疫步 [Walking in the Pandemic]

“Walking in the Pandemic [疫步]” is a Chinese short prose piece by Hong Kong-based author Cheung Wai Lap that captures moments from Hong Kong’s lockdown during 2020 through the lens of a poetic imagination, published in the literary magazine Hong Kong Literature Bimonthly. Founded in 2006, the magazine accepts creative pieces and reviews in Chinese from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, guided by the principles of innovation, harmony, and inclusivity.

Cheung sets the scene by introducing readers to the practice of “making a list of all that was lost along the way” (50) at the end of the year 2020. His non-exhaustive list includes “two boxes of face masks / one liter of alcohol-based handrub / 2,000 Hong Kong Dollars” (Cheung 50), which illustrate the personal protective products that became necessities amid the spread of COVID-19 and the associated financial costs. Aside from material losses, he adds to his list, “several smiles (sometimes few, sometimes fewer) / three hundred gloomy nights” (Cheung 50), highlighting the persistent feeling of sadness throughout the year and the emotional costs of living through the pandemic. The recording of personal losses sustained during the pandemic thus far indicates a need to preserve memories of lockdown.

The piece goes on to describe the impact of pandemic regulations on individual identity and social life. Taking readers back to the beginning of the pandemic, Cheung outlines the initial panic brought by rumors of the new virus that gripped the public, which gave rise to the obsessive practice of mask wearing. Behind masks, Cheung states, people became unrecognizable and experienced a radical disconnect from their own bodies, writing, “When facial features are lost, all facial expressions and speech simultaneously lose their function and meaning, as if what inhales and exhales under a mask is not a nose and mouth, but merely a lump of unfamiliar meat chunks” (Cheung 51), which displays people’s inability to express themselves with their faces obscured. “Communication itself has become frail and powerless, its only remaining purpose being to dampen the cloth [of a mask]” (Cheung 51), he writes further, observing that speaking failed to fulfill its social functions and instead became unhygienic, as evidenced by the imagery of dirtying a mask with one’s spit. Cheung writes about social distancing, another pandemic regulation that creates more isolation, saying, “1.5 meters of distance, like porcupines who want to seek warmth from each other, but are unable to do so” (51).

With COVID-19 having spread to the US and most of the world by the time of this piece’s publication, Cheung crafts a narrative of being isolated and depersonalized under pandemic restrictions, yet feeling connected to others around the world by the shared fear of and exposure to the pandemic itself, marking the transcendence of his individual, subjective experiences with identity and physicality to a global, collective experience that many can relate to. He concludes with the image, “I wandered under the dimming daylight, imagining a pair of wings sprouting out of my back so I could fly towards the sun, not to challenge the world, not to trespass upon divinity, but only to properly sanitize [myself], for myself and for the world” (Cheung 52). The irony of this hopeful wish is its impossibility, as Cheung turns to escapism in the face of this seemingly never-ending pandemic, which reflects his powerlessness amid the circumstances he and the rest of the world have found themselves in.