The Physical and the Passable: Immigrant Anxiety,Fulbright Becoming,and the Invisible Trials of the Ordinary Body

Abstract

This article adopts a response-able methodology that diffracts the author’s autoethnographic writings, composed while preparing a Fulbright application to the United States. Creative acts of responding open a material-dialogic space in which the self and its imagined other enter into fragile partnership across geographic and epistemic distances. By engaging literary works and leaving ambiguity intact, the practice advances a reparative approach to becoming, recasting Fulbright candidacy through inquiry that is both relational and culturally situated. The methodology foregrounds the affective and embodied dimensions of marginality, exposing the invisible weight of otherness. Through the metonym of “passing,” the article interrogates the moving body as a site of possibility and stalled transformation. In producing meta-discourse, it extends the sociology of the life course by conceptualizing immigrant anxiety as material, discursive, and socio-cultural force shaping transnational becoming.

Writing and Immanence

Provoking critical questions of epistemology, ontology, and axiology, this article is grounded in Ken Gale’s (2023) framework of writing and immanence, where concept-making and the reorientation of thought are central. Introducing a specific cultural subject—myself, a Chinese-born Australian—I cast the spectacle of applying for a Fulbright Postdoctoral Award not as a personal or professional milestone, but as a bureaucratic rite of passage: an elaborate performance in which the immigrant-scholar rehearses excellence before an institution intent on measuring it.

Even before entering this game, the protracted search for an academic “endorser” renders the application less an opportunity than a choreography—a lens through which the utopian process of becoming is staged, suspended between aspiration and paperwork, prestige and parody. Within this performance, the structural and symbolic boundaries that contour my academic and cultural positioning come sharply into view. By turning the intellectual gaze inward, my writing in this article unsettles the very grounds of knowing, opening space for the ordinary self to speak (Yan et al., 2025) and, through its transformations, uncovering the quiet drama of human life.

My writing becomes a creative-relational inquiry (Wyatt, 2019), a space where self and other emerge, provoking questions of transnational identity, academic “passing,” and the biopolitics of academic culture. In examining the Fulbright event, I evoke embodied memory, tracing the genealogy of my cultural upbringing and histories alongside the layered trajectories that continue to shape my becoming as a scholar across borders (Yan & Poole, 2024). Through acts of creative responding—drawing on literary works and theoretical insights—the article advances the practice of diffractive ethnography in neoliberal times (Gullion, 2018), revealing its implications for how we might reimagine the conduct of social science research.

The Remains of the Day

It is March. ¹ A quiet Sunday. You step away from your writing and walk along the Yarra River, your thoughts elsewhere (Yan, 2025d).

On the bank, a competition unfolds. A man is towed by a motorboat, carving swift, intricate turns. You do not know the sport’s name. The voice of a reporter – with a thick Aussie accent – carries across the water as young athletes prepare: lean, strong, confident. You feel a flicker of envy.

You have recently become an Australian citizen. The thought lingers: you are now eligible for the Fulbright Program.

“Australia is my new home, you remind yourself” (Udah, 2025). Your body is tired, your mind preoccupied with revisions.

...

Crossing the bridge, you pause as a rider falls into the river. The sport is more demanding than it first appeared.

“What is this called?” you ask a spectator. “Wakeboarding,” he replies.

The announcer introduces the next competitor: Sam Brown. You cannot see him clearly, but you make out a figure folding and unfolding, attempting tricks. He falls. “Is he out?” you ask. “Not yet. Two falls allowed. Others before him are gone.”

Sam resurfaces, takes the rope, and begins again.

You are struck by the sheer effort, the precision, the quiet courage of it all. Then, unexpectedly, your chest tightens. You pass your hand across your face. It comes away wet. You hadn’t realized you were crying.

...

The river glints, the sky holds its blue, the crowd watches (Yan, 2024b). Yet something has shifted. A cough, a tightening in your throat. The world hesitates. Voices blur into a single hum.

You watch the final performance. It is not perfect. That is what makes it beautiful – the fall, the recovery, the attempt. You recognize yourself in it. Not in the athlete, but in the act itself: the trying. All those years.

You stand there, unmoving. Your chest tight. Your face blank. You look up. The sky is blue. Too blue, maybe. It stretches out, indifferent. ²

In that moment, the day, in its own way, has acknowledged you.

...

The sunshine-filled bliss of the moment is quickly interrupted as my thoughts turn to the past. I feel that “my body is suffering from a physiological reaction to Endgame and the political anxieties it conjures up in me” (Newman, 2013, p. 250). I walk on, unwilling to know whether Sam Brown will win in the end, for I have never won a game in my life.

