On 17 January, I met a friend at the Hankou train station in Wuhan, 17 days after the first cases of coronavirus had been reported. She was the only person wearing a face mask. At the time, the official line was that everything was under control and the spread of the virus would be prevented. “The Huanan seafood market is only two blocks away,” I teased, a reference to the epicentre of the outbreak. In an all-night restaurant, the glass tanks were swimming with life. We ate noodles with crab legs. The streets were packed, drunk revellers hailing cabs after their end-of-year company parties. A man doubled over to vomit and a young woman patted him on the back: “Ready for another round?”

A week ago, the panic was still confined to health-conscious retirees, always prone to worrying about seasonal illnesses. News of a virus just gave older people another reason to instruct the young: don’t go out, drink plenty of water. There were also the conspiracy theorists who doubted official news but couldn’t provide more reliable information. To most of us, not wearing a mask seemed reasonable and logical. Who wanted to be associated with paranoid pensioners or ill-informed cranks?

Wuhan is not a city of fear. I can’t think of a time when my hometown has ever been gripped by panic. Perhaps this has something to do with its revolutionary past – the city is the site of the Wuchang uprising in 1911 that overthrew the Qing dynasty. If a revolution didn’t faze us, a virus won’t either.

In 1998, when I was a child growing up in Wuhan, a flood burst the dams on the Yangtze River. Neighbourhoods were head-deep in water and public transport came to a standstill. The ground levels of houses and apartment blocks were submerged, so kids would play together on the second floors of buildings, firing BB guns at dead animals floating in the water. While we had a watery vacation, our parents kept going to work. Wuhan residents have a perversely resilient streak: the more extreme a challenge, the more we rise to it.

When the time came for my friend to leave on 19 January, official reports from other provinces informed us the virus wasn’t confined to Wuhan and that it could be transmitted between human carriers. Though supermarkets were still crowded with local people stocking up for the lunar new year celebrations, the atmosphere had become more tense. I was only back in town for the holidays, and wrote to my university in Australia about extending my leave.

The following day, I came down with cold-like symptoms. At the local community clinic, the doctor, the only person wearing a face mask, prescribed antibiotics, drugs to fight fever and traditional honeysuckle medicine. I didn’t have a fever, so he wrote down my name and age, before informing a crowd of patients that the clinic had run out of face masks. Go take a look in the pharmacy next door, he suggested. “What can we do to prevent getting sick,” someone asked. The doctor lowered his mask and replied: “Try positive thinking.” Everyone laughed.

The shelves in the pharmacy stocked all types of face masks. I hesitated before selecting a handful at random. Another customer arrived shortly afterwards with a bulky bag to buy the rest of the stock. In Shanghai and Beijing, masks were already selling out – in Wuhan, they’re now almost impossible to find. As new year approached, they became ubiquitous, like pear blossoms budding out of season.

A lot of people were coming down with colds – some real, some imaginary. I was due to meet friends for lunch in the city centre. Come over and drink down the virus, they said. None of us suggested cancelling. The restaurants were emptier than usual, and by the time we had finished drinking we were the only people left. Outside, as we walked across Liberation Park, we took off our masks. I’d never seen the park so quiet. “It’s because it’s raining today,” my friend said, flipping up his collar.

At 2am on 23 January, Wuhan’s residents learned that in eight hours’ time, buses, trains, flights and ferries would be suspended to and from the city. The airport, the train station and the metro were closed. The World Health Organization called the quarantine “unprecedented in public health history”. Concerned messages flooded my phone. I tossed a few effervescent vitamin tablets into a glass of water. My parents went shopping to stock up; goods were grabbed as soon as they made it on to the supermarket shelves. The supermarket closed in the morning, to reopen at an undetermined date. At the door a security guard touched everyone’s head with a thermometer, as if giving them a blessing.

It’s a fortnight since I met my friend at the Hankou station. The Huanan seafood market shut on 21 January. My neighbourhood is nearly deserted, and I’m sleeping unusually well. The news is dominated by a combination of new year celebrations and selfless doctors and nurses venerated by Chinese media as frontline heroes. On social media the crisis has become a litmus test for the flaws and merits of the Chinese government. Neither side has changed position, but now they have new examples to invoke, new justifications for praising or criticising the state. I didn’t want to write a word; Wuhan wasn’t an argument for me to brandish in a debate.People in a quarantined city don’t care about political point-scoring.

• Xiaoyu Lu is a research student, a travel writer and a frequent contributor to Chinese media

• This article was translated by Allen Young. It was first published on the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel