'Now we are refugees': A family in limbo amid the coronavirus outbreak

The family of Chloe Chang, a Taiwanese woman, is effectively trapped in Hubei Province, and in the middle of a spat between China and Taiwan.

These days, Chloe Chang, a Taiwanese woman stranded at the centre of China's coronavirus outbreak, says she wakes up every half-hour during the night. Sometimes she breaks down in tears.

She and her family are effectively trapped in her grandmother's apartment building, where a man recently died from the virus. Workers in hazmat suits haunt the surrounding streets, and the neighbourhood has a strong police presence. There are shortages of food and other essentials throughout Yichang, the Hubei province city of more than 4 million where they have been in limbo for weeks.

"No household can go out at this time," said Chang, a 26-year-old industrial artist. She said she feared that even a trip for groceries would increase her chances of contracting the virus.

"My child has eaten nine meals of plain noodles in the past three days," she said of her 2-year-old son.

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Chang and her family thought they were on the verge of escaping Yichang earlier this month, but the bus taking them to the airport was abruptly turned around.

All she can do now is wait — and hope.

"The government of Taiwan surely will come to our rescue," her husband, Calvin Fan, who is from Beijing, has reassured her. But the chartered flight they have eagerly awaited to evacuate them has yet to materialise.

"Neither side wants us," Chang said. "We've given up. Now we are refugees."

Taiwan and China each say the other is the reason that she and other Taiwan citizens are unable to leave Hubei, a province under lockdown, where hundreds have died from the coronavirus and tens of thousands have been infected.

Chang and hundreds of other Taiwanese people in Hubei had hoped to go home via chartered jet. But last month, after the first plane carrying evacuees landed in Taiwan with an infected passenger onboard, a backlash ensued on the self-governing island, which China claims as part of its territory.

Some said Taiwan would not be able to handle an outbreak if more infected people arrived. Others said Taiwan should not help to evacuate mainland Chinese spouses of Taiwan residents.

Decades of tensions between the two governments have come to a head over the outbreak, and people like Chang and her husband — both of who arrived in China last month to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday with family — have become pawns in a complicated and dangerous game of political chess.

Chang said she was told by Chinese officials that she could return to Taiwan on a second chartered flight, scheduled for February 5. That day, her family boarded a bus bound for the airport in Wuhan, the provincial capital, where the coronavirus first emerged.

But just as the bus was about to leave, she said, a Chinese official hopped on and announced that the flight would not take off, saying: "Taiwan won't let you go back."

"I was really devastated," Chang said.

Taiwan had a different explanation. According to officials there, reports in Chinese state media that said a flight was scheduled to leave were untrue — the two sides had never discussed it.

Both governments, and their proxies, have continued to point fingers while Chang and her compatriots languish in Hubei.

"Taiwan authorities have repeatedly delayed the schedule," Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, said last week. "Let the Taiwan compatriots return home as soon as possible, and stop making up all manner of excuses and rationale to block them from returning."

Chen Shih-Chung, Taiwan's minister of health and welfare, said Friday that "China still uses all excuses to delay the evacuation, and refuses our plans and suggestions."

Fears of the virus — and, perhaps, anti-China sentiment — have led Taiwan to escalate preventive measures in recent days.

On Wednesday, Taiwan's Central Epidemic Command Center announced that children who have mainland citizenship but a Taiwanese parent would not be allowed to enter Taiwan for the time being if they were arriving from mainland China, Hong Kong or Macao.

Confined to her grandmother's home for so long, Chang has turned to her art as an outlet for the helplessness and resentment she feels.

In a satirical cartoon she recently sketched, she portrayed the administration of Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's president, as deliberately delaying the evacuation.

She depicted the Taiwanese in Hubei as pawns.

Written by: Amy Chang Chien
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES