Can I Go Home to Tend My Mother's Grave Next Qingming Festival?

This year is the only year since my mother's death that I have not gone back for Qingming to tend her grave. What I cannot be sure of is whether next year and the year after I will be able to go back.

Someone told me that we are now survivors after a catastrophe. I am skeptical of this phrase. Have we really reached the "after" of the catastrophe? Is China's epidemic over? Can we already speak of surviving a disaster?

If the ordeal has not stopped, no one can say whether they have a "remaining life." I think no virologist or epidemiologist in the world dares say when the epidemic will end, nor can they be sure whether later this year or in the coming years we will face wave after wave of new outbreaks.

If confidence slogans could end this disaster, that would be the easiest thing. Unfortunately, confidence slogans solve few problems. Today, after watching videos of COVID-19 patients collapsing and convulsing in the streets of Indonesia, I felt as if I were seeing Wuhan two months ago. I also saw that our Chinese scholar Shi Zhengli found evidence of the novel coronavirus in the bodies of a group of cats in Wuhan. These things make me pessimistic about what lies ahead.

The virus has already spread across the globe, and with human-to-animal transmission and the virus's continual evolution, then scientifically speaking we are far, far from the day this problem is finally solved. The great plagues in Chinese history came wave after wave, year after year; sometimes plague continued unabated for five to ten years on end, until people were wiped out in many regions.

So I am not sure when I can return to my hometown to tend my mother's grave.

Because of COVID-19, two of my relatives died this year. Both died because Hubei's medical system was overwhelmed, leaving them unable to seek timely care. If the words of our ambassador to France are reliable, then the number of other patients in our country who died because they could not get care due to COVID-19 is three to five times the number who died of COVID-19 itself.

In my father's words, these people died "as quietly as a dog." After they died there were no funerals, no mourning; they were quickly buried. My two relatives, being in the countryside, were buried in the ground rather than cremated, laid to rest by their closest kin.

Before such a disaster, life becomes very cheap, and tears too. Many Hubei people are hoping for an apology, hoping our society will reflect. But we are disappointed again and again-no one truly cares about what is deep in our hearts.

Our loved ones died for no reason, when they need not have died. We feel deeply aggrieved, but in others' eyes perhaps weought to be grateful rather than weepy.

I have lived forty-one years and, unfortunately, have lived through two plagues, atypical pneumonia and SARS. The reasons that ignited them are strikingly similar, yet regrettably, neither time brought about any truly deep reflection. I think that in a few more years we will see a third similar event.

I can watch many videos that circulate overseas but are strictly banned in our country-thanks to our intranet, which protects many people's fragile hearts but also, successfully, makes many of our citizens frighteningly ignorant. Now the nightmare Hubei once lived through is playing out in other countries, with many people collapsing dead in the streets. Our own defenses may be breached at any time; in truth, no place in China is safe.

I do not know when this way of life will finally end, nor who the next innocent person to die will be. Maybe it is me, maybe it is you, maybe it is someone else. Plague does not care about politics; people of every political persuasion may die in it. Maybe we will die of the plague, maybe of the secondary disasters it causes; what the future holds, no one can say.

As my father says, many of us will die muddling through in this chaotic age, dying as insignificantly as a dog. Life is fragile; I can only choose to live in the present, even though this present moment is already deeply abnormal.

I am numb toward today's nationwide mourning. Having been cooped up at home so long, my feelings are truly no longer as keen as they once were. When the dead are many, when the rites surrounding death for those near us have become perfunctory, and when the end of the disaster is nowhere in sight, numbness is better than clarity. Otherwise, how overwhelming our suffering would be!

I utterly cannot understand those who sing praises, just as they utterly cannot understand me; I think they and I belong to two completely hostile camps. So whenever I spot someone from the other camp, I block them at once. It is better not to nauseate each other. The rest of one's life is precious; I do not want to spend it with people who nauseate me, and I am sure they feel the same. People who cannot understand each other ought to part ways and be well on their own.