| We’re covering China’s response to calls for a coronavirus inquiry, a look at life in Wuhan after the lockdown and essays about finding joy right now. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | President Xi Jinping of China speaking via video conference to the World Health Assembly, pictured in Beijing on Monday. Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | The increased contribution from Beijing is likely to ratchet up pressure on the Trump administration, which has cut U.S. funding to the global health agency. | | | U.S. reaction: A senior Trump administration official called China’s pledge “a token to distract from calls from a growing number of nations demanding accountability for the Chinese government’s failure to meet its obligations.” | | | ■ President Trump said he has been taking hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that the Food and Drug Administration warned can cause dangerous heart rhythm abnormalities in coronavirus patients, as a preventive measure for a week and a half. | | | ■ A refugee center in Cologne, Germany, reported dozens of coronavirus cases, increasing epidemiologists’ fears that outbreaks would take hold in the cramped camps with few medical resources. | | | People on the banks of the Yangtze River in Wuhan, China, last week. Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Residents of Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic began, are feeling their way toward an uncertain future after a two-month lockdown. Our reporter tells the stories of four of them as they learn to navigate life on the other side of the crisis. | | | Rosanna Yu has rediscovered bubble tea, visited Wuhan’s cherry blossoms and embraced the city’s new normal. Even traffic is a welcome change. “Seeing a lot of cars, I’m actually so happy,” she said. | | | Other residents’ lives were changed permanently: During the peak of the outbreak, Liang Yi, his wife and toddler son hunkered down at his parents’ home outside the city. Now he is preparing to live elsewhere. “If we can create better circumstances for him, then we don’t want to live in a city like Wuhan anymore.” | | | Veranda Chen lost his mother to the coronavirus during the lockdown, but has since been reunited with his father, who survived the illness after a hospital stay. Hazel He avoid crowds and risks and doesn’t leave her neighborhood. | | | There is trauma and grief, anger and fear. But there is also hope, gratitude and a newfound patience. | | | Tokyo’s usually bustling streets have been eerily empty. Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | The world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China shrank by an annualized rate of 3.4 percent in the first three months of the year, Japan’s government said on Monday. | | | The virus dealt a blow to Japan’s exports and tourism, after a drop in consumer spending coupled with a damaging typhoon. Recessions, often defined by two consecutive quarters of negative growth, may follow in other countries around the globe. | | | China’s economy: Our reporters looked at China’s two-decade global lending spree to expand its influence. Now, as the economy reels, countries are telling Beijing they can’t pay the money back, and Beijing is at a crossroads. | | | Illustrations by The New York Times | | | These are not, on the surface, joyful times. Not in the slightest. Which is why you deserve some relief. Our Styles desk asked 14 writers what’s bringing them joy right now, and their answers included the mundane, like really slow jogging, as well as the big-picture joys, such as taking care of others. | | | The joy of getting lost was on the writer Alex Williams’s mind. That means walks with no GPS and no destination in mind. “It’s you versus the maze that is life. It’s up to you to find your way out,” he writes. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Al Qaeda: U.S. investigators linked Al Qaeda to last year’s deadly shooting at a U.S. military base in Pensacola, Fla. They found evidence that the gunman, a Saudi cadet training with the U.S. military, communicated with a Qaeda operative who had encouraged the attacks. | | | Hong Kong brawl: Scuffles broke out Monday between lawmakers in Hong Kong as they debated the leadership of a committee that will consider legislation that pro-democracy politicians fear would tighten China’s control over the semiautonomous territory. The brawl was the second to break out in Hong Kong’s Legislature this month. | | | Ryu Young-Suk/Yonhap, via Associated Press | | | Snapshot: Above, the stands at an FC Seoul game in the South Korean capital on Sunday. Yes, those are sex dolls — managers, who were trying to maintain festivity in stadiums with what they believed were ordinary mannequins, apologized once fans quickly pointed out the truth. | | | What we’re reading: This Brain Pickings essay about “the extraordinary and enduring love between Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert, who ended up marrying her brother, Austin Dickinson.” Steven Erlanger, our chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, says it “is beautifully told and helps the lockdown.” | | | Melissa Clark/The New York Times | | | Cook: This buttery caper sauce will lift any vegetable. Eat it with scrambled eggs, on its own as a side dish, or on top of spinach for a fresh salad. | | | Listen: This stellar acoustic Aventura concert live, archived on YouTube, as well as John Legend and Dijon are featured for some of the most notable new songs chosen by our music critics. | | | What does marriage mean for a woman’s identity? What does it mean for her name? Those questions are at the center of The Mrs. Files, a new project from The Times that looks at what the honorific “Mrs.” means to women and their identities. | | | The Mrs. Files looks at what it means, and what it has meant, for a woman to be identified by her partner’s last name — regardless of her accomplishments. Tell me what your name has meant to your career. | | | Sarah: I take names very seriously. When I meet someone, it’s always important to me that I check with them about what they would like to be called. So much of who we are is what we get called by in the world, so defining what we would like to be called is this moment of potential agency. That agency is taken away when the world calls us something we don’t want to be called. | | | A Gimbels department store fashion show of bridal attire in 1965 in New York. Robert Walker/The New York Times | | | Denice: Growing up, I lived most of my adolescence solely with my mother, who’s Puerto Rican. My father is Jewish. A lot of children of multicultural families have hyphenated names but I don’t, and it’s not lost on me that I have my father’s last name solely because of a patriarchal idea. So much about writing is pointing at the world and pointing at yourself and finding language for what someone else has named. | | | When you were a child, did you dream of a traditional wedding? | | | Denice: I was very invested in a traditional wedding. My parents split up when I was very young. So I’d never seen a happy marriage and, with no model or example, I had to create one, so I pulled from pop culture. As I got older and stepped into my sexuality, I had to unpack that. I was trying to conform to an expectation instead of living a life that was in my own handwriting. | | | Helen: I started thinking recently about who weddings are for. I always assumed that if I got married it would just be for me and for my partner. But then you start thinking about relatives and it becomes a difficult negotiation between the public and the private. | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