Yes, I know, your “dreams are filled with sighs” (Han, 2020, p. 153). Strange, how dreams etch themselves into the memory of a moving body—caught only in fragments, fleeting, like shadows slipping through sunlight. In Montage of a Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes (1995, p. 426) asks:

what happens to a dream deferred?

does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

or fester like a sore—

and then run?

does it stink like rotten meat?

or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

or does it explode?

Yet Ishiguro (1989, p. 244) cautions against dwelling on such speculation: “what is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took?”

Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in pursuit of such aspirations, then surely that, whatever the outcome, is cause for pride and contentment.

Yes, you’re right—I should embrace a more generous outlook and “make the best of what remains of my day” (Ishiguro, 1989, p. 244). I cannot forever look back and blame myself if my immigrant life has not unfolded as I might have wished.

The hard reality is that, for the likes of you and me, there is little choice but to entrust our migratory journey to the benevolent overlords of bureaucracy—those ambiguous processes of rigorous selection—who, in their perpetual competitions, employ us less for our talents than for our capacity to keep the machine humming politely along.

Now I see how naive it was to believe the Fulbright Postdoctoral Award was ever meant for someone like me. Draped in the lofty spirit of Senator Fulbright—“leadership, learning, and empathy between cultures” (Fulbright program, nd)—the Award performs competitiveness, rigor, and excellence more than it promises inclusion. Its rhetoric gestures toward eligibility, yet eligibility has its own borders. And those borders, drawn by institutions, quietly remind you: the invitation was never meant for you. Dreams were cheap—until you tried to live them.

The Narrative and Its Diffraction

This autoethnography moves across multiple discourses, generating new meanings through processes of “entangled intra-relating (Barad, 2007, p. ix). Within this narrative diffraction, the interplay between “you,” representing observed reality, and “I,” embodying lived knowledge, mirrors the dynamic between reader and author. It foregrounds the intra-active nature of knowledge production—what Gullion (2018) terms diffractive ethnography—revealing how entanglements affect not only others but also reverberate back upon ourselves.

Through a discursive process of reading, writing, and rewriting an event alongside literary works, multiple voices emerge. This creative act of research writing—what Yan et al. (2023) describe as “ventriloquism”—enacts a double movement toward the “cultivation of collective knowing, desiring, being, and making-with so that we render each other capable” (Murris & Bozalek, 2019, p. 882). In performing this double movement, the hybrid text generates a material-dialogic space that diffracts autoethnographic writings I first composed to ease emotional strain while preparing a Fulbright Postdoctoral application in Australia.

The self: I cannot tell my story without going a long way back. If it were possible I would go back much further still to the very earliest years of my childhood…

My other self: You must understand every human is not only himself or herself, but each is also the unique particular, always significant and remarkable point where the phenomena of the world intersect once and for all and never again. ³

By enacting a double discourse, I inhabit a liminal space—neither fully included nor entirely excluded. From this threshold I write, where philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, and political ideas converge (Fournier, 2021). Producing, responding, and creating difference, my practice of response-ability is rooted in the notion of “corporeal epistemes” (Giardina & Newman, 2011b, p. 39), enacting a democratization of epistemologies. In displacing desire, the reader may come to see how my longing becomes increasingly indistinguishable from despair—such that the self is entangled with the other and with its surroundings.

Thinking with the embodied figure, I engage in diffractive reading as a form of creative response to articulate the “biopolitics of human movement” (Newman & Giardina, 2014, p. 419). Biopolitics here is not abstracted from lived experience but inscribed in the body’s gestures, pauses, and displacements—revealing how movement is regulated, constrained, and made meaningful within broader social, cultural, and political economies. Through this lens, ordinary acts—walking, watching, faltering—entangle “the body’s ordinariness” (Wyatt, 2024, p. 233) with structures of citizenship, belonging, and labor, revealing how the body both resists and reproduces the conditions of mobility.

In this research practice, my creative respondings function as a methodology of response-ability, raising critical questions about nationalism, nostalgia, and the formation of the intellectual and cultural subject. In shaping new temporalities—what Barad (2014, p. 168) describes as “space-time-mattering”—these respondings explore the “possibilities for coming ‘together-apart’ as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world” (Thorpe & Newman, 2023, p. 109). Moving toward a response-able pedagogy, this practice offers inventive provocations that encourage thinking differently and creatively. As Murris and Bozalek (2019, p. 882) remind us, a “response-able methodology is not a once-off reading, but an ongoing and ever-changing entanglement of experimentation with the ideas of re/reading and re/turning to one’s own and others’ texts.”

This creative methodology cultivates a dialogic liminality, resonating with Barad’s (2010, p. 268) notion of the “ongoing reworkings of ‘moments,’ ‘places,’ and ‘things’ – each being (re)threaded through the other.” Such an approach to knowledge-making is especially valuable in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary contexts, such as migration, as it sustains sensitivity to thought without oversimplification and fosters creative engagement with the complex, situated nature of knowledge. Attending to the psychic dimension provides a lens for understanding how the body comes to matter—and how its materialization enables “critical interventions” into the very processes that redefine the “terms of exclusion and production” (Barad, 2007, p. 209).

The critical questions of recognition, exclusion, and the politics of scholarly belonging acquire particular urgency in the context of becoming Fulbright scholars, where the politics of recognition and exclusion are quietly enacted. By performing the disruptions introduced through destructive moves, this practice extends further, assembling alternative ways of knowing, relating, and acting (Mitander, 2025). In this process, knowledge emerges as power relations, materiality, and entanglement co-constitute ethico-political practices grounded in relational ontology (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017), demanding reparative reinterpretation.

Dreams Beyond Borders

You were born in the 1980s, somewhere near the borders of Russia and North Korea, in China’s northeastern province. That detail matters, or maybe it doesn’t.

When you were small, you asked your mother what it would take to become President of China. With the kind of ‘cruel optimism’ reserved for dreamers ( Berlant, 2011 ), she replied: “One day, if you go to Peking University or Harvard, you might be.”

Oh, boy. You believed her. That lie sustains you – an invisible thread binding survival to illusion. Not because it was likely, but because you were young, and the world hadn’t yet explained itself to you. You came from the underclass, but that didn’t mean much at the time.

You thought the world was yours for the reading. ⁴

I grew up believing I knew what it meant to be underclass. It was not a theory, but a life lived in the marrow of daily struggle. Then I encountered Charles Murray’s essay, “The Underclass”—and realized, apparently, I do not qualify. For Murray (2013), “underclass” is an ugly word, heavy with Marxist fumes and lumpenproletariat baggage.

I was never marked by crime—only by domestic violence and a chronic scarcity of resources (Poole & Yan, 2025). So, not underclass. Merely inconvenient.

It seems the definition shifts with geography: in America, it is crime statistics; where I come from, it is surviving on rationed hope and borrowed futures.

Perhaps I have exaggerated. Or perhaps Murray’s reality is filtered—screening out everything that refuses to fit neatly into policy briefs. Definitions, after all, reveal not only differences in thinking but the narratives they are designed to serve.

Throughout your secondary school years, your father was laid off. Confronted with the bleak prospect of a future offering little promise, you chose to leave for the big city, hoping to shed the identity shaped by that hopelessness.

What you didn’t realize, though, was what Grosz (1994 , p. 187) reminds you: “the body is not open to all the whims, wishes, and hopes of the subject.” It turns out the body has conditions – temperatures, environments, supports. Without them, it risks collapse. Or death. Which, admittedly, puts a damper on the whole reinvention plan.

In childhood, I understood the world through the lens of lived reality (Yan et al., 2025). Like many in China, I believed education was the only viable path out of a seemingly hopeless situation—one that demanded unwavering focus on preparing for and succeeding in the Gāokǎo, the national college entrance exam.

Looking back, I see how “daring to dream,” as Paulo Freire (2016) envisioned, offered not only hope but also a way of living—a method of imagining otherwise. Coming from a background with few material resources, I placed my faith in education as a means of becoming someone beyond the limits of circumstance, even as I now recognize the structural constraints embedded within that belief (Newman, 2013).

At times I wonder whether the idea of a “possible dream” was naïve. Yet perhaps it was not. Perhaps it arose from a deeper, critical awareness of the human conditions that shape and constrain individual lives. Freire’s (1970/1993) notion of “limit-situations”—and the “limit-acts” they provoke—speaks directly to this tension. These situations, as he explains, are never neutral; they serve some while negating others.

The fierce competition of the Gāokǎo demanded relentless diligence, leaving little room for curiosity, creativity, or passion. Yet within that constraint, I still imagined something more—something beyond mere survival. As Ishiguro (1989, p. 179) observes: “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently?” Speculation is not only exhausting but limited, for significance emerges only after the moment has passed.

