PREFACE
It was sometime during mid December 2019 when I received a phone call via WeChat from Liu Chuan Feng, my Chinese son. It felt urgent: “’Bàba’, something is going on in Wuhan. It seems similar to what we experienced in Hong Kong early 2003, do you remember?” How should I not remember? A shiver went through my body, I felt paralyzed for more than a split second!
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My name is Friedrich Baron von Pawlowska. I am a photographer, well, rather a hobby photographer for natural photography, which means that I try to capture our planet’s majestic landscapes, such as the multiple shades of blue and the rifts and crevasses from the Patagonian glaciers, a lunar eclipse emerging from behind the Adriatic waters as seen from Brač island, shadows falling from the peaks and slopes along the Himalayan range, the deep green amidst the Amazonas jungle, the Central American volcanoes’ majesty or such as the different colors between the Taklimakan, Sahara or Atacama Deserts. I am also fascinated by our planet’s flora and fauna, its exuberance, variety, so motley and colorful, sometimes hidden and yet not so evident, or evident and not really visible, like a tiny cactus flower within Majorelle Gardens, mildew on dead trees in the Black Forest or a mimicked leopard between the branches of an a acacia erioloba in the Okavango Delta.
But capturing the right moment during a hot discussion between a market vendor and its customer at the Marrakech bazaar, the innocent smile from a curious child at the Tajik village of Bulunkul, the deep looks from a holy man next to shores of the Ganga river or the self-absorbed look from a woman in love resembling Venus in a painting from Boticelli, makes photography, like a painting from Francisco de Goya, superior to any other means to transmit emotions and messages instantaneously.
In my parallel life I happen to be an engineer and an economist. So when I do not capture moments with my photographic camera, I do advise younger and lesser young executives in the management and progress of their respective companies and ventures, foster them in their personal and professional development and more than in few situations, dedicate time to counsel them in non-professional matters, mostly by just listening. It is in those moments, when I hear again the parting words from my religion and philosophy teacher at the time I left the Jesuit boarding school I spent almost 10 years of my life after finishing high school: “Friedrich, it is a real pity you declined the offer to continue your studies at our seminary and take the novice vow. You have all the endowment for a professed or a spiritual curate at the Society of Jesus. But we respect your decision and wish you success with your engineering studies. We know you take those endowments with you, independently of the profession you shall exercise in the future.” The endowments, as my teacher put it, made me an observer of situations without judging them as good or bad but rather considering them as reasonable or less reasonable, probable or less probable, fair or unfair, something that is not always well received: ‘Shooting the messanger’ is the rule when undesired news are being communicated. My great-great-grandmother Angelika, countess von Pawlowska, large landowner and matriarch from the Pawlowska shire nearby Katowice in Upper Silesia, had insisted that all family first-born males had to take their education from a Jesuit boarding school and, in the best of cases, follow their call with a ecclesiastical career.
Prussian values plus the education I received in the boarding school during my youth have prevailed and accompanied me during my academic studies in Europe and the United States and then after as consultant or entrepreneur across all continents, including China.
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Zhou Zuofen was a sought after chef in Shenzhen, he was a specialist in preparing Cantonese dishes in a very traditional way. To prepare the demanded chuān shān jiǎ, Zuofen had to go to the local market where all sort of livestock and also wild animals would be offered for sale, all of them tightly squeezed in wooden boxes, one above and next to each other. The smell was nauseating, but Zuofen knew exactly where he would find the best pangolins for his exquisite dish, typical in the traditional Cantonese cuisine. There they were, at he end of a blind alley to keep the barking noise away from the rest of this enormous market for countryside merchants. They came to sell their stock, whether they were bats, rats, chicken, pigeons, pigs, serpents, imported monkeys and many more alive animals. They would all find their way on a traditional Cantonese dish. Zuofen also used to prepare monkey brain, however, just on special order, hidden and only for well known diners, the laws for preparing animals for alive consumption had been restricting these practices since a few years. But to prepare yan wo, Zuofen had to seek another merchant who had the exquisite and outrageously expensive ingredients to prepare swallow’s nest. Hem ga tsan! Damn his family! The price at the merchant had increased to 5.000 ¥ per ounce, not far from the gold price. But the ingredients were of outstanding quality, not like the trash sold to tourists and foreign business people at the new five-star hotels in town. Only high-ranking officials and nouveau riche could afford the luxury of attending his small but exclusive restaurant and pay a premium Cantonese 20 dish menu. Many diners came accompanied by young and attractive women known from the Cantonese artistic scene, only few with their real spouses. After selecting the merchandise and bargain a discount, Zuofen would return to his restaurant. The political mayor would come visit his restaurant this coming weekend and come accompanied by 6 further officials, all accompanied by their respective “ladies”. The private dining room and the banquet had to be impeccable. Zuofen had to ask the mayor for a special favor: His son “Charlie”, a smart and ambitious young man wanted to study medicine at John Hopkins University in the United States, he thus needed a government scholarship to take care of the horrendous tuitions.
The banquette was a full success, the mayor himself praised the chuān shān jiǎ and especially, the yan wo. Zuofen had paid special dedication in the preparation himself, displume, eviscerate, clean the animals practically smeared in feces, the arduous swallow’s nest preparation, practically everything. Charlie had to get its scholarship! And although he felt tired, coughing with a sore and dry throat, he managed to finish everything, impeccably. The mayor promised to look what he could do for his only child, the most important thing in his life.
On Sunday, Zuofen woke up coughing and shivering with fever. His wife would take him to the local hospital. At the emergency room, the doctors would immediately diagnose pneumonia and apply antibiotics. In spite of Dr. Wong’s increase of dosage, Zuofen’s condition would further deteriorate. Maybe it wasn’t a bacterial pneumonia but some sort of virus thought the doctor on duty. The chief physician at the Guangzhou’s Zhongshan Memorial Hospital, the pulmonologist Dr. Liu Jianlun, was an eminence; he would know what to do. In Shenzhen there was nothing else they could do for the patient, who, by the way, was now getting into a state of delirium; his fever had increased to almost 41 degrees Celsius and oxygen had to be administered on a continuous basis. The patient Zhou had to be transferred immediately to the Cantonese capital, there was no more time to be wasted!
When Zuofen arrived the Zhongshan Memorial Hospital, he was practically in agony. The chief physician Dr. Liu was waiting for him along with his nursing staff; Zuofen’s symptoms were totally atypical from a regular pneumonia. It was required to administer oxygen by intubation to avoid asphyxia from the moment of the patient’s arrival. They would test an intravenous medication used in the United States against viral lung infection discovered during the studies against the human immunodeficiency virus during the 1990s. The retroviral medication was new in China and very expensive, all his staff was now pending.
Independently of the intensive care given and the modern medication administered, Zuofen would pass away next morning. He had entered into a comatose state. The last thing Zuofen would think of before completely losing his consciousness was if the mayor would keep his promise and send Charlie to study medicine in the United States.
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By the time Dr. Liu Jianlung arrived in Hong Kong with his wife two weeks later, he would suffer from severe headache, dry cough and high tiredness. Although Hong Kong was just 130 kilometers away from Gaungzhou, his wife had urged him to cancel the trip and rest. But the doctor had insisted on this journey, his beautiful and talented niece Liu Mei Feng would marry in a few days time, her fiancé being a young tycoon. The wedding was the outspoken event during this spring; all press columns in Hong Kong were full of it. He was not going to miss by any means this experience; all the local prominence would participate.
Although the wedding festivities would take place at the exclusive Peninsula hotel, his wife had made reservation for a twin room at the Metropole hotel, less exclusive but rather matching her husband’s salary range; other relatives and friends would also stay at the Metropole, so Dr. Liu had had no objections.
