A Year Later, Wuhan, the First Post Coronavirus Pandemic City - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/world/asia/wuhan-china-coronavirus.html
Le retour de Wuhan à la vie. Avec de magnifiques photos de Gilles Sabrié prises ce mois de janvier 2021.
Pour mémoire, Gilles Sabrié est le photographe qui a réalisé le portfolio inclu dans le livre « Red Mirror : l’avenir s’écrit en Chine » de Simone Pieranni (C&F éditions, février 2021).
The long months of harsh lockdown have faded from view in Wuhan, the first city in the world devastated by the new coronavirus. As residents look to move on, they cite a Chinese saying that warns against “forgetting the pain after a scar heals.”
To many in this central Chinese city, the saying sums up a temptation to let go of the bad memories while reveling in the recovery. To families grieving in the shadows, it means the danger of hastily forgetting without a public reckoning for the lives needlessly lost.
A year ago when Wuhan shut down, it offered the world a forewarning about the dangers of the virus. Now, it heralds a post-pandemic world where the relief at unmasked faces, joyous get-togethers and daily commutes conceals the emotional aftershocks.
In Wuhan, residents savor ordinary pleasures that a year ago became forbidden hazards, like strolling along the historic Jianghan shopping street. Office workers jostle for seats on the subway, which was shut throughout the lockdown. Riverside restaurants, karaoke bars and music clubs are a hubbub of conversation and song that was unthinkable last year, and remains unthinkable for much of the world still in the grips of the pandemic.
Wuhan’s experience will echo in New York, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro and other hard-hit places as they eventually recover. All have families marooned in grief and anger about deaths they say were avoidable. All have restaurants and shops, the livelihood of millions, struggling to survive. All have cemeteries that swelled in the past year.
Wuhan still has not released statistics for cremations in the first quarter of last year, many months after they would normally be reported. Writers and independent journalists who even mildly challenge the glowing official accounts of Wuhan’s crisis have been vilified in Chinese media, detained or even imprisoned.
“It has always been this way in China. How many tens of millions died in the Great Leap famine? How many in the Cultural Revolution,” says Ai Xiaoming, a retired professor in Wuhan who, like quite a few residents, kept an online diary about the lockdown. “Everything can be forgotten with the passage of time. You don’t see it, hear it or report it.”
Many in Wuhan now embrace the version of events offered by the Chinese government, and say that their “city of heroes” waged a proud fight against a virus that has gone on to humble wealthier countries. Some residents view the early failures in a more forgiving light, after seeing the trail of calamities in the United States and other democracies.
Like survivors of an earthquake, some in Wuhan are nervous that the crisis could return.
Many on the streets have continued wearing masks over the past year. Face coverings were less common in the rest of the country until a spate of small outbreaks in recent weeks.
“When I accept food deliveries at the door of my home, I wear a double-layer mask,” says Zhang Yongfang, a 68-year-old retired math teacher who fondly remembers a retired co-worker who died with a high fever.
Wuhan has stiffened back into greater vigilance recently, as other parts of China face flare-ups of infections. Signs urge residents to watch for symptoms, avoid travel over the coming Lunar New Year, and refrain from sharing food.
Infrared monitors scan stores and hotels, displaying spectral images of shoppers and guests as temperature blobs. Checkpoints, in varying states of alertness, stand ready to register visitors and scan for fever.
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