Alas, your education—steeped in ancient wisdom—offered no chance to discover or nurture talent. It was gloriously devoted to the noble art of rote memorization, an art form only if repetition counts as creativity. You still recall your primary school determination, scribbling in every diary:长大后,我要为共产主义事业,添砖加瓦。 [When I grow up, I will contribute to the communist cause.]

The line dutifully closed each entry, while the entries themselves bled irony across the margins—you believed it, not because it made sense, but because you thought they might need someone like you. They didn’t—you are just a dime a dozen, another interchangeable cog in a machine that never cared who kept it running.

But you were young—and belief was cheap.

With few resources growing up, I believed education offered a way out—a means of becoming someone beyond the constraints of my social position. Despite its structural limits, education embodied a kind of untested feasibility, what Freire (1970/1993) describes as the transformation of possibility into reality through praxis. In this light, dreaming becomes a political act, rooted in the recognition of one’s capacity to intervene in the world.

Only in adulthood did I realize how some bodies are granted the conditions to contribute meaningfully while others are excluded (Ahmed, 2012)—a point I will explore further in the following text. To “dare to dream” in such a context requires more than aspiration; it demands reshaping one’s environment and continually expanding one’s capacities, often through external objects, practices, and discourses. As Grosz (1994, p. 188) notes, this process reflects “the most blatant cultural anxieties and projections” tied to my sense of ordinariness within specific locations.

Dreaming becomes my only way to imagine new horizons, interrogate the conditions I inhabit, and rewrite the past to connect memory with both the present and an imagined future—writing my becoming in the West (Yan, 2026). Writing, in this sense, is method, tool, and quiet rebellion (Gale & Wyatt, 2019). Through it, I confront imposed limits—not by escaping them, but by naming, reshaping, and refusing to let them define possibility.

Having lived in the West for more than a decade (2009–2025), I realize the world I once knew now feels vividly unfamiliar. What was ordinary has become foreign, echoing Bakhtin’s (1982, p. 101) insight that “the otherness of what is foreign is emphasized, savored, and elaborately depicted against the backdrop of one’s own ordinary and familiar world.” This dislocation compels me to reconsider what it means to dream the impossible—not as naïve optimism, but as a sociocultural act.

The Possible and the Passable

Considering affective dimensions, various scholars have examined the formation of scholarly identity (Leach, 2021), as well as experiences of invisibility and disposability (Stewart et al., 2025)—often overshadowed by the continuous erasure of who they are and what they have accomplished (Poole & Yan, 2025). Such repeated rejection can foster feelings of impostor syndrome and burnout; as Egido (2025, p. 27) writes, “It took me some time to be human here.” In some cases, it causes racial battle fatigue (Smith et al., 2011).

Reading Giardina and Newman’s “The Physical and the Possible,” I come to see the moving body—politically constrained by the spatial and the liminal—as evoking “new imaginings of what might be possible” when set in motion. It “carries forward meaning, contests power, and embodies both structure and the means by which it might be overcome” (Giardina & Newman, 2011a, p. 393).

Yet I argue that this possibility of becoming hinges on the passable body—both the corpus and the body of knowledge situated within it—a site of corporeal and discursive negotiation enacting a form of embodied “passing.” ⁵ In this way, the body bears a fourfold burden: first, it houses the organs of knowledge—the brain and affective flesh; second, it materially anchors the self to place—Australia, the United States, a community, or geopolitical and institutional boundaries; third, it presents the identity-marked self to the world—as racialized, gendered, and otherwise inscribed; and fourth, it functions as a moving materiality, capable of reproducing or contesting social order.

Therefore, I argue that “academic passing” is not necessarily rooted in impostorization (cf. Phelan, 2024). For me, passing is a performative act—embracing an empowering identity that renders the ordinary self acceptable while simultaneously accentuating its extraordinariness. To apply for a Fulbright from Australia, I must first become Australian, anchoring nationality in geopolitical and cultural moorings that generate tension and rhetoric. Yet I must also prove my scholarly worth beyond the “real.” This performance becomes an ethical struggle for the immigrant “I,” where creative, affective, and aesthetic practices explore how the moving body shapes life amid such encounters.

Echoing Bunds’s (2021) lamentation, “I have anxiety and I am not alone, although I have felt that way” (p. 1040), I theorize this as immigrant anxiety—an unrelenting struggle to pursue aspiration amid repeated rejections within a place that continually tests belonging. For years, I could not shake the sense of never doing enough, never doing the right thing. I knew I carried a gift, yet it often felt obscured, as though possibility itself hovered between recognition and erasure. Immigrant anxiety, then, is not merely a private affliction but a condition forged through displacement and the relentless burden of proving oneself within a liminal space.