The chief physician was concerned about a number of his nurses falling ill at the Memorial Hospital two weeks ago. Also, a number of doctors and a larger number of patients from other departments had also fallen ill, some of them had suddenly passed away, shortly after being interned and nobody had suspected why. The trajectory had always been the same: severe headache, dry cough, followed by fever. Before parting to Hong Kong, Dr. Liu had written up and sent a report to the Cantonese health ministry. Now he himself felt the same symptoms and high tiredness. He had had more than a foreboding that all those incidences had to do with that patient that was sent to him from Shenzhen two weeks ago. Could it be that that poor devil had been the patient zero, the super-carrier of an unknown disease? But the urge in participating at his niece’s wedding and being part of that outstanding group of guests in Hong Kong, had blinded his mind. Surely everything was going to be fine. What Dr. Liu did not know at that moment was, that he was not going to go back to his work to Guangzhou, that he would not even leave Hong Kong anymore, that he would die in 7 days time from a highly contagious and mortal virus but not before infecting hundreds of other people, many of them dying as dramatically as he would at Kwong Wah’s hospital intensive care unit. His wife, his brother in law and regrettably his beautiful niece Mei Feng, the bride who would widow the young tycoon in less than two weeks time after celebrating a fulminating wedding, were just a few amongst the hundreds of deceased. Dr. Liu was going to become the second super-carrier of the fifth corona virus in history, but he was going to be the first one triggering the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, better known later across the world as the pandemic of SARS. The Chinese government had censored away Dr. Liu’s reports upon receiving them. It was not until a month later that Chinese authorities were to inform the World Health Organization. Now it was now too late; the virus had already made it out of mainland China, to Hong Kong and from there, it had spread all over the world.
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Chuan Feng had insited: “Bàba, you have to come to Mei Feng’s wedding to Hong Kong. You know she is my favorite cousin; you have always admired her beauty and the grace of her acting at the Beijing Opera. I don’t like Jim either, but if Mei Feng is going to merry him, it won’t be for his arrogance nor the millions he earns with his freight forwarding company. He surely has other qualities and perhaps you could capture a few of them with your camera. On top, all family members from the North of China will also come, you don’t happen to see them that often anymore. They will all be happy to see you, it will be like in former times, a large family reunion between East and West.”
Liu Mei Feng and my son Liu Chuan Feng were cousins. While Chuan Feng did not inherit much from the artistic talent of his Manchu’s mother lineage, Mei Mei, as we use to call her dearly within the family’s inner circle, had been an artist from very young age. Like Chuan Feng’s mother, Mei Mei enjoyed the nobility and beauty like only women from the ancient Manchuria would.
Chuan Feng’s grandmother had been a quite famous singer and Chinese Opera diva during the difficult Sino-Japanese Manchukuo puppet government back the in the 40s from the past century. She had even met Pu Yi, the last Chinese Emperor, during several of her multiple performances in Mandju Gurun, today better known as Changchun. By the end of World War II, that culminated with the disintegration of the Japanese occupation in Manchukuo and started the Soviet occupation, Chuan Feng’s grandmother had flown to Chong Qing, capital of the Nationalistic Party. Here, at some of her many performances, she would meet General Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the NP or Kuomintang, as it was known in China. But that was not going to end there: the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party supported by the Soviet Union would be decided, to the astonishment of many, for the Communist Party. Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Formosa (today called Taiwan) and Chuan Feng’s grandmother had to move again. This time she decided to move to Beijing, where she perfected her feminine “dan” character roles at the famous Beijing Opera. With the new leaders now settled in the new capital, her new admirer would be now, no one else than the leader of the new People’s Republic of China, Chairman Mao Zedong himself.
