She is an energetic and loud lady.
She's just given a few good cuts to the piece of fish and now she's washing her chapped hands.
While she drains the bowl of food with chopsticks, she tells how the business is going: bad, she assures, people do not have money to buy after the continuous confinements.
Behind her, a huge spider crab —at 540 yuan per kilo, about 73 euros— throws her legs over the fish tank to escape her fate.
The stall is located in a new location for fresh produce vendors north of the city of Wuhan.
But before he was in the Huanan seafood market, that place where several cases of an unknown, highly contagious virus were registered at the end of 2019, which spread throughout the world at an unprecedented speed causing at least 6,
7 million deaths and a global health emergency whose long shadow lasts until today.
As soon as the conversation takes that path, the woman withdraws: "I'm not supposed to talk to foreigners."
The pandemic, in this city, is still sensitive material.
The market was immediately closed and surrounded by workers in biological protection suits in an image that seemed unreal but would also soon spread around the globe.
They transferred their vendors, there are several of them spread over two markets in the north.
On the other, with dozens of open-air stalls selling shellfish, fish and even live reptiles (soft-shell turtles), EL PAÍS is expelled after some employees notify security.
The Huanan market would never be reopened, despite the fact that researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO), after their visit in 2021, downplayed its role as a possible origin of the pandemic.
The old compound is fenced off, but it is still there, next to a block of flats, like an old scar, behind some faded blue planks and a section crowned with a spiral of concertinas.
If you pass by, you probably won't even notice.
It is curious how quickly the traces of disaster can become anonymous.
Things happened at breakneck speed.
On December 31, 2019, China informed the WHO of the existence of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
The affected market, where live fish and shellfish are sold, closes on January 1, 2020 to proceed with its disinfection.
On January 3, 2020, the authorities notify 44 patients, 11 of whom are seriously ill.
On January 11, the first death was recorded.
On January 13, a case is confirmed in Thailand, the first abroad.
On the 14th, the WHO indicates that "it would not be surprising" if it could be transmitted between humans.
On January 20, Beijing confirms the contagion between people.
Three days later, on January 23, the authorities decide to confine Wuhan, a city of 11 million inhabitants,
This Monday marks the third anniversary of that confinement that lasted 76 days and marked its inhabitants forever.
"No one who is not in Wuhan can understand what those of us in the city are going through," narrated Fang Fang (Nanjing, 1955).
This writer kept a conscientious record of that confinement that she posted on the Internet and was read by tens of millions of people every day, later published under the title
Wuhan Diary
(Seix Barral, 2020).
In it, he expresses his anger at the fact that things could have been done differently, avoiding "devastating" damage if the authorities had not insisted on "counting only positive news and hiding negative ones, prohibiting people from telling the truth ”.
“The people of Wuhan are in desperate need of comfort,” writes ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, one of the first local doctors to raise the alarm before official notification and reprimanded by the police for spreading rumours, when he dies of covid.
“Li Wenliang was just like any of us, he was one of us,” Fang says.
A vigil in Hong Kong, Friday, February 7, 2020, for the late Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang.
Kin Cheung (AP)
Three years later, the writer does not leave her home in Wuhan.
After the sudden reopening in December, after more than a thousand days of anti-pandemic policy in China, the country has suffered a tsunami of coronavirus that has left tens of thousands of deaths.
And she, who is not vaccinated, has diabetes and "her heart is not very good", she fears that the virus will affect her.
"In the last month, many friends and relatives around me have died of the infection, which anguishes me," she writes in response to questions from EL PAÍS.
(In China, immunization has lagged behind other places, such as the European Union, especially among the elderly and vulnerable.)
Fang declares herself "totally contrary to the massive tests and the continuous expansion of the confinements" that have marked the country in recent times.
"Containment and control" practices, she continues, have in many cases diverged "from reason and common sense."
“Reopening was a must,” she says.
But she believes that, without preparation, the twist in health policy in the cold of winter has caused a tragedy.
"Many people have died this month of January due to lack of medicines."
Hospitals have been overwhelmed.
The crematoriums could not burn all the bodies.
“There were obituaries everywhere.
It has been miserable."
But many of those infected, she says, have already recovered.
“They are starting to come out, the streets have almost recovered their daily life.”
In Wuhan, as in the rest of China, the wave of covid has spread like fire in a dry bush.
A Peking University study estimates that in just over a month some 900 million people have been infected, almost two-thirds of the country.
Most of the interviewees say that they have passed the virus in December.
