While we titter about inflation and FIFA and the January 6th commission and no confidence votes, China is facing a tsunami of covid-19. Three years of draconian lock-downs ended abruptly last week, and huge numbers of people are falling ill. Chinese vaccines aren't as effective as the mRNA we've all had, and many people haven't received boosters, including 40% of the elderly. Vast resources went into increasingly fanatical efforts at testing and containment rather than vaccinations and hospital capacity so Chinese society is unprepared as the floodgates open.
We can't expect anything like accurate numbers on hospitalizations and deaths in the three waves of infections predicted for the next months. (Social media notice increased traffic at funeral homes, as well as a surge in online searches for same, but officially only two people have died of covid in the whole country.) State controlled media in China have apparently whitewashed out the very name of the abandoned "zero covid" campaign, and deleted references to the "long covid" said to be haunting less cautious countries.
So I find myself deeply grateful that the South China Morning Post chose this moment to publish a story on a photographer who's been giving free funerary portraits to rural folk too poor to get their own. In the part of China the documentarian visited, people start planning their own funerals at 60, and part of a funeral is a portrait. We learn that these old folks, often living alone - presumably many of their children are among the hundreds of millions of migrant workers in China's cities - are less afraid of dying than of being forgotten.
This would be a touching story at any time, but at this moment, when untold numbers of mostly elderly people have been placed in harm's way, it's especially poignant. Hopefully these old folks won't be affected but many others like them may well lose their lives to covid-19. Will their deaths be mourned - or even acknowledged?
The galleries the photographer sets up when distributing the finished photos, framed for funeral use, remind me of the efforts to mark and name our covid dead in the last years, with photos and biographies and the memories of bereft loved ones. (Remember Lima's cathedral full of photographs of the dead?) Soon the numbers overwhelmed what photos could do and it was names, then little white flags, which soon spilled, despite the best intentions, into abstraction. We've long since started forgetting... even as we find ourselves beset by a new wave. People are still dying every day.
In the People's Republic of China, however, as these old folks will know well, there's a history of organized forgetting, especially of calamities resulting from failed government policies. The editors at SCMP know this too. Thank you.