There have always been rumors in Chuan Feng’s family around grandmother Liu Yu and her famous admirers, but nothing had ever been certain, she had always been very discrete. When passing away, many letters had been discovered in an old round lock cabinet made of elm wood. I had always liked that cabinet and grandmother Yu knew that. When grandmother Yu passed away, to mine and the surprise of all family members, I had been named as heir of that cabinet, including all sealed letters, the letters she had been hiding away so jealously all her life.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Liu Yu was at the pinnacle of her artistic career. It was just the when she suddenly decided to leave her profession and leave the opera without giving any explanation. She wanted now to dedicate time in educating her two daughters who had been under the tutelage of her own ayah for so many years. No one understood why Liu Yu had taken such abrupt decision, until the Cultural Revolution broke out and ran through all China like a hurricane, leaving only destruction and millions of persecuted and murdered, especially amongst famous artists and writers across the country. If that had been the grandmother’s clairvoyance, a secret message from an intimate friend or a timely insinuation from a highly ranked official in the Communist Party would never be known. Who knows, perhaps this passage of her life would be hidden somewhere amongst those many letters guarded in the old Chinese round lock cabinet.
Grandmother Yu would neither forget nor let her passion go. With Chairman Mao’s death and the consecutive radical change in Chinese politics, economy and therefore the entire social turnaround in China, Liu Yu decided to revive her vocation, this time though through her two daughters and especially, by training her granddaughter Liu Mei Feng in traditional Chinese music, song and dance arts, something that was practically exterminated in the People’s Republic of China during the days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
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Some members of the family had stayed at the Metropole hotel, amongst them the famous Dr. Liu Jianlun, a distant uncle Chuan Feng’s.
Chuan Feng, other Liu family members and I had opted to stay at The Peninsula, a five stars hotel built in 1928 and emblematically situated next to Victoria Harbor in Tsim Sha Tsui. It was there where Mei Feng´s wedding celebration with Song Yin would take place, her young and millionaire fiancé whom everyone called “Jim”, his Western name.
Jim had and continued to make a fortune with transporting all sorts of goods between East and West, especially with the transport of containers between Hong Kong and especially, since a few years, also from the new harbor at Yang Shan, the largest container harbor in Asia, a few kilometers South of Shanghai. From Hong Kong and Yang Shan he directed thousands of containers to the rest of the Asian countries but with his good connections to the Central Government in Beijing and the shipping company COSCO, now also to the North American and European harbors. While his fellow citizens produced more and more textile and electronic consumer goods for the global markets, the Chinese consumer required more food products for own consumption, from soya to products unknown in China by regular consumers until then, such as Australian beef, South American Coffee, Belgian chocolate or luxury and Western brands, such as German, French or Italian machine tools, Mercedes Benz automobiles, Panerai watches, bags from Bottega Venetta, Spanish acorn ham, caviar from Beluga, Champagne or wine from Bordeaux. Jim´s enterprises would offer the right transport for every industrial or commercial product from and to Mainland China and Hong Kong.
He had met Mei Feng at a Beijing friends’ party in Shanghai. While her owed beauty left all other present girls far behind, what attracted him most was her character. She was a charming woman while very independent minded and professional. She didn’t really seem interested in the young entrepreneurs pockets, present at the party. She’d rather inquire what they were interested in apart from making money and spend it on European luxury items. Jim came from a wealthy family; he was born in Hong Kong and educated in England’s and the US’ best universities. He knew luxury from his infancy, but the fact his family belonged to Kowloon’s aristocracy, a family that claimed to be of Song Bing’s lineage, the last Cantonese Emperor, had not allowed him a rampant way of life like most nouveau riche youngsters. His family had instilled in him the value of a good education, the best of Jesuit schools, Anglo-Saxon universities, blended with Confucian wisdom and business strategies derived from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese General and Philosopher. Money in the Song family had to be earned by each member himself.
