英国留学生眼中的疫情

最近英国的天气出奇的好，好的让我感觉窗户上的玻璃都是多余的。外面的世界也格外安静，安静的只能听到鸟鸣和心跳。

今天英国累计确诊人数已超过了一万，实际则会更多。一条接着一条的信息在轰炸着这个看似静止的世界。英国首相鲍里斯·约翰逊新冠肺炎检测呈阳性，他的卫生部大臣Matt Hancock 也确诊了，伯明翰机场开始建造临时停尸房，37岁的英国驻布达佩斯大使馆外交官史蒂文·迪克因新冠肺炎死亡，查尔斯王子被确诊，英国一线护士在医院内自杀……

伯明翰街头

中国疫情在慢慢好转，欧洲疫情开始蔓延。人性的丑陋与伟大也在疫情中暴露。很多人开始指责和嘲笑西方处理疫情的方式有问题，真正关心人间疾苦的又有几个？甚至有人在论坛直接说希望英国多死一些人，这难道不是反人类吗？内心有多阴暗才会说出这言论。

各种自媒体也不忘乘火打劫，各种不属实的文章煽动人心，放大愚蠢。大家齐心协力支援武汉是事实，中国有很多 “特色“之处也是事实，视频中一家人其乐融融说着武汉加油，真的能鼓舞前线工作人员吗？感染者在与死神较量的过程中真的会点开那些视频吗？与其说关心鼓舞不如说秀存在。英国人们也开始重视，大街上几乎没人，商场快餐酒吧都关闭，聚会被罚款，很难想象以欧洲人的性格接受了这些，成功的调动了人的自主积极性，激发了人们的自主求生欲，以至于到今天要求自主隔离才没有受到大众的抵触。也有各种媒体找了一些人多的照片，带英国的节奏，评论中也是各种讽刺。很多评论都说政府的举措存在很多问题，但试问大英帝国人民的首相无论如何也比网络上的键盘侠逻辑清楚。英国疫情现在很严重，但我相信情况会向好的方向发展。在这种情况下，进行自我隔离是代价最小的举措，闷在屋里总比呆在急救室强，房间里的空气再不新鲜也比呼吸机里的空气让你安心。疫情能放大很多东西，从国家层面来看，疫情放大了国家体制的优点和缺点。从个体看，放大了人性。国内，小人得志，西方，为自己的狂妄自大买单。正所谓制度是人影子的延长线。

超市里的花也还在

春天在英国如约而至，路边的花静静开放，超市里的鲜花让我感觉一切如同往常。可悲的是没有人记住死去的人，没有人记住当初的悲愤和教训。把所有的情绪转化成对西方社会的蔑视和嘲笑之中，取代了之前所有尘封的教训……

徐丹丹，伯明翰艺术学院硕士研究生。

以下是英文原文

Home and Away: Queer Diasporic Musings

Hongwei Bao

During the coron**irus COVID-19 pandemic, one of the popular buzzwords is ‘home’. The UK government has advised people to ‘stay home’ and only go out when absolutely necessary. Brexiteers shouted at foreigner-looking people: ‘Go back to your home!’ Chinese students studying abroad often h**e to struggle with the decision, and even action, of whether they should go back ‘home’; and for many, this ‘home’ is located in China, the taken-for-granted ‘homeland’ for ‘Chineseness’. Home, in these contexts, become an anchoringpoint, a safe h**en, and a place of origin one can return to. It has occupied aprimary position in the contemporary cultural imaginary, both in China and in the West. It seems that wherever one tr**els to and whenever there is a crisis, one can always hope to go back to the ‘home, sweet home’.

As a queer person of Chinese origin currently living in the UK, I find the often taken-for-granted notion of the home problematic. What if one has no home to return to? (Think about homeless people or people inexile.) What if home is a repressive and suffocating place, and is harmful forone’s physical and intellectual development? Can people make home by themselves, wherever, whenever and with whoever they like or love? What is a home for sexual minorities whose families refuse to accept their sexuality, and for the diasporic communities who h**e been away from China for too long and China seems as alien as a foreign country? Moreover, in popular discourses, home is often associated with conservative and heteronormative — if not homonormative — ideologies: one should get married and h**e offspring early; being a gay personor being a ‘left-over’ woman (shengnü) brings shame to the family. Similarly, the notion ofthe ‘homeland’ is often associated with patriotic and nationalistic sentiments: being gay is Western and is thus incompatible with Chinese values. And worsestill, ‘home’ seems to h**e a highly anxious subjectivity: it constantlyrequires demonstration of loyalty at the expense of hybridity and ambivalence: h**e you forgotten your cultural roots? You are Chinese, after all, wherever you go, and however long you live in another country. Home, therefore, can be anoppressive regime for queer people and people living in the diaspora. This explainswhy many lesbians and gay people dread going back to their hometowns to spend time with their parents and relatives during the Chinese New Year; and this is also why many people living in the diaspora often keep a critical distance fromnational identities, Chinese or otherwise.

Home often conjures up a fixed sense of identity: where people come from often describes and even dictates who they are. There are stereotypes associated with people from certain cities, countries, family backgrounds and upbringings. But we are much more than the place where we were born or the family in which we grow up. We go to schools and universities; we read booksand watch films; we tr**el to different places and meet interesting people... all these encounters and experiences shape who we are and will continue to h**e an impact on what we will become. After all, who we are is not static and maybe constantly changing. There is no single identity, in the same way that thereis not a fixed home. Home is where we are, whom we are with and what we make it to be.

Perhaps we should strip home of its mythical origin and bourgeois pretentiousness by seeing it as an ordinary place in society or one of the many stops in life. We can even give it radical meanings by making it procedural, collective, collaborative and political. Indeed, home is as much an imaginationof a better world as that of a safer place for oneself; it is both a collective struggle for equality and social justice and an individual pursuit of happiness. In this sense, perhaps home does not h**e to entail a heightened sense of identity and individualism characteristic of a capitalist society; it can also be collective, socialist, participatory and activist. Similarly, intimacy should not be seen as merely private and domestic; it can be public, with help and support for each other, and trust and good will shared among strangers. One ofthe problems with the ‘stay home’ discourse, I would contend, is that it confines intimacy and responsibility within the bourgeois domestic home, often in the form of a heterosexual coupledom with children. It also imagines strangers as enemies and potential sources of contagion. Such an imagination of home undermines communities and society, especially for those who live at the margins of society: the homeless, the elderly, the immigrants, and many more. Fortunately, perhaps the picture is not so grim after all: while we do see selfish beh**iours such as stockpiling with no consideration for other people, we also see mutual help and support within the communities and between strangers. Indeed, a politics and ethics of care is very much needed at a such historic time: not simply care for the self, but care for others, the community, the society, and the non-human world as well.

Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not asking people to le**e home and risk their and other people’s lives during the pandemic. We can still stay indoors or go back to China if needed. After all, taking care of the self is the first step towards taking care of others and the society. However, a reinvigorated imagination of home is certainly needed to depart from the conservative, nationalistic, heteronormative and even homonormative values with which home is often associated. After all, home is only a small part of the big social worldwe live in, and the complex human-nature entanglements we are a part of. Home should be seen as a beginning rather than an end for sociality; it is a becoming rather than a being for our politics and ethics.

Hongwei Bao is an associate professor of media andcultural studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is also a research associate at the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at the Birmingham School of Art. He is author of Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism inPostsocialist China (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2018) and Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge, forthcoming in 2020).