Stock photo of a woman touching her face.
F
/
d
哦
我
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time,
Pandemic Style*
PAMElA M. lEE
There’s a young Chinese man barking at me—he can’t be more than twen-
ty years old, I’m guessing—after I finish my lecture on gender and contemporary
艺术. Even with the lag of a nonsynchronous translation, it’s clear he’s pissed.
There I am at the lectern, Chinese-American cis woman with a toddler’s grasp of
Cantonese. There he is in the audience: glasses, flattop, jowls. I strain to catch
the halting paraphrase of the translator rendering his words in English: . . . 你 . . .
能 . . . 不是 . . . be a fem . . . 我 . . . 尼斯特 . . . your ges . . . tures are too fem . . . 我 . . . 九 . . . 看 . . .
how you . . . 是 . . . tou . . . ching your face . . . look at all . . . your lip-u-stick . . . you must be
三月 . . . ried . . . 什么 . . . 做 . . . your hus . . . band think . . . of this?? It’s almost funny, 这
heat of his response, his finger accusing the air. The assumptions and laughable
clichés. He’s word-spitting in a mother tongue unspoken by the guest lecturer. 然后
再次, his accompanying pantomime of femininity speaks volumes, as hysterical as it
is misogynistic: See how he sweeps the back of his hand over his cheek and below his
chin, now tilted high like an arrogant bird! Behold this graceless performance of
female narcissism! Spread fingers stroke his neck, lavish across the dull planes of his
脸. Eyelashes flap one, 二, 三, like a heroine in a silent melodrama. And here
comes the toss of invisible hair, digits combing phantom locks. Such a luxuriant,
absent mane he has—swinging!
The occasion precipitating this outburst was an art-history lecture series in
China sponsored by the Ford Foundation in the early aughts. We were in
Chengdu that day, among the last stops on a monthlong itinerary. I had been
invited to teach critical approaches to the field with another art historian, 和
feminist methodology was my chosen presentation. It was a fabulous if romantic
机会, a prospect of transnational solidarity between Chinese and dias-
poric scholars in the so-called global turn. Gender performativity was it.
Whether or not Judith Butler had been translated into Mandarin by this point, 我
don’t recall, but teaching such material to Chinese students could only be grati-
fying, 至少可以说.
*
For Mel Y. Chen and Julia Bryan-Wilson, and the students in the 2020 spring graduate semi-
nar “Picture Industry” at Yale University. This essay was written before news of the state-sponsored mur-
ders and vigilante killings of Georg Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too
好多其它的. The mask is off.
OCTOBER 173, 夏天 2020, PP. 230–241. © 2020 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00409
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
232
OCTOBER
Or at least until this man’s peculiar burlesque. I admit, his interpretation of
gender performance still stings, although I can also admit it may have simply been
the obnoxious response of an outlier. Up to this point on the tour, the worst reac-
tions were boredom and head-scratching—not venom or rage—which is why, 为了
years after the fact, I had mostly forgotten about the encounter. Teachers consign
such episodes to the pedagogical back burner. If we’re being generous, we archive
them as a category of hard-won experience, those fabled “teachable moments”
directed to some fabled instructional future. When we’re less than kind, we share
such WTF events with sympathetic colleagues, laughing and shaking our heads at
the youth. A student will act out from time to time, 毕竟. We deal.
仍然. It’s been hard not to think of this man recently, to ponder where he is
现在, what he’s doing, if he’s even alive. I wonder about his chauvinist vogue. 他的
deep-rooted Chinese-ness versus my watered-down Asian-Americanness. I won-
der about his invisible drag while picturing his fingers caressing his face. And I
wonder what else this performance might insinuate about where all of us are
right now, particularly those for whom gender and “Chinese-ness”—a term I’ll
necessarily qualify in what follows—always precede our reception and set the
stage for our performance, no matter what we might ultimately say or do. 不
matter how we choose to present—or not. No matter how much choice we have
in the matter.
Chengdu is some six hundred miles from Wuhan, a fourteen-hour drive
inclusive of punishing traffic. Total travel time from Wuhan to Newark clocks in at
twenty-six hours, with at least two possible layovers: Guanhzhou and/or los
安吉利斯. New Jersey Transit from Newark (Northeast Corridor) gets you into Penn
Station in under an hour. Metro North 125th Street to New Haven is a slog. 哪个
is another way of saying: The reader won’t forget the time differences, nor the lag
between what happens here and there, now and then. The reader won’t forget
where your here and my there is situated, and vice versa. We will insist upon the dif-
ferential uptake of how this pathetic anecdote might land.
I need to ask the question now. What gestures will a face abide?
*
These days, everyone is barking and no one needs a translation. listen to
the pandemic’s grim and relentless audio. Warnings boom with the authority of
science while autocrats spit their rabid patois. No dog whistles are necessary
when the pundits come screaming, fomenting the hordes. Adult children bark at
their elderly parents, STAY INSIDE; young parents admonish their kids, WASH
YOUR HANDS. It’s a strange type of barking, 尽管, for most of it comes at a
distance, muffled through screens large and small, from news media to social
media to the inevitable roll call of chat apps and platforms: Zoom, Skype,
FaceTime. Such verbal commands play parasite to visual mediation, 在哪里
images give form to the soundtrack of emergency as so much bankable represen-
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time, Pandemic Style
233
站, even as—or especially because—contagion thrives on invisibility. 的
课程, options exist to turn down the sound with small icons in the corner of
your desktop. That red line slashing through a mic boom on a Zoom conference
(the mute function) is a welcome respite from the interpellations of media itself.
我, for one, take it as a kind of small, dismal freedom, a hapless protest. (然后
there’s the kind of barking you can’t turn off. As if erupting from a strangled
狗, the echoes of rasping coughs and choked air rattle down the walls of elder
homes, cruise ships, subway cars, bus depots, processing plants, housing projects,
homeless shelters, prisons, ambulances, finally hospitals . . . )
From the early days of the crisis, one message clamored with particular
力量: Don’t touch your face. I nominate this phrase as the de facto commandment
of the moment, which I oppose to its affirmative complement, Wash your hands.
Wash your hands sounds with an almost theological, because ritual, gravitas, 奇姆-
ing with the performance of religiosity across any number of faith traditions:
spiritual ablutions, cleanliness, godliness, and the like. Don’t touch your face
instead implicates the gross materiality of bodies, dirt, and invisible things that
stick. This injunction, I suggest, will both shadow and advance a viral confluence
of illness, animality, 性别, 种族, and power. To the larger interests of this exer-
cise, it will also signal the confluence between racial violence accelerated by the
pandemic and the forms of representation, both historical and contemporary,
that inscribe and enforce it.
Don’t touch your face is, 毕竟, a demand of mortal consequence. 因为,
as we know too well, a banal if once intimate gesture like scratching your nose,
stroking your chin, biting your nails, picking your teeth, or rubbing your eyes
now amounts to a direct line of transmission.1 To touch your face is to self-
administer a vector of pathogen; the hand will violate the newly securitized zone
of the face as it travels its own haptic road map to infection. The statistics on
how many times we touch our face are dispatched with robotic frequency: twen-
ty-three times an hour on average, once nearly every 2.5 minutes. Scientists dis-
close an interesting fact on this point, that humans are “one of the few species in
the animal kingdom” to touch their faces. It’s been theorized as an evolutionary
tic that might either self-regulate feelings of stress—a kind of self-soothing—or
encourage flirtation. On a nonverbal level, 换句话说, touching your face
might amplify the expression of emotion, hence registering our affective com-
munion with other human animals.2
Today one needs to ask: What kind of animals? And what constitutes any-
thing like communion these days? Consider the rudimentary visuals. The brusque
diktat that admonishes Don’t touch your face is typically paired with one or two gen-
1. Scholarship on gesture, 种族, and contagion in the visual arts includes an important essay by
Rizvana Bradley, “Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion,” TDR: The Drama Review
62, 不. 1 (春天 2018), PP. 14–30.
2.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-how-to-stop-touching-your-face.
See Fernando Duarte, “How to Stop Touching Your Face,” March 17, 2020, BBC,
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
234
OCTOBER
res of stock images. 第一的, there’s that awful gray orb, ubiquitous in the media,
impaled by a crown of red spikes: SARS-CoV-2. 然后, there are pictures sourced
from catalogs of online clip art featuring a languid hand cradling a chin or a fin-
ger tracing a delicate cheekbone, complete with glossy nails. Much of the time that
person presents as female, 白色的, and generically, or rather, normatively, “attrac-
tive.” Such images, we can only guess, are born of an algorithmic logic trained on
the data of whiteness by default.
