China Channel

Where similarities between the two disasters begin and end – Olivia Humphrey

Of all the images to hit the mainstream media over the past few weeks, some of the most arresting have featured Wuhan’s deserted streets during the coronavirus epidemic. These photographs take a city of eight million and reduce it to a ghost-town. In these still moments, it is hard not to think of another ghost-town – one that has actually been frozen in time, an ashy monument to a flailing communist superpower that mishandled a catastrophic crisis. For years, the empty factories, homes and schools of Pripyat were little more than a man-made playground for wildlife, tainted by plumes of plutonium. More recently, drones have been able to venture in. They have recorded beautiful and sad footage of what a town becomes when its people are suddenly wiped away: a ghostly observation wheel; a dodgem funfair ride overgrown with plants; a giant rusting hammer and sickle.

The Chernobyl-coronavirus analogy has not been lost on the media. Since the outbreak of the virus, and especially in February, journalists have pointed out parallels. First and foremost is the health toll, and how the damage proliferated. The radiation pollution that emitted from Ukraine in 1986 as a result of reactor 4’s meltdown nestled, quietly and terrifyingly, into millions of bodies. It is too early to tell the cost of coronavirus, but the fact that it also can spread silently, through people who are pre-symptomatic, gives it that same edge of phantom menace.

Advice for students out of school, from Shi Tiesheng’s celebrated essay – Nick Admussen

Ed: Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Cornell University, where all classes were cancelled last Friday. He penned this letter, edited for publication, to his students before leaving his desk.

As cases of Covid-19 spread and we begin a period of social distancing, I want to give you my argument for continuing to do the two things university was designed for: to read and to write. Colleges often present themselves to students as a package excursion for youth: open quadrangles, energetic friends and lovers, deep conversation, light beer, live music, parties. It is that, and much more. Yet my colleagues and I didn’t become literature professors – we didn’t become literate – by going to class. We learned what we know in rooms that lacked conversation, friends, and open doors.

Today I’ve been rereading the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng, a Beijing native who was assigned to rural labor during the Cultural Revolution, when at the age of 21 his spine was injured in an accident and he was rendered paraplegic. His 1991 essay ‘The Year of Being Twenty-One’, translated by Dave Haysom, records his struggles to come to terms with the new limits on his mobility and his future. In the essay, he watches carefully as the other patients in hospital respond to their own illnesses, and to the social and emotional sicknesses that constrain them. From his sickbed, Shi talks with a man with aphasia (“Bed Two”) who has lost all nouns. He remembers a seven-year old boy who fell off a truck and never walked again. And he tells of a pair of lovers pulled apart by an accident, and more. Their stories leap off the page, as if there is something bigger behind them, laboring to push its way through.