Immigrant anxiety is not confined to immigrants alone. For me, it first surfaced in childhood, within my home country. It has always been the tension of striving to belong while resisting the quiet erasure of ordinariness—the paradox of being visible yet unseen. This is the biopolitics of privilege, an apparatus that sustains and legitimizes majority norms (Bunds, 2014). Naming it immigrant anxiety acknowledges the condition of being forced to leave one’s original place, bearing both burden and resilience: sharpening awareness of limits while simultaneously insisting on the possibility of becoming otherwise.

This autoethnography amplifies the voices of invisible outsiders, bridging theory and practice by reimagining what it means to become a scholar. Asking “What is the status of the other?” and “What is the perspective of the other?” (Glăveanu, 2019), I employ literary montage as a response-able act that shifts attention from self to other. By offering a diffractive account, I reimagine the inner lives of outsiders as shaped by cultural and material forces, raising questions about how life itself becomes political (Foucault, 1978).

Through creative and diffractive readings (Gullion, 2018), the body emerges as a site where personal, cultural, and spatial transformations are enacted and made visible. It opens onto ontological possibility, marked by traces that simultaneously inscribe and erase. It is through this kind of “corporeal dialogue” (Weiss, 2008, p. 160) that possibility thinking arises as movement—transforming the immigrant “I” in plain sight into one capable of “silencing and dispelling the self, contemplating, and delineating nature with a clear eye” (Murdoch, 1971/2014, p. 63).

My diffractive thinking frames the sociology of the life course as a dynamic interplay of embodiment and temporality, where knowledge is continually contested and reshaped across shifting cultural, material, and geopolitical contexts (Yan, 2025c). In this sense, the moving body becomes not only a site of lived experience but also a lens through which the ordinary is politicized, revealing how trajectories of becoming are shaped by privilege, marginality, and the fragile hope of transformation.

The Secret History

Fruitful, they say, in the present day. ⁶ Nearing the end of your PhD, the thought of applying for a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship lingers – not loudly, but like a hum you cannot quite place. It promises an ocean to cross, a chance to deepen creative practice, to refine methodologies that already feel like extensions of your body.

From 2023 to 2024, you embarked on a quiet campaign: one academic at a time, one email at a time. Each message was a pebble tossed into a vast, indifferent sea. You waited for ripples – three weeks, sometimes four. Replies arrived like rare birds, beautiful but fleeting – “beauty is rarely soft or consolatory” (Tartt, 1992, p. 41). Quite the contrary. It is always quite alarming. Those who did respond were often on the cusp of sabbaticals or the twilight of their careers, their paths diverging from yours.

...

So you wait. You keep waiting. No one is going to say yes, but you wait anyway. No one knows you are waiting, but you wait anyway – perhaps only you know that “I’ve been waiting for a very long time. No one is going to respond, but still I wait. No one even knows I’m here waiting, but I’m waiting all the same.” ⁷

You wonder how to say, politely, that you are done waiting. That patience has worn thin. That silence is not neutral. By 2024, frustration had settled in like an old friend. You had achieved what you were told to achieve, done the work, and yet found yourself adrift – unmoored from the world you thought you were entering.

You reach out to Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Stanford – then Cornell, Duke, Washington State, UMass, Northwestern... One after another, like beads on a string. The order hardly matters; the ritual is the same.

And when I say you “contact an institution,” let’s be honest: it’s never the grand edifice you’re addressing, but a single academic, a person – someone tasked with embodying the prestige of the whole.

The halls are hallowed, yes, but also hollow.

You remain outside, knocking – the door opened, but not for you (Yan, 2025a).

...

It is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (Tartt, 1992, p. 5).

Newman (2013 , p. 252) captures it best: “Maybe others see me as an interloper, maybe they don’t. Their perception of my belonging matters far less than my perception of their perception.”

You read that line once, then again. It gnawed at you – not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was too familiar. It named something you hadn’t dared to. Was it because you were simply ordinary, daring to live an ambitious dream? You wonder if that’s the real transgression.

You start to suspect that the silence isn’t just absence – it’s a kind of quiet gatekeeping. No one says no. They just don’t say anything at all.

...

