Gan Ye on Covid Grief and Anger

Gan Ye, “They Survived the Pandemic, but Suffer because of the Unacknowledged Deaths”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated below is a journalistic study of how many Chinese people reacted to the deaths of their parents or relatives in the period immediately following the relaxation of China’s zero-covid policy in December of 2022.  When I visited China in May of 2023 for the first time since the pandemic, many young people spoke to me passionately about how the end of zero-covid had challenged their basic view of the state, which they had previously assumed to be basically competent and caring, but which proved itself in this instance to be the exact opposite, even as it demanded that the people whistle a happy tune and look to an ever more glorious future.  The crisis seemed almost existential to some of people I talked to:  how were they meant to live their lives in the face of such hypocrisy? 
 
At the time, I recall feeling embarrassed to not have known the extent of the suffering China had experienced, but at the same time I did not know how to keep in touch with how the issue evolved, since the theme is taboo in the Mainland Chinese media context.  The text translated here gave me the opportunity to do that.
 
“They Survived the Pandemic, but Suffer because of the Unacknowledged Deaths” was published in December of 2024 in Initium, a Chinese-language journal now located in Singapore, having moved there from Hong Kong in 2022 after changes to press freedom laws.  Initium is a rare Chinese-language outlet that is uncensored, reaches a wide Sinophone public, and publishes a range of journalistic genres, from first-person essays to more hard-hitting investigations. They cover many political topics that are rarely covered anywhere else in depth these days (one example is this essay on what it was like to report on years of court cases of the 'Hong Kong 47').  The text translated here is perhaps less hard-hitting, a familiar form of feature writing in which stories are told through the lives and experiences of particular individuals.  This kind of journalism is not unique to China or the Sinophone world, and can be very effective if well done (This American Life, the gold-standard for podcasts, often practices a similar type of journalism).
 
The journalist who researched and wrote this piece is Gan Ye甘叶, who as yet does not have much of an Internet footprint (it might well be a pen name).  The piece is part of Initium's feature-reporting mentorship program in which the journalist worked with the newsroom to hone her skills as a feature reporter. 
 
Her research method in this piece was to seek out and join bereavement groups on WeChat devoted to the discussion of relatives who died following the end of China’s zero-covid policy.  WeChat is a social media platform very similar to WhatsApp and generally preferred in China.  On both platforms, it is common for people to belong to multiple groups:  family groups, friend groups, and special purpose groups like bereavement groups.  Participation in such groups is generally anonymous and voluntary; users do not have to become friends with other members and can set the application to passive mode where they consult the group only when they want to and do not receive message notifications.  It is not specified in the text exactly where Gan Ye is physically, but her parents appear to live in China.  The bereavement groups are apparently very common, so Gan simply networked her way to a few groups, joined them, and tried to befriend members, after which she would interview them by telephone.
 
Gan Ye tells her story through a number of individuals whose stories illustrate the broader themes she wants to explore.  The chief themes are of course grief and anger.  Most of the participants in the bereavement groups Gan Ye explored were women in their 40s, whose parents would have been in their 60s or 70s.  China’s life expectancy is 79, so a sudden death at 65 or 70 would have been totally unexpected, experienced as much as a theft as a loss.  The intensity of the grief struck me repeatedly. I’m 66.  Would my sons mourn me in the same way if I were taken away in a covid epidemic?
 
Grief naturally led to anger at the medical establishment and at the Chinese state, because even though the pandemic was ongoing since 2020, the state was woefully unprepared, hospitals were swamped, doctors did not know what to do, there was not enough medicine…And the authorities continued to insist that Omicron was not the coronavirus and was just a bad cold, even as hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions died in the months following the change in policy.  For many people, Omicron did indeed turn out to be just a bad cold (as was the case with the coronavirus), but for many it wasn’t, and everyone in the bereavement group had lived through the latter experience.
 
The grief led to calls for justice and for explanations and apologies.  One group member spent an entire year going from one government office to another, refusing to cremate his father until justice was done.  He ultimately received some money but no explanation and let his claim drop, feeling guilty even as he did so. 
 
Most members did not dare confront the authorities directly, and the group chats became forums where they vented their anger.  Some portrayed themselves as downtrodden “ordinary people” ignored and exploited by the higher-ups with access to better information and effective medications.  More frequent was the practice of “review” where everyone exchanged detailed information about their experience with their relatives, with the hospitals, with the state, and with death.  Review did not render justice as much as solace, as some group members concluded that they had done all that they could – which of course in some cases only made them angrier at the state.
 
The piece is strongest in its exploration of the emotional torment people experienced and how they sought to deal with their pain.  Much of the emotional work is done online and with relative strangers; China in the 21st century appears no longer to be a country of extended families.  Many group members talked of feeling completely alone, because immediate family members – like society as a whole – simply wanted to move on.  Only online could they find kindred spirits.
 
Gan Ye’s piece also touches on issues of feminism, resistance, and spirituality, among other things.  I highly recommend it.
 
I found Gan Ye’s piece through Tabitha Speelman’s excellent Suipian newsletter, where she seeks out examples of contemporary Chinese writing that are worth reading.  Please sign up to Tabitha’s Substack.  You won’t regret it!
​
My thanks to Tabitha, to Lulu Ning, editor of Initium, and to Gan Ye for their help with getting the translation right.
 
Translation
 
The Abandoned Antelope
 
Xingxing told her ten-year-old son a story about a herd of migrating African antelopes. One day, one of the antelopes got hurt. The others encouraged the injured animal and tried to help it stay on its feet, but they found that it was impossible and that the antelope just couldn't get up. The other antelopes had to carry on and left the fallen antelope behind. "Your mother is an abandoned antelope," said Xingxing.

These abandoned antelopes gather together deep in the forests of WeChat friend groups.  Young antelopes need the guidance of older animals to acknowledge their kinship before they can enter this hidden stronghold.

"This is a temporary haven into which everyone can freely enter, choosing the healing path that suits them without any psychological burden," Xingxing, the administrator, wrote on the group bulletin board.

December 7, 2022 – the date is branded in her memory. On that day, without the slightest warning, the government issued the "New Ten Articles" announcing the relaxation of covid controls, or in other words the abandonment of the three-year long policy of zero-covid. 

This was a sudden policy change. On December 6, many cities were still requiring citizens to report their covid test results on a daily basis. In the month that followed the relaxation, an epidemic exploded across the country, and on December 25, China's National Health Commission announced that it would stop counting the number of infections, which it had been doing for nearly three years.
On the eighth day after the announcement of the end of zero-covid, Zhong Nanshan, an expert epidemiologist, said in a talk broadcast live that the current wave of Omicron "should not be called COVID-19, because there are no symptoms of pneumonia...It would be better to call it a 'COVID-19 cold.'" Zhong’s talk was diffused via official media such as the People's Daily and the China News Network. On the Internet, some netizens drew cute cartoons of COVID-19 infection symptoms, jokingly calling them “the plain rice” strain, the "dramatic weight loss” strain and the "I’ve got to study” strain. The memes and humor spread quickly on social platforms and downplayed the seriousness of Omicron.[2]
 
It was not until they visited the hospital that some people realized something was wrong. "The difference between the hospital and the outside world was the difference between heaven and hell," someone in the group recalled.
 
A week after the policy was relaxed, Xingxing's father caught covid. Because official propaganda said that it was merely a "bad cold," Xingxing’s parents kept the news from her so that she would not worry.  By the time Xingxing found out a few days later that her father was having trouble breathing, most of the big local hospitals were already overcrowded. She phoned around and called in some favors and finally visited four hospitals before she found an empty bed. A subsequent CT scan showed that 30% of her father's lungs had white shadows due to lesions (commonly known as "white lung" symptoms). On January 24, 2023, the third day of the Chinese New Year, Xingxing's father passed away.
 
There are more than 150 people in this WeChat group, all of whom are part of bereaved families who lost someone following the change in covid policy. Some of their parents heeded the government's propaganda and isolated at home after falling ill, eventually dying there; some got to the hospital in time, but the hospital's antiviral drugs were long gone, and their initially mild symptoms got worse; some families were living abroad, and the parent of one group member returned to China to visit relatives and friends during the pandemic and got sick and died.
 
Drug shortages, home isolation, white lung - such terms were quickly forgotten as covid became a memory that Chinese society urgently needed to shake off as it moved forward. From time to time, there were online calls for people not to forget, but even in such calls, there was a clear narrative distinction between light and dark:  the lockdown period was regarded as a kind of collective trauma, but no one talked about what happened when the policy was terminated, so no consensus view emerged.

There is another kind of pain hidden just beneath the surface. "I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, I’m glad that the three-year pandemic is finally over, but at the same time I paid a high price," said Pipi, a group member whose grandmother died in the Omicron epidemic. "I accept that we are the unfortunate people who paid that price, but I still need justice, I want someone to recognize what we suffered."
 
It's not that group members haven’t tried to talk about this through other channels.  Xingxing made an online comment wondering if the government hadn’t relaxed things too quickly, and someone left a comment saying that people couldn’t take the lockdowns anymore, that they had to change the policy. Someone else sent her a private message saying:  “Too bad for you, the rest of us are fine.  Wonder why it happened only to your father?”  "If this person were in front of me, I would definitely give him a slap," Xingxing said. More often, however, family posts related to "sickness and death following the end of zero-covid" were viewed by online platforms as violating national laws [and suppressed].
 
As time goes on, Xingxing increasingly feels that the pandemic left everyone in two separate worlds:  the bereaved and those still suffering the lasting effects of the disease on one hand  - and everyone else in the other.  She rarely brings up covid anymore in daily life, because if she does, everyone else gets annoyed, thinking “why is she still hung up on that?”
 
But in the WeChat group of these family members, the abandoned and lonely antelope finally found its kin
 
Being an “LBX”[3] in the Virtual World
 
“Not that you’re bourgeois, but if your family income is more than 1 million RMB (approx. 140,000$US) then you’re not an ordinary person”
 
Sister Fen fearlessly sent me a voice message right after I added her as a friend, saying: "Our parents (the parents of the people in our group) were killed by the state."
 
Sister Fen is older than most members in the group and calls group members "fellow sufferers." As a Party member, during the lockdown of Shanghai in 2022, she signed up to be a community volunteer for seven months and received an honorary certificate from the neighborhood committee. She posted this experience on her social media account, and in in the accompanying photo, she is wearing protective clothing while she distributes food and administers covid tests.  She raises her fist to the camera against a backdrop where we read the words “Let’s go!”  “We will win the battle against the pandemic in no time, and when spring flowers bloom we’ll all give each other a big hug!” she wrote. 
 
Before the arrival of spring, Sister Fen's father and mother-in-law had both died following the end of zero-covid. Someone left a mocking comment under her post saying:  "Did we ask for your help?" She did not reply but took a screenshot of the comment and saved it on her phone. She thought the person was right.
 
"They died in the prime of their lives," she said of the deaths of her parents.
 
In the two years that have since passed, what Sister Fen has been unable to let go of is that families have received no explanation from the state about the crazy numbers of deaths, nor a moment of public silence or an apology.
 
How many people died when the policy was relaxed? Group members have different ideas, some saying five million, some more than ten, but these are far from what government data say. According to statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 83,000 died from covid in hospitals in the two months following the relaxation of the policy.  By contrast, on the basis of the research of four teams of epidemiologists, the New York Times estimated that between one and one and a half million may have died during those two months.  In July of 2023, the Zhejiang Provincial Government issued a report stating that the number of cremated bodies in the first quarter of that year had increased by 72% year-on-year. The report was quickly suppressed.
 
Group members have concluded that the government lied about the data because the relatives of most group members were not recognized by hospitals as having died of covid. Qiuran is one of these group members. Her father had no preexisting conditions before his death and sought medical treatment only after contracting covid. Prior to his death, his nucleic acid test turned negative, and the doctors decided that they could not list covid as the cause of death, which also meant that Qiuran would not receive full reimbursement for treatment as stipulated by local regulations. "The doctors all said that they were treating him for covid, so how could it not be the cause of his death?”  But Qiuran did not have the energy to argue. At that time, the cremation list at the funeral home was long, and she had to deal with details like this.
 
Qiuran is not an exception. In the death certificates obtained by most people in the group, covid is not listed as the main cause of death. Instead, their parents and relatives died from "severe pneumonia" or "cardiac arrest."  Doctors gave different explanations for this. Some say that people who died of covid could not go through normal funeral procedures, so they were doing the relatives a favor by fibbing on the death certificate; others are more straightforward and say that they were following instructions from “above.”
 
"It is a man-made disaster that will never be admitted," someone in the group commented, "This time, ordinary people are not acknowledged or even counted as data."
 
In the group’s chat history, the term "lbx" must appear thousands of times. This is not like one of the politically sensitive words that people assume to be monitored by WeChat, but everyone tacitly decided to use the abbreviation. The group has family members in all walks of life:  civil servants, unemployed people, nurses, chefs in restaurants, overseas immigrants. After the relaxation of covid policy, all of these people unexpectedly came to share the same fate, what they called in the group being “ordinary people,” which they abbreviated as lbx. 
 