Which compels a return to my introductory anecdote about “Chinese-ness,”
on the one hand, and face-touching gendered as feminine, on the other. 今天
this conjugation frames the performance of those of us regarded as constitutional-
ly sick. In the current climate, one kind of face is reduced to a metonym for the
collective body as commons: The face is incorporated, hence it is rationalized, 大学-
versalized, and digitized as a public body, now forcibly trained in the technics of
both self-policing and mass surveillance.3 But when I hear or read the injunction
Don’t touch your face and nod, 是的, this is the pith instruction of the catastrophe, 一个
abject mantra for these endless, lugubrious days, I can only compare the circula-
tion of these images online—a surplus of mediated transparency—to the blocked cir-
culation of other faces offscreen. Faces that are invisible, masked, 和, more point-
edly—and polemically—“inscrutable.”
*
Perhaps no scholar has theorized what I’ve just called the “viral confluence
of illness, animality, 性别, 种族, and power” better than Mel Y. 陈, 谁的
pathbreaking Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012) 我有
returned to several times in the past few weeks as a different kind of map for the
次: a critical diagnosis that now reads as too prescient, terrible, 紧迫的, 和
真实的. Throughout the book, “mattering” is that complex of processes that variously
delimits, spatializes, ratifies, or shores up the divide between life and death;
human and nonhuman animal; the sensate and the insensate; binary constructions
性别的; and protocols of racialization that cleave to the terms of blackness and
whiteness exclusively. “Mattering” renders thing-like and provisionally objective
the animal, 生物, 化学, metallic, and toxic. “Animacy,” on the other
手, is like a solvent or actant transmuting such matter, loosening the borders
imagined to separate such things as reified and autonomous; setting into motion
what was once inert and discrete.
Critical race theory, Black studies, Asian-American studies, ethnic studies,
animal studies, and queer-of-color scholarship have long charted the nexus
The politics and racialization of the face under the technics of the surveillance state have
3.
been theorized and historicized by, 除其他外, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, and Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun. For an artist’s account of queer faciality as resistant to these conditions, in part inspired
by Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, see Zach Blas, “Informatic Opacity,” in Posthuman Glossary, 编辑.
Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (london: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time, Pandemic Style
235
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
George Keller. “Uncle Sam’s Farm in Danger.”
between dehumanization, animality, and race: The anti-Black terrorism encoded
in the visual rhetoric of simianization, 例如; or the assignment of feral
attributes to “primitive” peoples; or the epistemic and epidermalizing schemas
classifying those as less-than-human, as so much reptilian or amphibious life. (作为
Frantz Fanon wrote of settler colonialism in 1963, “the terms the settler uses when
he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptil-
ian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, 的
spawn, of gesticulations.”4) In the centuries-old chronicles of Sinophobia, the nine-
teenth-century San Francisco–based weekly The Wasp notoriously published car-
toons and advertisements advancing its twinned economic and anti-immigration
platforms against Chinese indentured labor.5 Represented as pigs and locusts, 这
Chinese populate a xenophobic menagerie.
But these virtual, propagandistic “species jumps” occur not only between
human and nonhuman animals—the animals we see, consume, corral. 的确,
4.
2004), p. 42.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 反式. Richard Philcox (纽约: Grove Press,
5.
For these and many more such images, an excellent online resource is Michelle Walford,
“Illustrating Chinese Exclusion: Thomas Nast’s Cartoons of Chinese Americans,” https://thomasnast-
cartoons.com/2014/02/14/uncle-sams-farm-in-danger-9-march-1878/.
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
236
OCTOBER
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
“The Chinese Must Go”
advertisement for laundry
detergent.
they launch at the submicroscopic level of that which cannot be easily visualized,
contained, or transparently represented as contagion: 因此, as an aniconic, visual
analogue to the actual species jumps enabling the transmission of novel disease.
