“A Journal of the Plague Year” is a fictional diary
written by Daniel Defoe. Writing diary is about recording keeping track of one’s
encounter of events and his feelings and opinions towards them, therefore faking
one must be a tough task. Defoe did a great deal of extensive research and interviewed
survivors from the plague in order to portray the tragic event as realistically
as possible. Through the perspective of the narrator H.F., Defoe was able to
incorporate many details of the happenings at the time including the escape of
the Royals and the rich, the locking up of an entire family because one person
was infected, and the public measures taken by the Magistrates.
If I were to write about a plague, I would probably
choose to write about SARS. Like Defoe, I experienced the incident but only at
a young age, so I would need to do a lot researches. I was nine years old
during the outbreak of SARS in Hong Kong which traumatized the entire city. I
remember seeing the number of cases and deaths going up every day, then very
soon all the schools were closed and I was thrilled for a short moment until
teachers started emailing us homework. My mom made me and my sister carry hand
sanitizers everywhere we went, and masks became part of everyday life,
magazines started teaching people how to make masks into a fashionable item. The
streets were quiet, cinemas were empty, door handles and elevator buttons were
covered in plastics that were changed hourly. People never fully walked out of
the shadow of this pandemic. In 2009, when a swine flu case was reported in a
tourist, the fear of another plague like SARS led the government to quarantine the
entire hotel for a week.
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