"People have always said that politics is dirty, but I thought, well, we are just ordinary lbx, so at the worst our taxes will be a little higher, but we’ll stay clean.  But who knew that the lbx would be deprived even of the right to survive?" Someone wrote on the group chat.
 
How do we define ordinary people?  “Looking at the line between ordinary people and non-ordinary people, it’s not that you are not an ordinary person because you are middle class, or because you make more than a million RMB a year,” says Xingxing.  Xingxing is 34 years old and was born in a small county town in east China but has been working for a state-owned enterprise in the city for two years, which has enabled her to buy a car and house and to raise two children.  She used to believe that hard work could change your fate, but the pandemic led her to change her mind.
 
Xingxing believes that what separates ordinary people from non-ordinary people has nothing to do with class status but is instead related to a political barrier which is much more difficult to break through:  “Those who were able to get their hands on enough information to provide their family with the resources they needed – before the announcement of the end of the zero-covid policy.  The ordinary people are those who cannot do this.”
 
The group chat is full of ideas whose origin and reliability are unclear:  that the end of zero-covid was actually a government plan to reduce the burden of pensions on the economy, or that some high-level officials knew what was coming and stocked early up on Paxlovid (a covid drug developed by Pfizer in the United States) before it became expensive and hard to find.  In any event, all of those who joined this group chat are ordinary people who have been ”abandoned by the country” regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
 
Prior to joining this group, Xingxing had belonged to another ordinary bereavement group, but people in the group had lost their family members for different reasons, and these differences created discord and arguments. So in the end she decided to return to the covid family group, because even if people’s ages and backgrounds were different, most everyone had come to believe that the illness and death that occurred after zero-covid was discarded were not examples of the normal “birth, aging, illness, and death” experienced by individuals, but instead a collective "man-made disaster."
 
"Had it been a car wreck or some other accidental death, we would have had an explanation, but our parents were guiltless and died from a man-made disaster. This is really too unfair. They suffered and no one was held accountable. This is what I can’t let go of," a group member said.
 
In the face of this prolonged man-made disaster, the group members are still waiting for an “answer,” or an explanation.  “When people die, there has to be a reason, otherwise it is simply too unjust.” Some people call this “justice,” and say that “it’s too bad that we lbx have been treated like fools, that people have paid with their lives and there is still no justice for them.”
 
According to the anthropologist Xiang Biao, calling themselves lbx is part of the "political vernacular" of ordinary people. He notes that doing this expresses the people's moral demands on the government, even if the term “ordinary people” might seem less “mature” than the term “citizen.”  Within the group, the moral claims they want to make on authorities are more directly related to what they call “injustice.”  Sister Fen told me that everyone's parents died "unjustly." She repeatedly told the group how her father was a Party member and a cadre in a state-owned enterprise, and showed everyone her father's advanced worker certificate, "but despite all that, my father had no idea why he died."
 
Some family members, including Sister Fen, were angry that the country had "cheated" the ordinary people.  They saw their dead parents as a generation sharing common points: they were all born in period between the 1930s and 1950s and experienced the early years of the New China. Some of them worked in the Construction Corps, in state-owned enterprises or in the public education system. "The country will not cheat us," a group member's father said when he heard the news of the end of zero-covid, telling his child not to worry. He believed that the policy was the result of careful consideration by China’s authorities. "I wonder if they are sad in the new world where they find themselves, having been cheated by the gj (note: guojia/国家the country) they always trusted,” said this group member eight months after losing his father. 
 
At the same time, their parents were accustomed to self-sacrifice and forbearance, which to a certain extent encouraged the spread of "silent pneumonia." A group member remembered that when he himself was quarantined in his own room, his father had insisted on coming in to bring him food and open the window. Later, when his father got sick, he always said that it was nothing until the family's blood oxygen meter sounded an alarm during a test, at which point the family realized the severity of the father's condition.
 
“Three years of famine during the Great Leap Forward, ten years of Cultural Revolution, family planning in the 1980s, and death from covid after the relaxation of the policy.” Some people summed up their parents' lives in this way.
 
Review

"At least this group feels our pain."
 
When Qiuran applied to join the group in January last year, she did it out of confusion: "At that time, I just couldn't understand why the more they treated them the worse they got." Before that, she had looked at various COVID-19 cases on Xiaohongshu,[4] hoping to find people with similar experiences.
 
But finding people with similar experiences did not mean the end of her pain. Qiuran soon plunged into a fierce review discussion. On the group chat, "review" refers to family members’ recalling and analyzing their experiences in the period following the end of zero-covid. When I joined the group in March 2023, there could be hundreds of group messages about review every day, and the discussions lasted from six in the morning until two at night.
 
The review process truly did help family members clarify certain things, so that what had originally looked to be chaotic or idiosyncratic came into focus following group discussions, illustrating that many experiences were not isolated cases.  They now could see that the harm inflicted by covid had been downplayed in government propaganda, the word “coronavirus” was not allowed to appear on death certificates, and hospitals had not stocked enough medications.  The originally scattered, individual deaths became collective deaths as different people shared their stories.
 
After exchanging information with the group, Qiuran found that she had been lagging behind all along. Her knowledge of covid over the past three years had all come from mainstream propaganda, and on the day the policy change was announced in late December, she and her colleagues talked about it at lunch as if it were a news item, without thinking that they should be figuring out how to get their hands on medications or masks. After her father fell ill, Qiuran thought that once she got him to the hospital everything would be fine but soon discovered that the nurses did not know how to set up the high-flow oxygen equipment. It was not until her father's condition worsened that she realized the seriousness of the problem and that it was up to her to go online to find the information she needed.   And it was only after joining the WeChat group that she managed to learn more about covid medications and indicators. 
 
"It’s painful not to review, but it’s even more painful to review," as someone put it. Information sharing brought new regrets. When carrying out their reviews, everyone confessed their guilt for sending their parent to the hospital too late, or not managing to procure medicine in time, or sending them – or not - to the ICU. As the number of people in the group increased, people were able to get a sense of where their regrets situated in comparison to others. Qiuran freely admitted that she secretly looked forward to the comfort brought by this kind of comparison.
 
"There is another kind of relief, I don’t know quite how to put it," Qiuran hesitated before saying. "You perhaps get a little comfort from people who have had the same experience as you...Those who understood things better and tried more things, and maybe even found a better doctor, but the same thing still happened to them in the end."
 
Comparison allowed people to establish a psychological frame of reference.  On one axis, Xingxing often stood out as an object of comparison, because she was recognized as having gone all out: she procured a scarce ECMO device (also known as an "extracorporeal membrane oxygenator") for her father, asked her company for a full month of time off to take care of him, and paid 700,000 RMB (approx. $96,000USD) for his treatment.
 