Viruses and bacteria do not have a face. They do not bear the weight of visual rep-
resentation bound to the mythos of the individual subject, possessing an equally
mythic interior life in turn. The iconography of the Yellow Peril swirling around
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 例如, draws a morbid equivalence
between race, 种族, 疾病, and Chinatown, and visual media imagines this
conjunction as phantom death, looming and immaterial.6 (Note that the spectral
personifications of “malaria” and “leprosy” are especially animalistic: The figure of
leprosy appears wearing a braided queue worn by Chinese coolie labor.) As if
6.
On the history giving rise to these images, see Joan B. Trauner, “The Chinese as Medical
Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870–1905,” California History 57, 不. 1 (春天 1978), PP. 70–87. Regarding
the historical advertisement for laundry detergent, the pervasiveness of such racist motifs continues in the
展示, as in a notorious anti-Black commercial for a Chinese laundry detergent, Qiaboi, 从 2016. 在
this commercial, a Chinese woman inserts cleaning liquid into the mouth of a Black man, whom she pro-
ceeds to stuff into a washing machine. At the end of the cycle he emerges as Asian.
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time, Pandemic Style
237
anticipating the technics of the contemporary wellness industry, the counterpoint
to such imagery marries hygiene, whiteness, and gender as an emerging American
市场, as in an advertisement for “The Magic Washer” laundry detergent. 作为
copy for the product chirps, “We have no use for them since we got this
Wonderful Washer: What a blessing to tired mothers: It costs so little and don’t
injure the clothes.”
Updating these associations, Chen narrates their history of invisible disability
triangulated by Asianness, chronic illness, and queerness. Inadvertently they fore-
warn a sense of the current crisis born of the dreadful contact zone between racial
skins and protective masks, incipient violence, and gender, dirt, and Chinatown.
Chen is hailed in public, 最终, as a virus:
let me get specific and narrate what my “toxic” and cognitive bodily
state means, how it limits, delimits, frames and undoes. Today I am hav-
ing a day of relative well-being and am eager to explore my neighbor-
hood on foot. . . . Some passenger cars whiz by; instinctively my body
retracts and my corporeal-sensory vocabulary starts to kick back in. . . .
I am accustomed to this; the glancing scans kick in from habit whenev-
er I am witnessing proximate human movement, and I have learned to
prepare to be disappointed. The preparation for disappointment is
something like the preparation for the feeling I would get as a young
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
/
/
.
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
凯勒. “San Francisco’s Three Graces.” 1882.
238
OCTOBER
person when I looked, however glancingly, into the eyes of a racist
passerby who expressed apparent disgust at my Asian off-gendered
形式. I imagined myself as the queer child who was simultaneously a
walking piece of dirt from Chinatown. . . .
To my relief, the pedestrians pass, uneventfully for my body. I realize,
然后, that I should have taken my chemical respirator with me. When I
used to walk maskless with unsuspecting acquaintances, they had no
idea I was privately enacting my own bodily concert of breath-holding,
speech and movement. . . .
I am, 实际上, still seeking ways to effect a smile behind my mask. . . .
Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask, I am often met with
some form of repulsion; indeed “sars!” is what has been used to inter-
pellate me in the streets.7
Following Chen’s lead, I ask: How is it possible that there are far too few and
far too many masks these days? No one is smiling behind them. Note that the pro-
tections a mask might afford are conditional—or rather, positional—depending on
who happens to have access to them; who refuses them; and who, by dint of their
status as “essential” worker, is forced to wear them. The question of who is con-
scripted to don the mask calls forth any number of projections, with pestilence
and criminality ranking high on the racialized checklist. Asian-Americans repre-
sent just one part of this dismal ecology, that much is clear; for the mask figures a
politics of intersubjectivity that exposes the virus’s catastrophically disproportion-
ate impact on people of color: African-American, latinx, Indigenous.8 “I have a
sense of anxiety wearing the mask,” a Black man named Allen Hargrove was quot-
ed as saying in the New York Times: “It makes me more aware of being perceived.”
Another man tweeted, “I don’t feel safe wearing a handkerchief or something else
that isn’t ClEARlY a protective mask covering my face to the store because I am a
Black man living in this world. I want to stay alive but I also want to stay alive.”9
I want to stay alive but I also want to stay alive. This is the cruel double bind of
the pandemic for too many wearing the mask.
7.
大学出版社, 2012).
Mel Y. 陈, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect (达勒姆, NC: Duke
8.
