SARS Stories

Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College and author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture.

“As we still come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic, Belinda Kong’s SARS Stories provides a powerful testament to the ways in which cultural discourse-fiction, film, and digital media-shape our understanding of pandemic narratives. In the process, Kong reveals the often tenuous line between the truths conveyed through ‘fiction’ and the lies that sometimes haunt the ‘facts.’” - Michael Berry, author of (Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign) “As our contemporary pandemic commonsense swings from jingoism to denialism, reading Belinda Kong’s incredibly learned and daring book has been not just enlightening but, dare I say, therapeutic. Kong has taught me to think anew about pandemic epistemologies in relation to race, empire, and power while giving name to my own desire for ‘pandemic prosociality.’ Written with warmth, curiosity, and verve, SARS Stories will speak to anyone and everyone who has tried to make sense of the past several years of pandemic life.” - Sunny Xiang, author of (Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction  11. Pandemic Ordinariness: Epidemic Romances and Female Sentiments  332. Pandemic Humor: Digital Prosociality for the Epidemic Socius  773. Pandemic Resilience: Deextinction and the Hong Kong Cantophone  1124. Pandemic First Patients: Deperilizing the Anglophone SARS Archive  180Afterword  238Notes  241Bibliography  267Index  285