Unlike most people who were slow to catch on, Xingxing understands medical care and reacts quickly. In late November 2022, an anti-lockdown protest march took place in China, and Xingxing immediately sensed the imminent end of the zero-covid policy . She told her parents to stay home as much as possible, but they didn’t take her seriously. At the end of December, when her father fell ill and was hospitalized, Xingxing contacted a friend in Beijing and asked her to buy Paxlovid for her. Because express delivery had been suppressed, she had her friend take the high-speed rail overnight to deliver the medicine to the city where her father was hospitalized.
 
"As I took the first steps, I was already thinking through what was coming next." She knew that it was a race against death. In her memory, the hospital at that time was a hellhole: sick doctors dragging their IVs with them to check on patients, six corpses carried out of the emergency room in one night…The morgue had no room for them and could only pile them up in the corridor. Yet Xingxing dared not relax. She stayed with her father throughout the whole process, recorded his vital signs every four hours, and listed the changes in his condition in an Excel table to plan the next treatment strategy. Before the run on medications, she had stocked up, and some of what she had bought was still in the hospital’s cold storage when her father died.
 
Despite their shared misfortune, group members are still ordinary people, and disagreements and conflicts are inevitable as they carry out their reviews.
 
The age of the those who died became a sensitive topic. Some of the parents that died were in their 90s, and the children of those whose parents had died younger sometimes became irritated at group members mourning the passing of their elderly parents, saying that they “didn’t know how good they had it” and that they were “rubbing salt in their wounds.” Qiuran once quit a family group because someone kept retelling the details of hospital scenes, which reminded her of her father's hospitalization. As part of their daily “remembrance” of their dead father, some group members cursed the politicians every time, which some people couldn't bear: "If you’re such hot stuff, then go kill a few of them.  If you do that, you’ll be a hero, but until then, shut the fuck up while you’re in the group."
 
At the same time, suspicions were on the rise. Some people questioned the "toxicity" of covid vaccines, and others speculated that the coronavirus was part of a plan to cleanse the global population. Opportunists took advantage, hawking cures and selling drugs, claiming that they knew how to prevent the aftereffects of covid or the side effects of vaccinations. Xingxing kicked these people out of the group as soon as she saw what they were doing, but some group members inevitably got taken. "Wherever there’s a wound, there are always flies and mosquitoes to suck the blood," she said.
 
Gradually, some people called for an end to the review process. Having been involved in the group for the better part of a year, Qiuran herself was a little fed up with it: "You can talk all you want without arriving at a resolution. You just get more irritated and regretful... Life has to go on, and you have to look forward. There is nothing you can do if you always look back."
 
But Xingxing didn’t agree. She believes that whether it is review ending in "self-torture" or an expression of hatred for the decision-makers, they are different ways for people to try to come to terms with things.
 
People’s views of the group began to divide into two camps. Those who left the group used words like “depression” and "negative energy," pointing out that memories and regrets cannot change how things are. Among the people who stayed, however, the group was said to be "warm" and "tolerant."
 
Xingxing belongs to those who stayed: "Even if talking about our pain and sharing all sorts of advice was of no real help, at least this group acknowledged our pain and respected our right to express it." As people came and went and time passed, she observed that those who stayed reached a certain tacit understanding. Rather than encouraging each other to move forward, they often "accepted that people still have things they cannot work through." She regarded this as the difference between the WeChat group and real life:  people outside the group told her to look to the future, and only people in the group understand why that was not yet possible.
 
Sister Fen's friends hoped that she could get over the pain as soon as possible and advised her to quit the group. Her answer was:  "Why should I want to quit? We are a big family and we share our warmth."
 
The man who walked out of the cave

"Who is Guo Jia?"
  
Looking back on things now, Xingxing has concluded that due to their lack of experience in treating covid and to the numbers of patients, doctors did not have a detailed plan for the treatment of the sick, but instead handed the initiative to family members, which meant that they had to make many medical decisions on their own.
 
Many family members had no idea what choices to make. One group member told me that she immediately regretted her decision to send her father to the ICU.  She did not know that the ICU would not allow family members to be with the patient, nor that the intubation treatment would mean that they would not be able to not speak. It was not until her father died that she learned from a doctor that no covid patient who entered the ICU during this period survived.
 
Before her father died, Xingxing had located a lung transplant team, but her mother persuaded her to abandon this and had her forcibly interned for reasons of mental instability.  By the time she was discharged two months later, her father had already been cremated. Subsequently, she discovered the covid family group in a private message on Zhihu, and this group soon became her sole communication channel.
 
"I would like someone to tell me what I did wrong, but at the same time I'm afraid they will point to a particular decision I made." In the six months following her father’s death, Xingxing hardly spoke to the people in her life, including her husband and children, but instead spent her time online with the WeChat group. She asked everyone the same question: “What did you do at the time?”

The discovery of people with the same experience did not bring answers but instead led to new insoluble problems. As the group members expanded from the 30+ who had been there when she joined to more than one hundred, Xingxing found that she was unique, because her review told her that, in terms of the treatment her father received, she had nothing to regret.  This became the source of her pain – that she had tried everything but failed to save her father, meaning that she had nothing specific to pin her feelings of regret on.
 
Over time, Xingxing began to believe that the one percent she could not do was simply fate. Watching everyone carry out their reviews day after day, Xingxing came to feel that no one knew how to treat covid, but she didn't post this in the chat box, and simply gradually faded out of the review discussions.  "People believe what they want to believe," she thought, and she chose to believe that covid deaths were related to genes. Putting it a different way, she decided that “genes are destiny."
 
But not everyone came to the same conclusion. One group member proposed that the group sit in front of the government building as a form of collective protest, or to hold a real life memorial service, but there were few responses. Some said that they worked for the government and would lose their pensions if they got in trouble; some had children to raise and could not afford to lose their jobs. "It's not that I don't want to, who doesn't want to?  It’s just that in a national disaster like this you have to accept your bad luck."

Tang Wei went the furthest in seeking justice. "If they want justice, family members must first stand up and ask for it, because just waiting for the country to deliver it is basically impossible," Tang Wei said to the group, "Chinese people are very strange, and all swallow their anger in the end. Only when we cease to do that will our human rights have a chance to work." After his father died, Tang Wei spent more than a year appealing the case to the local Health Commission.
 
When I first came into contact with Tang Wei, he gave the same impression as other group members, speaking confidently and frankly. After graduating from technical secondary school, he had gone to a big city to find a job. During the pandemic, he was unemployed and lived at home for two years. He said he wasn’t worried about other family members. "I was already so poor that I can't afford to eat. What did I have to be afraid of? I was just keeping my head down and trying to move forward."
 