的确, the mask is a formative trope in the literature of racial performance and racialized
psychic projection. The foundational philosophy to this end is (再次) Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White
Masks (1952) (纽约: Grove Press, 2008). A recent volume indebted to Fanon’s canonical example
is Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (明尼阿波利斯:
明尼苏达大学出版社, 2014).
9.
约克时报, 四月 14, 2020.
Derrick Bryson Taylor, “For Black Men, Fear That Masks Will Invite Racial Profiling,” New
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time, Pandemic Style
239
*
所以, 什么, if any, “teachable moment” might be redeemed from the emer-
代理机构, shot through with deflating personal anecdotes, gestures toward a facial
政治, and minor histories of visual culture from centuries past to the digital age?
This essay opened with a decades-old encounter from the global teaching archive:
a confrontation between a native Chinese son and an Asian-American woman. 它
draws down with the fragment of an imaginary draft syllabus. Complete with a
dispiriting and lengthening reading list, the syllabus is designed for a course that
no one should ever have to take:
COURSE TITlE: Face Time, Pandemic Style
要求: Showing up onscreen. Zoom. Nothing.
Prerequisites: A human face. If you are not in possession of one, a mask.
读物:
—“This Is What It’s like to Be an Asian Woman in the Age of Coronavirus”
—“Acid Attack on Brooklyn Woman in Apparent Coronavirus Hate Crime.
NY Mayor De Blasio Calls Rise in Racist Attacks on Asians a ‘Crisis’”
—“‘This Is Why There’s Coronavirus!’: Asian Woman Spat On, Assaulted in
Manhattan Hate Crime”
—“‘Where’s Your [Expletive] Mask?’: Asian Woman Attacked in Manhattan
Hate Crime”
—“Asian Woman Assaulted in Manhattan, Blamed for Coronavirus: Cops”
And so on.
An Asian woman in Brooklyn is taking out the trash. A man sitting on her stoop,
等待, wearing a mask, sneaks up behind her. He douses her with a caustic liquid,
runs away. The liquid is something like acid; the woman suffers second-degree chemi-
cal burns over her face, neck, 后退. She is sent to the hospital; she is in stable condi-
的. The event is captured by surveillance cameras and is now circulated widely
在线的. The survivor may not be ethnically Chinese (no article provides information
as to her actual ethnic identification), but no matter. Her face—now corroded,
effaced—will carry the scars of racist misrecognition. For “Chinese-ness” is the gener-
ic mask forcibly worn by people of Asian descent during the pandemic.10 Or, 作为
poet Cathy Park Hong writes, “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is
for tissues.”11
10.
“Chinese-ness” represents this nominal, Asian Other in the current moment. The conflation
of race and ethnicity is a structuring feature within histories of US immigration: Asians have long been
subjected to this generalizing logic. During World War II, it was “Japanese-ness” (“Jap”); during the
Vietnam War, it was “Vietnamese-ness” (“gook”). The economic recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s
saw “Japanese-ness” assume this mantle once again, leading, 例如, to the murder of Vincent
Chin, a Chinese-American draftsman beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for
Japanese. 同时, 后 9/11, people of South Asian descent were frequently targeted and/or mur-
dered due to rising Islamophobia and mistaken for Arab Muslims, including Balbir Singh Sodhi and
Waqar Hassan, both victims of this violence.
11.
p. 19.
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (纽约: One World, 2020),
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
240
OCTOBER
Hong could not have anticipated how the word “Kleenex” would resonate at
this moment, when the banal symptoms and accessories of your average cold con-
jure racialized scenes of death. She is equally on point regarding the illegibility of
this “Chinese-ness” in light of longer histories of Asian visibility, whether orna-
mented as the female embodiment of Chinese decadence (and by extension, toxi-
city and corruption) or rendered docile and subservient, the feminized keep of
the “model minority” myth.12 “Inscrutability” is the term that stereotypically names
这 (在)capacity of the Chinese subject to be “read” or analyzed (“scrutinized”),
for the deviousness of their motivations and the backwardness of their ways. 洪
speaks to the punishing logic of the mask for people of Asian descent:
The face mask seemed to implicate foreigners as agents of diseases.
