liquid steel splashing on human flesh. I wasn’t sure I understood the concept of hell then but the imaginary scene filled my body with horror. The mill was so overheated that we rushed out soon after.

In January, the city cried out for salvation. Apocalyptic scenes overwhelmed the press.

A young woman posted on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, saying her father couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t get a hospital bed for him. Can someone help? Some people left behind sad emojis and blessings. Some accused her of being overly dramatic: “why do you make a big fuss out of your own problem in the public? This isn’t a free helpline.” A few hours later she updated her status. Her father had passed away.

It wasn’t her being dramatic. It was damn life.

A man committed suicide near the grand Yangtze River Bridge. According to the passersby who captured him crying on their phones before he jumped, he could not carry on because he was infected with the Coronavirus and couldn’t risk passing the virus onto his wife and only child. There was no public transportation available and he had to walk between the hospital and a rented place where he lived alone. It was a very long and lonely walk and he was sick, his body too heavy to accomplish the task. He had not seen any chance that he could get treated by doctors behind the impossibly long queues.