The "justice" that Tang Wei wants is not economic compensation, but a kind of explanation for his father’s death. His demands are very clear: in addition to holding the hospital accountable for negligence, he wants the government to explain and apologize for the lack of preparedness that marked the end of zero-covid.
 
He had no connections, so he started by looking at public service videos put together by legal bloggers on Douyin [the Chinese version of TikTok]. He called the municipal citizen complaint hotline, wrote petitions, and squatted in government buildings. He rejected the compensation proposed by the Medical Dispute Mediation Committee and asked the Joint Prevention and Control Department to provide him with an explanation. To put pressure on the government, he overcame a huge sense of guilt and did not cremate his father's body during this year.
 
As he talked about the details of his appeal, he became unusually anxious. This emotion initially came from the repeated setbacks in the appeal process. For example, when the bureaucrat in charge of his petition told him he could not find the department above him that should address the issue, Tang got angry and said, "Do I have to run and jump off the building to get you to do something?" For more than a year, he stayed at home alone except for visiting one government department after another. He realized that something was wrong with him and went to the hospital and was diagnosed with depression.
 
Relatives and friends all advised him to give up, but people in the group gave him more support. Some admired his courage and praised the clarity of his thinking; some were encouraged and asked him to talk about his appeal experience. From time to time, family members asked him about the latest progress. He was like the first person to walk out of the cave, and people were curious about how far he could go.
 
But Tang Wei was an exception. Most people did not think about taking risks, just as few people used their real names in the group as Tang did, and family members had their own practical concerns. Outside of consulting medical issues, Qiuran never friended group members, because she "didn't want to bring the group too much into my everyday life." The anonymity of group chats makes people feel at ease, and individuals seem to deliberately keep a distance. I felt the existence of boundaries many times when I tried to set up times to talk to group members: some people showed resistance to my approach, and only a few accepted my friend requests; some people changed their minds or stopped responding after agreeing to interviews; interviews were always in the form of telephone calls, and family members were worried that showing their face might be risky in terms of life offline.
 
However, the group is no safer than the outside world. WeChat's censorship rules are not transparent, and anything you say may cause problems. Several people have been warned by the police about what they say in group. Once, when everyone was talking about decision-makers, a group member typed out the abbreviation of the name [of a well-known figure]. Before long, the police called her to the police station, closed the group, admonished her, and asked her to write a letter promising to never do that again. The name of that person could not be mentioned, and the abbreviation is not allowed. This is the red line as seen by the police.
 
In order to prevent the group from disappearing again, group members started self-censoring.  The member known as "Remembering my father" loves to discuss politics and is one of the people in the group who communicates most frequently. After being invited by the police to "drink tea,"[5] he became sensitized and asked people to take down their posts if they spoke too directly. Later still, he began contributing a great deal to the group once again but began used encoded language: "sacrifice" became "xs" [xisheng/牺牲], "covid" became "new g disease d" [xinguan bingdu/新馆病毒], and "elderly people" "lnr" [laonianren/老年人]. His posts became more and more obscure, and few group members responded, so he gradually fell into a kind of soliloquy.
 
Sometimes, self-censoring produced jokes.
 
A group member once described his experience this way:  "My father used to be very obedient to Guo Jia 郭嘉 and fought hard (against the disease), but things went bad when he went to the hospital.  I don't want to believe that my Guo Jia is so heartless...I used to love Guo Jia so much (three tearful emojis), and now I feel sad and betrayed."
 
Someone replied: "Just a quick question, who is Guo Jia?" [guojia/国家 is the Chinese word for “country”;  Guo/郭 is a common Chinese surname and Jia/嘉 is a common Chinese name.  The play on words is obvious].
 
The underworld
 
“Why are the big spoons only used to fish out the lower-class people?”
 
Li Yang often dreams about her father, who blames her for not giving him medicine, which led to his death. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she shouts in her dream. “I’m sorry, Dad” later became her group nickname. She can’t accept that her father only lived to 70.
 
Memories and regrets are all jumbled together and Li Yang thought of Menggu as she looked for a way out. 
 
Group members often bring up Menggu, a Daoist medium who is said to be able to get in touch with the underworld. Menggu runs a Xiaohongshu account and provides services at different prices: offline service is 3,999 RMB [approx. $550USD], in which she invites the deceased to return the world of the living to talk for 10 minutes; online service is 299 RMB [approx. $41USD], in which she visits the deceased on behalf of the living and provides feedback through a WeChat text; for 79 RMB [approx. $11USD] she can burn spirit money on behalf of the family members, a gesture which can make the deceased appear in the dreams of family members.
 
One day in April last year, a group member said he paid Menggu 3999 RMB and that he really heard his deceased grandfather talking, telling him things to do that he didn’t have time to tell him before dying. He told everyone that he experienced a feeling of release and subsequently left the group. Although some people suspected that he was in cohoots with Menggu, Menggu still became popular in the group.
 
That night, Li Yang read the Xiaohongshu message sent by Menggu from beginning to end. Another world, reincarnation, rebirth - she hoped that that all of it was true. She added Menggu to her WeChat and sent the 299 RMB to make an appointment for an online service. Menggu replied positively, and asked for her father's name, birth and death day, and then chose a propitious day, promising to help Li Yang travel to the underworld to see how her father was doing.
 
On the appointed day, Menggu texted Li Yang on WeChat. She said that she had gone to see her father, who was in a bad state, which is why he visited his daughter in her dreams. Menggu calculated the life span of Li Yang's father to be 70 years, which was exactly his age when he caught the coronavirus.
 
Menggu told Li Yang that her father's life span was fixed, which meant that it was over, and that if he hadn’t had covid, he would have died from something else.  Otherwise, the world of the living could not “accomodate him.” Li Yang asked whether you could save people if you knew their life spans in advance. Menggu replied that life and death are predestined and other people cannot change them.
 
"His time was up," Li Yang later said several times in the group chat.  She preferred to believe Menggu when she said, "No matter what you did he would have died anyway." This was her father's fate.
 
Menggu is a cheat, right?  People have different opinions, but even those who don't believe her still admit that Menggu's words are comforting. Over time, some people shared the feedback that came from Menggu’s visits to their relatives. In her telling, the underworld is very large, like a huge dorm for a big collective, divided into different halls and floors. There, the deceased parents who have completed their lifespans are assigned different residences and jobs by the underworld boss: some "build dormitories for newly arrived spirits" and others "look after the material needs for the infant spirits on their floor."   In any event, every deceased person has a place in this world. Menggu once told Li Yang that the living should not constantly mourn the dead, because excessive nostalgia emanating from the living will make the soul of the dead spin in place, consuming energy and suffering.  This made Li Yang feel that Menggu is adept at counseling.
 
