MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Hongwei Bao’s essay “Diary Writing as Feminist Activism: Guo Jing’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary (2020).” The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/hongwei-bao/. My thanks to Hongwei Bao for sharing this important work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, editor

By Hongwei Bao

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April 2020)

Figure 1: Cover of Guo Jing’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary.

For seventy-seven days from January 23 to April 8, Wuhan, a Chinese city with a population of eleven million people, was locked down to contain the spread of the coronavirus. This extreme measure was “unprecedented” in world public health history.[1] The total number of Covid-19 infection cases recorded in the city stood at 50,333, with 3,869 deaths, as of April 17, 2020.[2] While a lot has been written about the Chinese government’s response to the epidemic, our understanding of the human cost and social impact of the epidemic has just begun. A lot of questions remain in the unpredictable aftermath of the lockdown: How did people cope with the lockdown physically, psychologically and emotionally? How did people live their lives during and after such a tremendous disruption? Can life go back to normal, if “normality” is so desired? Examining the situation in Wuhan, a city that has experienced such a dramatic and traumatic historic event, has significant implications for our understanding of and responses to the global pandemic.

During the Wuhan lockdown, a 29-year-old social worker and feminist activist named Guo Jing 郭晶 kept a diary, which she shared online and through social media with her friends and followers. Almost immediately after the lockdown, in early April 2020, Guo’s diary, titled Wuhan Lockdown Diary (武汉封城日记), was published by Taipei-based Linking Publishing (联经出版), making the book the first officially published Wuhan lockdown diary by a literary press (fig. 1).[3] In the diary, Guo keeps a daily account of her own life and the lives of many other people she met online and offline. She also documents some of her thoughts on society and social issues, including her gender perspectives. With seventy-seven entries and totaling around 80,000 words, the diary is an important record of the lockdown history.[4] Continue reading Guo Jing’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary →

Source: NYRB (April 6, 2020)
Fearing For My Mother in Wuhan, Facing a New Sinophobia in the US
Jiwei Xiao

From Zhao Liang’s Mask Series

Wuhan is far away. My annual trip to the city was long and exhausting, a pilgrimage. A fourteen-hour international flight would take me from Newark to an airport in Beijing or Shanghai, where I would wait another few hours before boarding a domestic flight to complete the journey. I went back again last June to visit my mother. The dusk gave way to night when the cab driver dropped me off under our big camphor trees. The scent of locust flowers filled the early summer air. The ceaseless noise of Wuhan streets became remote.

I had to walk my last fifty steps with my luggage in tow to reach the gate of the apartment building. The night, not yet too hot, had a fantastic unreality. In the dark I could see the white tips of gardenia flower buds on the tall bush in my mother’s half-abandoned front yard and the light pouring from her bedroom window to the balcony. I could even hear her low voice talking to someone and her shuffling steps. My heart beat a little faster when I buzzed the door. Continue reading Fearing for my mother in Wuhan, Sinophobia in the US →

Hi all,

Want to share my NYR Daily piece on Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake with you: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/14/into-the-uncharted-zone-diao-yinans-the-wild-goose-lake/. You can find out if it is still shown in theaters near you: https://www.filmmovement.com/the-wild-goose-lake.

Source: New York Review Daily (3/14/20)
Into the Uncharted Zone: Diao Yinan’s ‘The Wild Goose Lake’
By Jiwei Xiao

Film Movement. Hu Ge as Zenong Zhou, back left, in Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake, 2019

The story of Diao Yinan’s new film, The Wild Goose Lake, is simple, almost allegorical: a man of the underworld is thrust onto a perilous journey to death to redeem himself. Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) leads a gang that specializes in stealing motorbikes in the streets of Wuhan. After mistakenly killing a cop on the road, Zhou knows he is doomed. So he hatches a scheme to turn the hefty bounty on his head into a final gift for his family. After a botched attempt to get his wife (Wan Qian) to report him to the police, another woman Liu Ai’ai (Gwei Lun-mei), a “bathing beauty,” steps into the accomplice role and helps him finally accomplish the mission against tremendous odds. The film ends with Ai’ai and Zhou’s wife walking together side by side, carrying a bag of cash.

Zhou Zenong is resigned to his imminent death not because the crime squad is particularly capable. In one scene in which Captain Liu (Liao Fan) gathers his team to set up the operation, the officers are so unconfident about using firearms that they ask for retraining. What really makes Zhou sure about his sealed fate is his realization that he has committed an unforgivable crime and that he cannot escape an all-out man hunt in a surveillance society. Continue reading Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake →

The wildlife trail re-emerges: The pangolin, known as the target of massive over-harvesting for Chinese markets, an over-exploitation which is driving the animal to extinction across the world. In the wake of the Corona epidemic some writers have tried to paint criticism of Chinese over-harvesting as anti-Chinese racism, but if you just look at the pangolin, you realize this is at best gross ignorance and at worst, papering over the speed-rushed extinction of wildlife. Criticism of unsustainable foods and fake “medical” use, like with rhino horns etc. is not racism at all. It is necessary.–Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu.

Source: Daily Maverick (2/7/20)
Coronavirus source found in pangolin meat
By Don Pinnock and Tiara Walters

A picture made available on 30 June of Hook the pangolin resting on a tree stump while zoo keeper Suman looks on in the Singapore Zoo, 29 June 2008. EPA/HOW HWEE YOUNG

As the death toll climbs in the China pandemic, researchers reveal new origins for the coronavirus in Earth’s most threatened mammal.

