return to Wuhan, the Chinese city where it all began five years ago

“They suit you well. » To sell, the optician at the L’Ere des spectacles store uses easy flattery, despite the obvious disproportion between the frame and the customer’s face. She still has other models to offer, and she can adapt them all to the required correction. In this market, the entire first floor is devoted to the sale of glasses. As for the floor below, traders don’t talk about it much anymore, as if they were ignoring the epicenter of a pandemic that has brought the world to a standstill. Every television channel, every newspaper on the planet showed photos of the Huanan fresh market, whose name means “southern China”, even though Wuhan is more in the center. At the intersection of Rue de la Chine Nouvelle and Rue du Développement, not far from the main Hankou station, the building remains surrounded by fences, five years after the start of the Covid crisis. Posters inform of the permanent move of the food business to another district. The glasses trade was able to resume in June 2020. No one knows what will ultimately happen to the building, as it remains associated with the emergence of Covid-19, struck by this image of unsanitary, of an amateur China of pangolin which in no way corresponds to the lives of ordinary people, and of the continuing controversy over the origins of the virus. “It was a long time ago. The fresh market had to leave, but we can stay for now,” confides the optician. Decline in the automobile market You have 83.58% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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