Beginnings

The Chinese city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, is 5,474 miles distant from my place of work, Leeds, England. It is the sort of distance that would usually make one feel remote, disconnected and removed from the lives of the 11 million inhabitants in this far-off city. That is probably how many felt in the UK, and other parts of Europe and the West, when news of a new strain of coronavirus (denoted as COVID-19 or SARS-Cov-2) was reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Distant, remote, isolated – words that often make up our language of defence, separation and irrelevance. We use these words as protection against those things that we feel may put us in some sort of jeopardy. How many times do we hear the phrases, ‘I’d keep your distance’, or ‘it's an isolated incident’, or even ‘It's not something remotely relevant?’ They are words that both describe distance and create distance.

With a name like ‘Tan’, you may have already guessed that I have a Chinese heritage. In fact, I can trace my cultural connections through English towns, Welsh valleys, and Chinese shorelines. I am British-born, yet I stand at the confluence of these three cultures. So, when COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, although physical distance remained, in other, cultural ways, I felt more closely involved (perhaps perilously so). You see Wuhan is only 700 miles from my Chinese, ancestral beginnings in Guangdong province, roughly 100 miles less than the journey between John O’Groats and Land's End in the UK. Passing through the province of Hunan, the fast train from Wuhan to Guangzhou makes a breathtaking journey of only four hours.

Early coverage of the situation in Wuhan by Western media also prompted a cultural resonance within me. There seemed a lot of images of the food markets of the region – busy, bustling places. Without listening to the words of such reports, the images brought back childhood memories of visits to various places where my family then resided, mainly in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.