There were too many things left unsaid. People never expected that the coronavirus would strike their loved ones dead within a month, nor that the sick would die while wearing an oxygen mask or in the ICU where relatives weren’t allowed.   Some people sought out Menggu to ask if their deceased mother in the underworld had any instructions to impart or whether “she blamed me.”  Someone sent Menggu the words they wanted to say to their father and asked her to convey it to him on his birthday. One  group member claimed to be a "materialist," but after her father passed away, she began to consult Menggu's writings and search out fortune tellers on WeChat to learn about her father’s current condition. "I will never believe that my father is nothing but a handful of ashes," she said. "I must believe that there is another world."
 
Not even Menggu could escape the consequences of the end of zero-covid, even if she does claim to be able to travel through the underworld. Menggu once said online that she had family members who had contracted covid after the relaxation of the policy.  She calculated their life spans and finally gave up on having them intubated.
 
Menggu provided another explanation for the huge numbers of deaths.
 
"That many people refuse to accept those covid deaths, that they are unhappy, that they mourn the deaths, I understand, because I also lost family members during this period.  But you shouldn’t say that your family members had no preexisting conditions and that it makes no sense that they died while others didn’t.”   Menggu wrote this on Xiaohongshu, and the post was quickly forwarded to the WeChat group.
 
In Menggu's explanation, the deaths caused by the end of zero covid were in fact the underworld’s "collecting people" whose life span was up. Whoever was swept up in the collection was taken away, regardless of whether they were good or bad. "It's like a big spoon scooping people out of the bowl, and once it’s full it takes them away."
 
However, not everyone accepts the explanation of fate. "Why did the spoon take only ordinary people?  Isn’t this discrimination?" someone in the group asked.
 
Eve hates all the group talk about "fate."  Her grandmother died of covid, and her mother said it was her grandmother's fate. Eve thought it was ridiculous, and she scolded others in her group for their inaction. After consulting scientific papers and a relative who is a virologist studying in the United States, she concluded that the attending doctor had erred in not providing medicine to her grandmother soon enough. In December of last year, she formally sued the doctor and asked him to resign. "I don't believe in fate, it's a man-made disaster," she told the group.
 
Some people admired Eve's courage, but not everyone can identify a clearly responsible party. Moreover, even they blame the government or the hospital, there is still no answer as to why their parents died among the many who fell ill.
 
In the endless process of group review, Rita almost lost it. If the death of her mother is to be considered a "man-made disaster," she played her role in causing it.  At the start of the pandemic, she made it a point to send her 60-something mother overseas. A few months later, she thought things had calmed down and brought her mother back to China. Not long thereafter, her mother caught covid and died. Rita once "lost her mind reviewing the case", but now she has stopped torturing herself. As for the group saying that covid is a man-made disaster and not fate, she has started to believe that what we call a man-made disaster is also a kind of fate, because "only if you believe in fate do you stop feeling like the bad guy."
 
Blaming the deaths on fate has become a way for people in the group to comfort each other - it provides a transcendent explanation for this man-made disaster that cannot be officially explained. Fate means different things to different people, and believing in fate prevents them from falling into constant rumination.
 
"Everything is fate, and it has nothing to do with people," a person nicknamed "I miss my dad forever" sighed in the group. But the next moment he said: "I hate myself. If I had been more careful, maybe my dad would still be here."
 
Survivors and victims

"Those miserable years seemed to disappear overnight."
 
When a pandemic strikes, the responsibility ultimately falls on each family and the trauma generated by the pandemic can only be digested within the family. The conundrum is that home is often a place where death is not discussed.
 
The group chat consists of people in their thirties and forties, most of whom are married women with children. Unlike the men in the group, who rarely talk about their families, women often talk about their husbands and children in the group chats. As caregivers, their responsibilities always guide their actions, even if those responsibilities are sometimes unbearable.
 
Qiuran mentioned frictions with her husband many times in the group chat. She is 42 years old, an only child and the mother of two.  Outside of work, she takes care of the whole family: early last year, she was busy taking care of her son who had covid and overlooked her father's condition; she subsequently took leave from work to take care of her father during the thirteen days that he was hospitalized. After her father passed away, her mother moved in with Qiuran.
 
As time went by, it became difficult to mention her father's death at home. Qiuran sometimes talked about it with her mother, but she didn't dare to mention it too much, for fear that her mother would be sad. She asked her son if he missed his grandfather, but the 14-year-old boy stayed silent and showed no emotion.
 
As for her husband, the two were in sync at the beginning. When her father was in the hospital, Qiuran stayed with him as much as she could, and her husband helped find medicine and bring food. The differences emerged after her father died. At first when Qiuran would talk about her father at home, her husband would comfort her, but after three months he lost patience and said enough was enough. In addition, there were inevitable frictions when her mother came to stay, and during one fight, her husband told it was time to get over things. The two had a cold war for several days.
 
"I don't even talk to my husband now, we just can’t communicate at all," Qiuran posted in the group, and several women said they had gone through the same thing and had to deal with their emotions on their own. Sometimes at work, when everyone was sitting in their cubicles, Qiuran cried silently for a while, and no one noticed.
 
Qiuran found that many people in the group said the same things about “having no one to talk to” and winding up “talking to themselves.”  "For example, when I remember how my father used to be, how the medicine worked at first, people with empathy might respond, but it’s more that I just want to talk about something, and if I find somewhere where I can do that, then I feel better.”
 
Xingxing is also the mother of two children. We have never met in person, but from the background noise I hear when I call her, I can tell that she is very busy.  Sometimes the only time she has to talk is when she is on her way to pick up her children from after-school activities, and when the kids need help with their homework, our talks come to an end. 
 
Over the past two years, she has turned everything over in her mind time and again, “thinking through every episode,” as she says.  Yet time has not brought healing, and she has merely grown accustomed to coexisting with the open wound. In every phone call, Xingxing is like a doctor holding a scalpel, calmly dissecting her life and explaining to me the gangrenous parts.
 
"You are still young and single, so you may not understand," she tells me. On the phone, she patiently explained how marriage and childbirth change a woman's identity.
 
She made a necklace out of her father’s hair, had his initials tattooed on her forearm, and has thought of him every day in the two years since he died.  But life cannot stop. In the real world, she described herself as "acting."  With her mother, she has to be a filial daughter; with her children, she has to be a responsible mother. In her own words, she "sees herself as an app.” "If my son can't do his homework, I have to help him right then, even if I was thinking about death just before he asked me.”
 
Her father was the person she loved the most. When she was six years old, her father took her on a bike ride and they ran into a tractor, and in the accident her father sacrificed a leg to save his daughter’s life.[6] Twenty-seven years later, she failed to save her father who was sick with covid, which dealt her a fatal blow.
 
