Since bursting on the literary scene with the novel Leave Me Alone: A
Novel of Chengdu (Allen & Unwin, 2009)—originally serialised on a company bulletin board and later long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008—Murong Xuecun has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. Murong was a prolific Chinese blogger commenting on current affairs with millions of followers until the events described in this essay. His account of lockdowns in Wuhan, Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, COVID Ground Zero, was first published in 2022 by Hardie Grant in Australia, where he now resides. He was an op-ed contributor for The New York Times and continues to write essays and fiction.
When Liu Lipeng first contacted me in July 2020, I was still in China. I initially wanted to write this as a fictional short story, but I didn’t have the courage to do it at the time because it would have landed me in prison. I left China in 2021 and spent time thinking about […]
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