In this essay, I document my COVID-19 quarantine experience in my home country of China. Due to changes to my U.S. immigration status, I had no choice but to leave for China during the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdowns, resulting in separation from my husband. I discuss how my quarantine experience is shaped by the ever-tightening U.S. immigration policies. For example, Trump’s executive order banning entry of certain foreign nationals has turned my temporary quarantine in China into an endless wait. This quarantine experience informed my reimagining of diaspora and immigration in the contemporary era. Specifically, I propose that we pay close attention to the transnational aesthetics as a productive way to offer insights into diaspora and immigration, particularly during a time of crisis.

This project examines the performance Thousand Hands Bodhisattva by hearing impaired dancers and the ways in which the invisible disability might provoke divergent viewing experiences and feelings contingent upon how the performance is contextualized. This performance showcases formal dancing techniques to elicit the sensation of beauty and the valorization of virtuosity, the presumed spectating responses to the aesthetic value of the performance. However, if the external knowledge of the dancers’ disability is prefigured to the spectators, the contextualized performance would stir unexpected responses among the viewers, such as a feeling of shame, admiration and so on, because their taken-for-granted assumptions are challenged that beauty is unquestionably associated with completeness, wholeness, and ability, and that disabled individuals are radically less self-sufficient than the able-bodied. Eventually, I attempt to argue that this performance exemplifies a certain type of queer formalism because, by simultaneously sticking with the conventional form of dance while mobilizing the sensation of disability to queer the viewing experience, it disrupts the presupposed, normative and predictable relationship between an artistic form and its reception.