The masks depersonalized their faces, making the stereotypically
“inscrutable” Asian face even more inscrutable, effacing even their age
and gender, while also telegraphing that the Asian wearer was mute
and therefore incapable of talking back if aggressed.13
The last notion finds inverse confirmation in a recent analysis that, in the
age of COVID-19, Asian-American women are “more likely to experience” racist
harassment than their male counterparts on account of their gender. Why this is
所以, one commentator observed, is “the sense that perhaps women are not going to
fight back, are more vulnerable, less likely to respond, and so when people feel
like they have a license to [harass them], they’re gonna go after people who may
appear to be vulnerable even though that’s not the case.”14
*
long after writing Gender Trouble, Judith Butler takes on Emmanuel levinas’s
theorization of the face. Her larger topic is precarious life, a life we’ll submit to an
updated, performative logic. Butler’s paraphrase of the senior philosopher consid-
ers how the face of the Other makes a certain demand on us as subjects. It is a
mode of address regarding moral authority and “an important obligation of our
times.”15 “To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological
12.
As Anne Anlin Cheng writes of the “Yellow Woman”: “this figure is so suffused with represen-
tation that she is invisible, so encrusted by aesthetic expectations that she need not be present to gener-
ate affect, and so well known that she has vanished from the zone of contact.” Anne Anlin Cheng,
“Preface: A Feminist Theory of the Yellow Woman,” Ornamentalism (牛津: Oxford University Press,
2018), p. 希.
13.
四月 12, 2020.
Cathy Park Hong, “The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020,” New York Times,
14.
Wendy lu, “This Is What It’s like to Be an Asian Woman in the Age of the Coronavirus,”
Huffington Post, 行进 31, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/asian-women-racism-
coronavirus_n_5e822d41c5b66ea70fda8051.
15.
(london: Verso, 2004), PP. 132–38.
Judith Butler, “Precarious life,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Face Time, Pandemic Style
241
right to existence into question,” levinas remarks. Critically, the face does not
speak but presents an ethical injunction nonetheless: Thou shalt not kill. The face
is that sphere of ethics incorporating the “extreme precariousness of the other.” It
is also the “situation of discourse”: what is communicated, or commanded,
through nonverbal gestures, appearances, cues.
And what of the “Other” in this encounter? The Other whose face, 条款-
ally exposed, makes a certain demand on an imagined “us,” as the face that
doesn’t speak? “To lose face,” following the Chinese idiomatic expression, 将要
indict a different set of behaviors, if not quite an ethics, tied to the devaluation of
the self in public, its appearance abused on the civic stage. Its performance, 在
换句话说. Here we behold the face as the fallen site of discourse, banked on
ideologies of transparent social exchange as its own genre of performativity.
Perhaps for many of us, a face offers no guarantee of such discourse, of social
communicability, least of all during a crisis of communicable disease, insidiously
called the “Wuhan virus” or the even more malign, because globalizing, 一般的-
ization the “Chinese virus.”
It began in late February, the behavior in the subway. I came armed with my
hand sanitizer, though that was nothing new; nor was the mask I wore regularly on
public transportation during the height of flu season. Years of travel in Japan,
Hong Kong, and China—melancholic recollections these days—had long since
convinced me of the mask’s utility. I started to notice the increasingly wide berth I
was given on the train, even during the crush of the evening commute. Odd, 但
there always seemed to be an available seat for me; stranger still, as the days wore
在, were the always open seats flanking where I sat. I joked about it to friends as I
lavished in those spaces, at first defiantly, 讽刺地. Not too long after, I inhabited
such spaces with increasing nervousness, head bowed, eyes refusing communion
with others, shrinking. If enforced invisibility is the traditional lot of the Asian-
American or “yellow” woman, “so suffused with representation that she is invisi-
布莱,” as Anne Anlin Cheng notes, the conditions of the pandemic have exploited
that lethal admixture of terror and shame as projected from the outside. 这
desire not to be seen.
On the train, I began to mute the symptoms of my perpetual allergies: 这
throat clearing, the dripping nose, the occasional cough.
Everywhere else I saw violence as partner to contagion, saw the two as contin-
uous, from behind both the mask and the screen.
I began to lose face.
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
/
/
e
d
你
哦
C
t
哦
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
我
F
/
d
哦
我
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
1
8
6
8
5
0
9
哦
C
t
哦
_
A
_
0
0
4
0
9
p
d
.
/
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