She would talk to me without hesitation in front of her mother, husband and children. She didn't want to hide things from her family anymore. Once after she hung up, her mother told her not to talk about such things with people outside the family. Xingxing had once been concerned but finally felt that telling other people and having her words recorded might be an outlet. "I want people to know that my father was here," she said. 
 
Following her parents' expectations, she married at 22 and by 24 had two kids.   After her father died, she played the role too conscientiously, and her relatives seemed to forget that she was her father’s daughter before she became a wife and mother. They always told her, "You still have two sons, you have to cheer up." They didn't know that in the covid group chat she had confessed that she was "so tired of life that she wanted to throw up." Xingxing understood that her relatives meant well, but she no longer went to family events because she was afraid that everyone would feel uncomfortable.
"There’s no one I can talk to about this in my everyday life, including my family.  For everyone else, he’s just gone," Xingxing said.

Halfway through our talk, we were interrupted by her cat, mewing for attention. She told her husband that she was on the phone with a friend and asked him to take care of the cat so she could talk in peace. Then resumed our conversation and said half-jokingly:  “If I could do it, I would love to send both my husband and the cat packing.” 

Everyday responsibilities propelled her forward, but in fact she had never left the day her father died. Her nickname in the WeChat group is "Waiting for Dad to Come Home." On Xiaohongshu, she updates the number of days since her father’s death in her personal profile every day. She feels that she has become indifferent and closed to people around her.
 
But Xingxing knows that people in the group care about her. In her WeChat settings, the family bereavement group comes before her work group. People who have never met look after each other here. Xingxing has had covid several times, and last year when she was not on the group chat for several days, everyone asked about her, and some group members who live in the same city as Xingxing went to see her in the hospital. When she was depressed, she would ask who was available to chat, and someone would come immediately.  Even if she has nothing to say, she will show up in the group chat from time to time in order to wish everyone well.
 
But the problem is still there, and her real life identity continues to pull her down. The thread could snap at any time.
 
In October of this year, Xingxing had a chance to get away from her family. It was during the National Day holiday, and she took her family to a newly built-up part of the city to watch a light show. This area had been developed into a brand new commercial district following the demolition of a migrant quarter. That night, the area next to the river was crowded with tourists, and groups of high-rise buildings lit up one after another, spelling out the words "Celebrate the 75th Anniversary [of the People’s Republic],” while drones wrote love letters in the sky. At 8:30, the music fountain began, and the water rose and fell in time with Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Xingxing immediately recognized the song because it had been her father's mobile phone ringtone.
 
She suddenly had a thought, which was that if her father were there, he would certainly make his way over to her to say: “Look how cool your old dad is [for having Adele on his phone].”  But he wasn’t there. She looked around and saw her two children, playing with the bamboo dragonflies they had bought for 15 RMB, and her mother was smiling and taking videos of them. Everyone present was a covid survivor. They held up their mobile phones to take pictures, and their faces were filled with joy.
 
At that moment, a wave of anger strangled her. While everyone was celebrating the country’s 75th birthday, only she was thinking that her father didn’t make it that far, and that he should have. Even the happiness of her family became hard to take. "I have the false impression that those miserable years disappeared overnight... What hurts me the most is that these people who were not acknowledged or counted by the statistics have truly been forgotten by the world and have been tragically abandoned. They were erased, you know?"
 
When she couldn't digest her emotions, she chose to flee.
 
The next night, she went by herself to see her father. The cemetery is in the mountains in a nearby suburb; it took her an hour and a half  by subway and taxi. The cemetery was pitch dark at night. She used the flashlight on her cell to locate the tomb.
 
Xingxing’s father had been a math teacher in a county town throughout his entire life, and his tombstone is in the shape of a book. She leaned against her father’s tomb and sat down on the ground. The place was silent and empty, the most peaceful place in the world for Xingxing. Her own grave site is next to that of her father, her name already engraved on the tombstone.  She had decided on this when she arranged things for her father, but there were local regulations about buying tombs for people who are still alive. She was only able to buy it after having a heart attack, after the hospital issued the appropriate document.
 
The two graves are close together, and she is determined never to be separated from her father again. The temperature at night was only about 17 degrees. It had rained, and the air on the mountain was damp and cool. She lay quietly in the cemetery. The starry sky above was beautiful and bright, and she gazed at it for a long time.
 
This was not the first time she ran away. The first time, her son noticed that she was missing, and Xingxing's mother immediately called the police.  The cemetery manager went up the mountain to find her. After Xingxing got back home, her mother asked her why she was wallowing in despair, saying that this hurt her, the mother, very much.
 
Xingxing had not told her family that she was going, but she did tell people in the group chat. Later, people in the group asked her if she felt better and whether she dreamed of her father. "This is the difference between WeChat groups and real life," Xingxing said with a smile.
 
Epilogue: Those who left and those who stayed behind
 
In the stories of Xingxing and Qiuran, I often see my mother. Like them, she is both a mother and a daughter.
 
In late December of 2022, my mother’s father fell ill with covid. In the later stage of his hospitalization, my mother and aunt took turns, accompanying him 24 hours a day.  When covid gets into the lungs, the patient can slowly suffocate, as if drowning, and my grandfather asked his two daughters to comfort him on several occasions.
 
At the time, funeral homes were prohibited from organizing funerals. On the day my grandfather died, his family had to go home and wait for the cremation notice. Later on, like everyone else, we traveled and took selfies with smiling faces. We rarely mentioned those painful memories and there is a conspicuous gap in the photos.
 
The suspended farewell became a ghost in daily life. After cooking a meal, my mother would suddenly say, "It would be great if your grandfather was here." A few months ago, my aunt called my mother and told her that she saw someone who looked exactly like my grandfather while out doing errands. My mother and aunt, like most of those who are grieving covid losses in their daily lives, did not join a WeChat group to talk about their feelings.
 
These days, when I open my WeChat and see the 99+ messages and reminders in my family covid group, I often swipe down and look for another group to chat with. Whether or not to click on this group has become a constant, which means you are willing to return to the painful memories of two years ago, at the same moment that you are traveling in a newly reopened world or enjoying being with friends.
 
Some people choose not to return to the group chat. Some members who are determined to put the past behind them have left the group, usually without saying anything, which you can see in the number of people that appears after the group name. A few people will write a long message before leaving, encouraging other people to join them and leave the group when they can.  These messages are generally ignored and washed away in the flood of other comments.
 
Pipi set her group chat on “do not disturb” mode.  Once the pandemic was over, she went abroad to study and live for work reasons, and for a year has hardly shown herself in the group.  "It would be very painful to see the group again, because it will remind me of all those things, and can only affect my normal life negatively." Only now and then, when lying in bed late at night and can’t help herself will she open the chat, read all the messages from beginning to end, and then delete everything.

