A twist in the tale

We have all seen how quickly plans, no matter how detailed, no matter how seemingly definite, can change. Huang Yiyang, a senior journalism student from Tsinghua University, had never imagined that his business trip to Wuhan, producing a short film for his graduation assignment, could change so completely.

Huang arrived in Wuhan in December and planned to stay until April to shoot a 30-minute documentary about a hotelier named Shu Mansheng, whose hobby was to construct various model planes.

Then came the lockdown that suddenly pressed the stop button on his project.

"I read the news on my phone in the morning, only a few hours before the lockdown, and I was totally dumb," Huang recalls. He spent the next day, Lunar New Year's Eve, with Shu and his family.

"Shu used to celebrate Spring Festival with his brothers and sisters and their families, but this year, it was only his family and me," Huang says, adding that the atmosphere was a bit tense. "We talked about nothing else but the novel coronavirus, and the meal ended early, at which time the sky hadn't even gone dark."

It was also Huang's first Spring Festival that he didn't spend with his family in his home province, Jiangxi. He had planned to record local people lighting some fireworks and firecrackers in celebration, but since nobody did that during the lockdown, it wasn't an option. He was feeling down that night. "It felt like the whole city was sick," Huang recalls.

Because of the lockdown, Shu could not go to the factories to get the components for his planes, which left Huang having little to record for his documentary.

"The first few days I had to stay in my hotel room and the only thing I did was read the news on my phone, which was mostly bad and all about the coronavirus," he says.

Luckily, he talked with his tutor on the phone, and at his suggestion, he found a new subject to record.

"I felt clearer about what I could do, as my tutor suggested that, if I couldn't work on Shu's hobby, then recording Shu's daily life during the crisis was also interesting," Huang says.

Shu's hotel was actually used for quarantine and on Feb 5, the first people arrived.

Huang then went to the hotel to work with Shu while recording his routine.

The first time Huang wore a medical protective suit, he felt it was too unwieldy and he found it hard to operate the film equipment. Before each batch of people coming in, Huang also helped clean each room, by making beds and disinfecting everything.

"At first I was slow; now I can finish cleaning a room quite quickly," Huang says.