The deadly novel coronavirus pandemic has been traced to pangolins, the world’s most trafficked and endangered mammal, according to researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. This had been confirmed by researchers at the South China Agricultural University.

Today Our Burning Planet can reveal that DNA analysed by the Baylor researchers appears to offer a near-perfect match for the current outbreak of novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019), an acute respiratory disease that has killed hundreds. Continue reading Coronavirus source found in pangolins →

Source: China Channel, LARB (1/13/20)
Review: Perverse Pasts and Queer Futures in Taiwan
Brandon Kemp reviews the academic essay collection Perverse Taiwan

Taiwanese LGBT rights activist Chi Chia-wei (Chris Horton on Twitter).

When Taiwan’s government became the first in Asia to legalize gay marriage last May, the de facto island-nation received a flurry of positive press from international media. For a brief moment, coverage of Taiwan was not dominated by its relationship with neighboring China. Yet the open question remained of what exactly it means to be Taiwanese. The island, once home to an indigenous majority, was colonized variously by the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Chinese and still calls itself the Republic of China decades after the end of the exiled Chinese Nationalists’ one-party rule. This is despite the fact that its population increasingly identifies not as Chinese but Taiwanese.

Taiwan, in short, is a queer subject. By this, I don’t mean to repeat the cliché that it’s a gay Mecca, though it’s certainly true that Taiwan boasts a rich tradition of cultural and artistic LGBT expression. Rather, I mean that Taiwan today, with its political ambiguity, cultural syncretism, and peripheral status, seems almost impossible, or impermissible. Even as an object of scholarly inquiry, Taiwan is frequently ignored. As Sinophone scholar Shih Shu-mei writes, “Taiwan is too small, too marginal, too ambiguous, and thus too insignificant. Taiwan does not enjoy the historical accident of having been colonized by a Western power in the nineteenth or twentieth century; instead it was colonized by other Asian powers.”¹ The result, she concludes, is that Taiwan has been effectively “ghettoized” within China-centric Asian studies or Sinology. Continue reading Perverse Taiwan →

Source: Long March Space (1/15/20)
Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance
The Drawing Center, New York
February 20, 2020–May 10, 2020

Guo Fengyi, Diagram of Primordial Positioning of the 64 Hexagrams, 1989. Colored ink on glazed printing paper, 39 x 54 cm

Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance, will be the first major institutional exhibition of the work of Guo Fengyi (1942–2010, Xi’an, China) in the United States. The exhibition will feature works from all periods of her compact yet fruitful career, including drawings executed on the backs of book and calendar pages and on cloth, as well as small- and large-scale drawings on rice paper scrolls. The exhibition will also feature sketchbooks, notebooks, and archival materials that provide context for a drawing vocabulary that osscilates between the whimsical, the systematic, and the wildly imaginative. Occupying two floors of The Drawing Center—the Drawing Room and The Lab—the exhibition will present the expanse of a career that was highly focused but at the same time inclusive of a variety of interests and obsessions, including Chinese medicine, ancient Chinese history, and a deeply personal spirituality. Continue reading Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance →

Continue reading Stephn C. Soong Translation Awards–call for entries →

Dear Friends,

A gentle reminder on the November 11th deadline for submitting your abstract for the 2020 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, to be held in our beautiful campus from April 16-18, 2020 in Lexington Kentucky.

Please submit your abstract in the field of East Asian Studies by November 11th, 2019 @ 11:59 pm EST here: https://kflc.as.uky.edu/submit-abstract.

Warm thanks,

Liang

羅靚 Luo, Liang Ph.D.
Faculty Director, International Village Living and Learning Program
Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Kentucky, USA

Source: The Guardian (10/24/19)
Chinese orienteering team disqualified for cheating at Military World Games
Athletes lose moral compass after using secret paths and markings to win contest
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

The Chinese orienteering team disqualified from the Military World Games for cheating. Photograph: Tomonews.com

A Chinese orienteering team has been disqualified for cheating at the Military World Games in China.

Chinese runners in the middle-distance competition on Sunday initially came first, second, and fourth among the women and second among the men.

However, it was soon discovered that the runners had received illegal assistance from spectators and used markings and small paths prepared in the terrain that only their team was aware of, the International Orienteering Federation (IOF), whose rules govern the competition, said. Continue reading Chinese orienteering team disqualified →

Continue reading China from the Margins–cfp →

Dear list members,

Through a mutual friend, Taije Silverman has asked for the contact information of the poet Shu Ting. If anyone can provide it, please reply to her at:  Taije Silverman: taije@sas.upenn.edu

Thanks,

Nick Kaldis

Hi, please allow me to seek your attention to my fieldwork housing, if you don’t mind.

I’m looking for a room to rent for about a year in Shanghai, beginning in mid June 2019. This is for my dissertation fieldwork in cultural anthropology. My dissertation project is about environmental NGOs of today’s Shanghai. My budget is around RMB 3,000 per month. I’d like to be within an hour-long distance from North Sichuan Road (四川北路) by subway or bus. If you are looking for a roommate in Shanghai or know someone who is, kindly consider letting me know. I don’t smoke, I have no pets. My email address is goeun.lee@uky.edu and my WeChat ID is huahai14. Thank you.

All the best,

Goeun

李高恩 Lee, Goeun, MSc Social Anthropology
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
211 Lafferty Hall, University of Kentucky, USA