Pandemic Ordinariness: Epidemic Romances and Female Sentiments

Chapter 1 examines three sinophone texts that foreground sentimental plotlines of female sexuality, romance, domesticity, or friendship during SARS: Joan Chen's 2012 short film Shanghai Strangers; Hu Fayun's 2004 internet novel Such Is This [email protected]; and Chen Baozhen's 2003 diasporic novella SARS Bride. The chapter begins by analyzing Eileen Chang's wartime writing as a female-centered model of affective ordinariness and sovereignty amid crisis. It then explores how the three SARS texts likewise focus on female feelings and relationships to narrate everyday epidemic experiences at Chinese urban sites. The chapter close reads for textual moments of Chinese love practices in order to counter pandemic crisis epistemologies and bioorientalist discourses, arguing for an interpretive model of pandemic ordinariness—the commonplace microagency of minor subjects living in pandemic epicenters. The chapter coda discusses Fang Fang's COVID-era Wuhan Diary within this framework.