I look at the recent Fulbright application, and memory stirs. I am back in China—young, restless, anxious. I am back in New Zealand—anxious still, but hopeful. In my dream I am waking from sleep (Yan, 2024a). Fragments rise from places where futures once hoped to begin. My academic journey became a decade-long search for ground where aspirations might take root (Yan & Poole, 2024).

In 2003, I entered a provincial teacher’s college, majoring in English Language and Literature. It was not glamorous, but it was something. I studied as if it were the only way out—because it was. Every hour was accounted for, every breath measured against the weight of a future not yet earned. By 2007, I graduated and failed the entrance exam for Peking University. I told myself it was fine, that I would try again. I did not. I became a schoolteacher in China.

The reader might notice my high expectations and wonder why I aim so high. I have never explained why the Fulbright looms so large in my imagination—why this scholarship, stitched from bureaucratic paperwork and patriotic branding, shimmers with such (real or imagined) prestige. To aim high is an act of defiance, a refusal to accept the quiet exclusions of meritocracy. It is a way of insisting that my story, however inconvenient, belongs in the conversation.

Perhaps it is the promise of being anointed by an institution that insists it recognizes “excellence,” as though excellence were a stamp one could collect like a visa. Or perhaps it is the irony of chasing validation from a program that exports intellectual labor while pretending it is a gift. Either way, the glow is hard to ignore, even when you know it is manufactured.

“Does such a thing as the ‘fatal flaw,’ that dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?” (Tartt, 1992, p. 5). Maybe I have been chasing something larger than myself, not because I believed I could catch it, but because standing still felt like disappearing. The margins were never empty; they were crowded with people like me, dreaming too loudly in spaces that preferred quiet.

My father reminded me: if your dream is too big, you will learn what failure means. He was not warning me. He was remembering himself. Today I understand: I was raised for failure, even groomed for it. And so I began to fail on purpose, to claim recognition. Failure is the only thing with which I feel at home—because it is what I was taught at home. ⁸

Now I see: one might live in the margins—of my own imagination. A space where dreams grow large in a world indifferent to your existence. It is from there that I write. It is from there that I have lived. Becoming is not a destination—it is the only way I know to move.

Cultivating Response-ability

In my writing and immanence, the only practice attuned to chronic pain (Newman, 2013), transformation and transposition emerge through dynamic interplay. The scene must be reopened, “the course of a life” replotted—as Bakhtin (1982) observes, “in any actual dialogue the rejoinder also leads such a double life” (pp. 208, 284)—each response bearing immediate meaning while simultaneously reshaping narrative. This article foregrounds dialogical liminality as a site where diffractive movements evoke dissonance between identity and difference, negotiating boundaries of knowledge, sensation, language, visibility, and imagination (Nixon, 2024).

Here, reading–writing becomes a form of becoming, shaped by the friction of text, body, and time. What I write against is the abstraction of “politically embodied subjects,” the erasure of “authorial presence,” and the loss of an “empirical, dialectical self” (Giardina & Newman, 2011b, p. 44). My “differential responsiveness” is a performative attentiveness to “what matters” (Barad, 2007, p. 380). I may not belong among scholars, yet I offer my rag-to-scholar story—quiet rebellion, whispering hope to dreaming margins. It is not a declaration of success but a trembling, “minor gesture” toward possibility (Manning, 2016).

In (re)configuring this ordinary self, cultivating response-ability reveals how the immigrant body functions as a horizon—shaping and sustaining my understanding of transformation and frustration. It discloses multiplicities, overlaps, possibilities, and limits embedded in lived reality (Weiss, 2008). Performing creative respondings, the writing “body separates itself from thought, and the individual breaks the boundary of their skin, occupying the other side of their senses” (Caillois, 1984, p. 30). Through a material-dialogic space, I explore liminal becoming as it unfolds across personal, historical, socio-cultural, and intellectual dimensions.

If liminality signals paradoxical yet generative conditions that emerge in transitional states—across “physical spaces, languages, literary genres, cultural traditions, or stages of development” (Zavala, 1997, p. 9)—then resisting dominant constructions of academic identity becomes more than intellectual exercise. It becomes survival. I position myself as an outsider within academia—passing, for now, as belonging. Yet passing is impermanent: a performance, a negotiation, a refusal to vanish. It occurs when marginalized bodies, constrained linguistically, financially, or culturally, confront limited access to flourishing.