Mei Feng was different from all other girls Jim had met so far, especially in Shanghai. While most Shanghai girls were well-educated, cosmopolitan, modern and the most Western ones in Mainland China, they did also have a reputation, for some a particular defect, being primarily interested in their husband’s pocket, before any other quality. Mei Feng was different; she wanted to know all about Jim, why he had studied abroad instead of taking an executive post at one of its wealthy parent’s ventures, why he had chosen to study philosophy before studying business administration, how was life in the West, how were men and women in Europe and America, their art, culture, music, literature, religion and especially, their food, something so important for any Chinese. Jim on his side loved the traditional in her; she seemed to come from another epoch, the epoch from emperors, the epoch of traditional China. However, when she did not perform at the Beijing Opera, Mei Feng seemed like any other young and modern girl from the higher society, spending daddy’s money or her husband’s or that of a wealthy lover, a higher ranking and corrupt official with loads of money, wearing the latest of Balenciaga or Tom Ford, her favorite brands. “I like the disguise” she said, with allusion to her many Beijing Opera “dan” gender costumes and the newest collections from many Western designers that often looked like costumes. But the true reality was that Mei Feng had no one spoiling her; her father had passed away a long time back, she had many pretenders but no one to call a boyfriend and there was neither a lover nor a wealthy official, least married. Her grandmother Liu Yu had instructed her in the arts of seduction, but also, in the wisdom of not falling in temptation to any pretender’s big pocket and rather, fend for herself.
They mutually fell in love, and what surprised most to all who knew them well, was the short period of time they needed to get married. They decided to marry in Hong Kong and invite closest friends and relatives. It was expected that Jim’s parents would invite the Hong Kong aristocracy; their wedding was going to be the spoken event in Beijing and Hong Kong during the upcoming weeks.
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Our family tragedy in Hong Kong on that February 2003 and the impact it would have across the world, was still very present in my memory. Not only had Chuan Feng’s uncle seriously fallen ill before the wedding took place, but also a number of other relatives that had stayed at the Metropole, the hotel Dr. Liu Jianlun had stayed with his wife as well. They had shown flue symptoms, sneezing and spitting everywhere while the family had met for an informal dinner at The Peninsula two days prior to the official wedding celebration. Dr. Liu Jianlun and his wife had been surprisingly missing during the wedding celebration; they had both been admitted to Kwong Wah hospital with acute pneumonia in the morning. The relatives that had stayed at the Metropole and predominantly came from the Southern part of China seemed now to be in a much more acute state; however, none of them wanted to miss Mei Feng’s wedding celebration. Luckily, our table had been set-up on the other side of the ballroom, along with all relatives from the North and next to the bride and the groom. Mei Feng looked stunning, as expected; but for a reason, we also noticed her to be worn-out, contrary to her vital and alluring character. She said to suffer from a terrible headache that had neither gone away after taking a few aspirins nor after an acupuncture treatment at The Peninsula SPA. The wedding celebration had been The Event, all Hong Kong Who-is-Who being present. I had been busy during the celebration taking pictures with my older camera, a Leica M my father had given me as a present in the 1970s. That camera had been one of those innovations that would change an industry and profession. Photo cameras in the XIX century had been big studio cameras until Eastman Kodak developed and commercialized a photographic camera affordable for the masses. The Brownie, basically a photographic carton box, would be sold for the next 80 years in different sizes with the sole objective to sell the film role inside the box. The role had a 6 x 9 mm format, which permitted decent postcard sized prints. However, for better quality prints big or difficult to transport photographic equipment would still be required. When the German company Leitz developed a mini film camera in 35 mm format for the emerging cinematographic industry by early XX century, they discovered that what this super compact camera really did, were fantastic photos. The difference between a Kodak camera and a Leitz camera was like the difference between a Ford T and a Mercedes Kompressor designed by Ferdinand Porsche. The Leica was born and with it, photography as we know it today.
The model my father gave me as a present was in principle the same model built for almost a century, with slight improvements, certainly better lenses and materials. The advantage of the Leica during the wedding celebration was still its compact design, manageable with one hand and with my 35 mm 2.0 Summicron lens, it allowed for high-resolution in a low light environment without flash light and thus, go unnoticed.