And during the days leading up to the Lunar New Year –celebrated on Sunday– the city is bustling with people, firecrackers are heard and the restaurants are full.
It is the first time in three years that the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar has been celebrated without restrictions.
But the road, these long three years, has been hard for many.
“It's like my life has been put on lockdown,” she says,
latte
in hand, Jessica Wang, a pseudonym for a 29-year-old Wuhana woman who has suffered the uncertainty of the tug-of-war with the continual lockdowns and policy changes.
She feels that neither her life nor her career has progressed in this time.
"I've been stuck here."
Her family, with restaurants and hotels, has suffered the economic tourniquet, although they have also been hired by the authorities to serve food to hospitals and shelter infected people in quarantine.
With the outgoing wave, Wang's father fell ill with covid and worsened within a few days.
He had to be admitted when there were hardly any hospital beds.
There were also no drugs.
The daughter was forced to look under the stones for immunoglobulin, according to her account.
She has ended up paying the equivalent of about 5,700 euros for a week's treatment, plus the bed, just over 1,300 euros.
The father has come out alive.
He was not vaccinated either.
"Because of the diabetes," says the daughter.
When talking to her he gives the feeling that he feels something is off.
“We have been following the rules for three years and now we have to suffer.
What's the point of all this?".
—Do you think 2023 will be better?
-I don't believe it.
Each has their own account of these three years.
An artist in his late 50s says it has been a “blank period” that has left him “numb” and without the urge to create.
It defines QR codes, the ultra-technological surveillance system that the authorities have applied, like a maze.
"A very modern and advanced technology, but used by pre-modern leaders."
He admires those who came out to protest at the end of November.
He didn't do it because he has family.
He is "optimistic" with 2023.
After the interview, he will receive a call from the authorities asking about his meeting with a foreign media outlet.
With another interviewee it will be even worse: she receives that same call while the interview is taking place in which one of the central points will be precisely how Beijing has raised the level of surveillance during these three years.
She remembers a moment of unreality, with all the residents of a block coming in line to get a PCR “as if they were dead bodies following the instructions of the Government in a science fiction movie.
She was scary."
“The impact has been huge,” says Zhu Ning, 51, the owner of Vox, a small and well-known concert venue linked to the punk scene, which has managed to survive thanks to a music school and renting rehearsal spaces. .
"If there are no shows, there is no income," he adds.
And there have been few: they used to program about 200 a year.
In 2020, there were only about 40. In 2021, they managed to recover to 120. By 2022, Zhu says, they have not even calculated it.
"It's been disgusting."
He says that he has not noticed the blow of the covid in the lyrics of local bands.
But there is an explanation: "Everything that is sung has to be approved by the authorities."
He believes that perhaps that sentiment will be reflected in the future.
He, too, is optimistic about 2023. But he believes it will take several years to catch up.
Carrie, a 26-year-old, says it's been a good three years for her overall.
She finished her degree (which she was studying in Australia) remotely from Wuhan.
She has gone through a job at the University, has been a seller of women's clothing on Douyin (name of TikTok in China) and is now employed at an investment firm and continues to feed a sports video channel.
She acknowledges, in any case, that these have been tough years physically, mentally and financially for many.
“We're definitely in another phase,” she says, glancing around a crowded restaurant.
"There is a new hope."
And towards the end of the conversation, she adamantly states that it was the Americans who brought the virus to the city during the military Olympics held in Wuhan in October 2019.
A Wuhan resident receives a bag of food over a wall on March 3, 2020, during the lockdown.
STR (AFP)
This unsubstantiated theory was bolstered in 2020 by an unsubstantiated suggestion by Zhao Lijian, then a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“When did patient zero start in the US?
How many people are infected?
What are the hospitals called?
It could be the US military that brought the epidemic to Wuhan.
[….] The US owes us an explanation”.
Carrie believes that the dominant power in the coming years will be the one that determines how the pandemic originated.
"Now everyone is happy," says a local in an alcohol and tobacco shop located opposite the Leishenshan hospital, one of two that were raised in Wuhan in one breath to deal with the outbreak.
It's another one of those almost forgotten scars.
Now it looks abandoned;
behind the fence, the ground is furrowed with weeds and several buildings seem propped up.
The local man, who lives in the buildings opposite, offers a cigarette, tea and a little chat.
He claims there is a project to demolish it and convert it into housing (local news only claims it was built in a residential area).
“We look optimistically to 2023″, he says.
It is the first time in three years that he is going to get together with the family for the New Year.
He trusts that the foreigners will return because that will mean money.
And he also asks:
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