Transformation demands movement: a shift from margin to mainstream (Moriel, 2005). Becoming a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar enacts a form of passing—a transgressive performance sustained by belief despite improbable success. Passing reveals desired becomings as tragic: retrospective, nostalgic, reaching forward while remembering. The condition of feeling like an outsider carries a painstaking weight, born of the desire to resist one’s own lived reality while the body lingers in a void of in-betweenness—neither fully embraced nor entirely rejected. Might this act resist dominant cultures, returning their own question: “Whataya want from me?” (Poole & Yan, 2025).

Conceived as movement, what passes becomes a sequence of emotionally costly events, moments where “I can vent, unmask myself, and be comforted” (Edwards, 2019, p. 33). Discursive struggles persist, yet they remain peripheral, historically minor, easily dismissed. Beneath them lies something quieter, more insistent: the narrative of transformation. I now attend to silences between words, those overlooked spaces where knowledge quietly resides.

As I look around,

Silence stretches outward –

An unbroken expanse mirroring the solitude within.

To hold and no one to understand,

My dream deferred.

Maybe someday ... someday.

Someday somebody’ll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me—

I reckon it’ll be

Me myself!

But I need you to guide me how to write… ⁹

Through creative, diffractive engagement with the other self, this autoethnography contributes to debates on embodiment in the academy by foregrounding the cultural body. It advances an iterative process of materialization—one that includes reading as a reader (Thorpe & Newman, 2023)—thereby expanding methodological possibilities for relational inquiry and embodied scholarship. These creative respondings produce a “dialogically engaged understanding of a living heteroglossia” (Bakhtin, 1982, p. 308), attending to writing as it unfolds, not as a finished product but as a site of encounter.

The Line of Beauty: Passing, Becoming, and What Is Passable

In reading you, I am reminded of my own “chronic pain”—of the pursuit to escape poverty and the intellectual, pedagogical, and theoretical labors undertaken to dismantle its conditions; I am also reminded of the comforts afforded by the very subjectivity shaped through those labors (Newman, 2013, p. 256). Though we are worlds apart, we are one body shaped by different histories. I see myself in you, and you in me.

Perhaps “some memories never heal” (Han, 2020, p. 140); instead of fading, they remain when everything else is worn away. I have come to understand that “the presence of others who are smarter, kinder, wiser, and different” enables transformation—quietly yet unmistakably, in plain sight (Braun, 2014, p. 218). To produce this kind of knowledge, I embrace a metaphysics in which “embodied imagining is a disposition that can be encouraged and nurtured” (Nixon, 2024, p. 82). This exploration opens a diversity of life stories, revealing ways of living, being, and daring to dream amid uncertainty.

And yet you remember: leaving your hometown for Shenzhen, chasing a horizon that promised breadth. The job title was “translator” – a word evoking movement, negotiation, even diplomacy. Instead, you packed cosmetics in a factory. Day after day, you sealed plastic bags with a hot iron. Day after day, the hiss marked time more faithfully than any clock. Day after day, you thought about the pay—barely enough—and the repetition that pressed against each hour. Deleuze (1968/1994, p. 70) said “repetition changes the mind, not the object.” You understood him in the process.

As an educated person in a factory, you were granted a better dorm, a television, Cantonese dramas you barely understood. You lived and worked in the same compound. No future in sight. What skills did you gain? None I could name. But something shifted. A difference. A thought.

The factory is gone now—from your academic résumé for Fulbright, at least. Some stories don’t fit the narrative. Some truths are too real to be useful.

...

By investigating “the body from the ground up,” I attend to the affect of indifference to better understand the movements through which the body emerges (Giardina & Newman, 2011a, p. 398). In this light, the Fulbright application process itself becomes an embodied event of migration, with the body in performance—particularly in its negotiation of space—serving as the primary site of analysis. Within this discursive process, ordinary affect opens imaginative space for critically engaging my conditions, generating new possibilities for becoming (Gale, 2023), shaped by economic, socio-cultural, psychological, and intellectual forces.

If life itself is a dream, are ordinary people forbidden to dream big? Within this frame, “extraordinary experiences” gain meaning (Rosen, 2008, p. 273). Performing the migrant body, I soften and dissolve barriers between inner and outer, allowing ordinary events to be newly inscribed by those willing to read, write, and think otherwise. As Bakhurst (2022) notes, “we have rich and complex inner lives, the contents of which we often do not and, in some sense, cannot share with others, and which might even be elusive to ourselves, are part of this common knowledge” (p. 817). These inner lives explain and justify action, shaping horizons through which we interpret experience and make sense of the lived world.