For Pipi, moving forward is not about getting over the pain, but about keeping the pain with her as she moves on. She once thought about quitting the group but chose to stay because she wanted to keep in touch, because after all, she’s not the only person in the world still sad about this.   After her grandmother died, Pipi had the feeling that her mother had shifted the focus of her life to Pipi, hoping to set her daughter’s life on a certain course. But Pipi found herself perplexed about concrete life choices:  whether to take the civil service exam after finishing university, whether to get married and have children.  But she has set her sights on one thing:  she wants to be a volunteer in a hospice ward. This idea came to her after her grandmother died in the hospital. She believes that when someone can no longer see a future, they should be able choose to leave with dignity, which will diminish the grief felt by their relatives.
 
Their experience with covid has affected mothers' expectations for the next generation.  One mother said that being a “helicopter mother” is “the only thing she still believes in.”   Having lived through the medication shortage that followed the end of the zero covid policy, she decided to make it possible for her child to “climb the class ladder.”  “They have to go to a top university, even if it is only to avoid sliding down the ladder.  It’s a kind of insurance, to keep being a screw in the social machine.”  She talks about her parenting views with other mothers in the group chat. She does not want her child to "fall into the middle-income trap" like her and has already planned a path for her seven-year-old son to study abroad.
 
Qiuran does not expect her children to stand out, and now thinks that as long as they’re healthy, it's fine. She occasionally chats with people in the group about family matters, such as how her mother became independent, or how they found lumps in her breast during a medical examination. But most of the time she steers clear of the group. I often see photos of her traveling with her children and doing handicrafts on her own personal WeChat friend group.
  
There are fewer group messages, and few new members. Xingxing feels that people are gradually leaving.  The group was shut down several times by authorities, and each time Xingxing set up a replacement group, many people declined her invitations to join, saying that they wanted to “look more to the future.”  Xingxing used to have complicated feelings about those who left the group, but she has eventually calmed down.  Not everyone wants to focus the rest of their lives on this matter, she told herself.
 
"I hope everyone will welcome every new friend with a warm embrace, and bid farewell to every partner with sincere blessings," Xingxing wrote in the group message. She hopes that the group will slowly fade away.
 
Might Xingxing quit the group one day? She laughed when I asked her: "When I quit the group it will be because I have died." She thinks she will be the last remaining member.
 
Tang Wei's journey to seek justice for his father came to an end in April of this year. After a year and a half of lodging administrative complaints, the Health Commission finally determined that responsibility lay with the attending hospital and asked the hospital to pay 200,000 RMB (approx. $27,500USD) in financial compensation. Although Tang Wei repeatedly requested to meet with local public health officials, no one accepted his request and he did not receive the apology he wanted. Tang Wei felt that it was not justice, but that it was not nothing.   He had had no income during the appeal process, and relied on relatives and friends to help pay the rent. He finally decided to give up further appeals.
 
"I feel even more guilty because I took the money and didn't pursue the matter. You make the only choice you can, and endure the pain that remains."  On the phone, it sounded as if Tang Wei was talking to himself.  "But at least I got something. I feel like I have to let it go, that I can’t pursue it further."
 
The same month the case was closed, he cremated and buried his father. Next, he plans to find a new job, make new friends, and "slowly erase the bad memories."
 
History finally provided an explanation. In May of this year, someone discovered that the coronavirus appears in the junior high school history textbook published by the People's Education Press, the past three years reduced to a small paragraph in the corner of the page. In the summary of about 130 words, the pandemic was likened to a war, in which the lives and health of the people had been protected to the maximum extent, and "pandemic control and economic and social development both achieved significant positive results."
 
A photo of the passage was circulated on the chat, and no one was surprised. In the  interviews I carried out, almost everyone told me that history would not tell the truth. Which is why they were willing to talk to me: they hoped that someone would remember.
 
Only Pipi is optimistic: "I think there will be a day when we all become history, when perhaps we will be able to talk about this in broad daylight, and we’ll discover that it was not easy at all for people, and that many families suffered a great deal.  This was in no way a victory, it was just pain, and there is nothing to be happy about.”
 
The group organized a collective mourning activity. On the eve of Father's Day last year, someone invited everyone to commemorate the dead, and more than 80 people participated. Everyone included a few words of mourning for the deceased, like a belated collective obituary.
 
A few months ago, Qiuran went to a temple to make an ancestral tablet for her father and to carry out a ceremony to help his soul find peace. During the nearly 5-hour ritual, Qiuran and her family kowtowed to the deceased as the master chanted. After the ceremony, the master placed her father's tablet together with those of her grandparents. Seeing her relatives reunited in another place, Qiuran felt much more at ease. A month later, she finally dreamed of her father once again. She met him in the temple. He looked very healthy, not as thin as at the end of his life. He smiled and told his daughter that everything was fine, and not to worry.
 
"It was if my father had not died," said Qiuran's voice from the other end of the phone. "He just went somewhere else, and I feel he is still alive."
 
There is one thing she will always remember. On the day they had her father’s ancestral tablet made, she and her family sat in the courtyard of the temple, and a butterfly flew over and kept circling around her.   She couldn’t shoo it away.
 
She is not the only person to have seen a butterfly. One day a few months ago, the leader of the group chap posted a short message. She said that one day she took her children to her mother's house for dinner, and a black butterfly flew up from downstairs. On the way back home, the same butterfly reappeared, circling her and her son.
 
The post was about nothing in particular, attracted no attention, and disappeared amidst the rest of the messages.  The group was still talking about mediums, mourning rituals, and holiday arrangements, as mentioned above.
 
Half an hour later, a group member sought out and replied to the message, saying to the group leader, “This had to have been your father.”
 
Notes

[1]甘叶, “他们在后疫情时代里幸存，在不被承认的死亡中受难,” Initium Media (paywalled), December 6, 2024.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  For more information about and pictures of these memes, see here (in Chinese). 

[3]Translator’s note:  LBX is a code word/abbreviation for laobaixing/老百姓, meaning ordinary, everyday people.  A fuller explanation follows in the text.

[4]Translator’s note:  Xiaohongshu/小红书, or “Little Red Book,” is a widely used media platform in China, the rough equivalent of Instagram or TikTok.

[5]Translator’s note:  “Drinking tea” is the euphemism employed when citizens are "invited" to come to the police station to answer a few questions.

[6]Translator’s note:  Imagine a very old-model tractor with belts and pullies on the outside of the engine.  The bicycle must have collided with the tractor, throwing the child into the belt, and the father saved the child by inserting his leg between her and the pully.