THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 37
other example of old science: effective
public communication. The man not
only recognized his symptoms but trav-
elled to the hospital by bicycle, as offi-
cially recommended, in order to avoid
infecting others on public transport. Af-
terward, the government locked down
parts of Beijing, and, within a month,
nearly twelve million residents were
given swab tests. The city had the ca-
pacity to test four hundred thousand
people per day.
“Recent outbreaks in places that had
not recorded confirmed cases for weeks
show that the virus is very difficult to
completely eliminate,” Gabriel Leung,
the dean of medicine at the University
of Hong Kong, told me. “Coronaviruses
tend to cluster in super-spreading events.
It can have an explosive outbreak out
of the blue.”
It can also do nothing. The Liupold
Bloom of northeastern Sichuan, whose
unchecked voyage across his city lasted
for eight days, appears to have infected
a grand total of zero people. In a sense,
the outcome made no difference: one
neighborhood-committee member in
Liu’s city was punished, just as the out-
break in Beijing resulted in six officials
being disciplined. Liu himself was never
very sick. He spent a week isolated in
a coronavirus ward, felt fine, and tested
negative. Then, after nearly two more
weeks of strict quarantine in a hotel, he
tested positive again and returned to
hospital confinement. By the time Liu
was finally released to the world of phar-
macies, gas stations, and frog-and-fish-
head restaurants, he had spent sixty-five
days in medical isolation. Serena asked
for an interview by phone, but a neigh-
borhood-committee member said that
the experience had left Liu too psycho-
logically fragile.
D
uring week nine, in late April, I
reviewed some student writing
with a freshman class. At the end of
the session, I asked if there were any
questions about the essays. After a long
pause, a student typed into the text box,
“Can you talk about what is happen-
ing in the U.S.?”
Throughout the term, tension be-
tween America and China had shad-
owed our interactions. In week three, a
Chinese official claimed on Twitter that
the U.S. Army might have brought the
virus to Wuhan; in week four, Donald
Trump started referring to “the China
Virus.” After American fatalities ex-
ceeded China’s, during week six, the
U.S. numbers exploded: ten times as
many deaths as China by week ten,
twenty times by week fifteen. During
week sixteen, my nonfiction class dis-
cussed a book excerpt by Ian Johnson,
a Beijing-based writer for the Times,
and I told them that Johnson’s visa had
been revoked back in week four. It was
part of a tit-for-tat exchange between
the two governments, which took turns
expelling each other’s journalists.
Later in the term, some student es-
says referred to the death of Freud, which
initially confused me. Then I realized
that this was what happened when a
student read Chinese news reports about
George Floyd—Fuluoyide—and ran the
name through a machine translator back
into English. Even with all the improve-
ments in technology, distance still mat-
tered, and I longed for face-to-face in-
teractions during such a time. I did my
best to talk about what was happening
across the Pacific, but students were
cautious about giving their own opin-
ions via audio and text. I remembered
how much I had depended on visual
clues in the nineties, when certain sub-
jects could make a classroom of Chi-
nese students drop their heads in dis-
comfort: the Cultural Revolution, or
Chinese xenophobia, or any reference
to the country’s poverty.
Nowadays, in a much more prosper-
ous Chengdu, people were less sensi-
tive and less restrained when talking in
“At what point are we no longer reënacting churning butter
and actually just churning butter?”
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