In spite of numerous professional photographers and journalists taking hundreds of flashing and posing pictures from the Hong Kong aristocracy and especially from Mei Feng and Jim, it was my old Leica the one discreetly capturing the real scenes on that festivity setting, however, without knowing at that instant, that what I was actually capturing were the last happy moments and the last alive moments for dozens of people, such as the smile Mei Feng was offering to her future husband.
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“What are you talking about Chuan Feng? Don’t tell me there is a new SARS epidemic starting?” I burst out alarmed.
“What’s happening in Wuhan bàba is quite similar. Do you remember my friend Toni Cheng, the one you met two years ago at my wedding and you guys had a long discussion about analogue versus digital photography? Well, he works as a director for an analysis laboratory in Wuhan. Apparently there have been a series of flu cases resulting in acute pneumonia, especially with senior patients. Since Toni knows our family history and what happened on that February in 2003, what worries him most at the moment is, that hospital staff is also suffering from the same symptoms and all that happening in a very short period of time. It looks to him like a dynamic infection. At the lab all staff have immediately thought of the corona virus causing the famous SARS in 2003 in Southern China. But while in the analysis they have done so far they clearly identified a corona virus, this one seems different from the one discovered in 2003, so any potential vaccine will most likely be useless in this new case. The genome has yet not been reproduced, but meanwhile there are more and more patients storming into Wuhan hospitals; he fears it is a pandemic, judging by the number of patients. Meanwhile, the authorities have imposed a communication ban, even menaced and silenced Dr. Li Wen Liang from the Wuhan hospital, who informed us all about this happening via WeChat.”
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The photos I was able to capture during the wedding celebration and the consecutive days speak for themselves: our family group, the wedding, all those that had contact with us, at the hospital, and later, the scenes at Dr. Liu Jianlun’s and his wife’s funeral and shortly after, Mei Feng’s grand funeral. The prints told a tragedy that happened in a blink of an eye, not allowing to reflect what was happening or worse, what could happen or was about to happen.
It was in those days when the Chinese government decided to communicate to the World Health Organization what was happening in Southern China, in the Guangdong province; a new and highly contagious corona virus had had been discovered and was spreading fast. Hundreds of people had meanwhile died in Guangdong and no one could tell how many would follow. My photos had captured the tragedy from the very beginning to the very end. Associated Press had asked me if I would share them for worldwide broadcasting. But with respect to all family members and in special memory to Mei Feng and her widowed husband, Chuan Feng and I decided to keep them in our private family custody, very much like grandmother Liu Yu had done so discretely with those letters she had never shared with anyone, least published in all her life. Jim, the young tycoon and widow after two weeks would never marry again, but in his spacious and sumptuous living room at his spacious apartment at the very top of Victoria Peak, there would shine a large black and white print, two by three meters lit with special museum spotlight, the moment I could capture Mei Feng while slightly leaning her head backwards, Jim approaching, perhaps for a kiss, their faces not more than 10 centimeters away from each other, their eyes absorbed into each other, their faces lit, their background practically turned off, as if totally alone, in compete silence, none of us at that crowded celebration present during those short moments of reverie at The Peninsula, an instant that would now last in Jim’s memory for the rest of his life. The photo at Peak Road 75 would be the only print from that period leaving my collection. It had been his requested wedding present and sadly enough, a quiet drop of comfort for Jim, to whom I still keep a close relationship since those weeks full of gray in Hong Kong.
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If there is a new pandemic virus spreading, I do not want to know what will come upon us. My premonitions, of course, sensed the worst.
END OF PREFACE
(To be continued. If you found worth the reading, do not miss the next chapters. Better, perhaps you would like to share your experience in times of the corona virus pandemic, during this lockdown in a literary, short-story telling form, in the language of your choice. I would be happy to publish it on this portal, with or without a print.)
The Decamerone 2020 