From Shadows to Fulbright Candidacy

You were desperate to leave the life you had known, to become someone other than yourself. At times you wake so far from who you were that you can no longer remember. “Where am I?” you ask, and then, more urgently, “Who am I? Who am I?” The answer comes close, as if spoken inside your own head. ¹⁰

You are a Chinese-born Australian, speaking English with a thick accent. You live in Melbourne now. You love your job, and you work hard at it. In Auckland, you volunteered for the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, taught immigrant children, and served as an interpreter. Yet later you realized these experiences were not considered “useful” when applying for a Fulbright.

...

Still, you are a schoolteacher, a reader, a dreamer. You have a voice, though you rarely used it before. You have been a diarist since primary school. You are an excellent learner. The Inclusive Education Award gave you a second chance to reach your academic potential. You are patient. You are kind. You are the most perseverant person I know, in every way.

You earned this. Eighteen years of toil for the glittering possibility of Fulbright—an award dangled like salvation. Some never get the chance. You are eligible, yes, but eligibility is not assurance. It is the institution’s way of letting you audition for a role you may never be cast in.

Through the Fulbright application process—the proverbial knocking at the door to solicit endorsement from U.S. academics—I was confronted once again with the slow, painful realization that “some bodies are valued, while others are not,” a reality long naturalized and rarely questioned (Bunds et al., 2015, p. 284). My creative responses to this event enabled me to develop a meta-narrative discourse that weaves together private and public histories in a “dialectical cadence,” revealing how heightened self-awareness is continually shaped by the “contingencies of identity, power, and forward-facing trajectories” (Newman, 2013, p. 257).

By attending closely to the texts of the self, I examine the “surroundings [which] grew unrecognizable and I knew I had gone beyond all previous boundaries,” recounting moments of the past where “one is at a loss to imagine any situation which could ever dislodge a professionalism borne with such authority” (Ishiguro, 1989, pp. 16, 30). Through these creative responses, I have come to see how deeply our upbringing shapes who we are—how the places we come from and the people who raised us leave marks that surface in ways we do not always expect. These stories reveal something real about space, about bodies, and about the kind of knowledge we carry without even knowing it.

Within the halls of a Fulbright research collaboration—where recognition hinges on networking and unspoken rules—such insights do not always receive equal respect. Sometimes they are welcomed and woven in; other times, they are quietly set aside, especially when they come from those who do not fit the mold of competitive excellence. After all, nothing disrupts the smooth machinery of meritocracy quite like an inconvenient truth.

In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) asks: “What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?” The hard reality, he suggests, is that fate often lies in the hands of “those great gentlemen at the hub of this world” (p. 244).

What is at stake here is more than recognition. The central concern is not only who gains access to opportunity, but how academics respond to and sustain the very contours of intellectual life.

The liminality of my becoming functions as both a conceptual and methodological space—a “performance of ambiguity and confrontation” (Yan et al., 2023, p. 269)—revealing the simultaneous displacement and formation of meaning, identity, and relations. To be response-able here is to resist tidy narratives of excellence, expose the silences that shape intellectual capital, and imagine futures in which scholarship is measured not by conformity but by the courage to speak from the margins. Such a response-able act resists erasure, insisting that lived histories and embodied knowledge matter—even when people within institutions dismiss them.

To be response-able is to refuse to leave my story in the hands of others, but to write and rewrite it—again and again—each time with difference, each time with repetition (Yan, 2020, 2021, 2024a, 2024b, 2025b, 2025d). It is the reclamation of a marginal voice, the unsettling of meritocracy’s boundaries, and the opening of space for new forms of becoming—forms that honor the ordinary no less than the extraordinary.

The consequence of such response-ability is double: it exposes the fragility of systems that claim to reward excellence while silencing difference, and it opens space for imagining futures beyond those sanctioned by elite institutions. For the reader, the payoff lies in confronting the uncomfortable truth that exclusion is not accidental but personal and political, and that transformation requires more than individual perseverance—it requires collective re-plotting of whose voices and research count, and why.

On Making an Immigrant Life

The thread of your migration is as tough as an ox tendon, so even after I lost you, it had to go on. I had to make myself eat, make myself work, living this immigrant life, forcing each day down like a mouthful of cold rice, even when it stuck in my throat. ¹¹ Your reality is that you were born in the wrong place.

Eighteen years later – even after graduating as a top achiever from an Australian university – you still could not gain entry into an Ivy League school for postdoctoral research. No, you do not even possess the “right” vocabulary to articulate the impact and significance of your autoethnographic work. And yet, eventually, someone did offer me generous support and endorsement.

...

I continue to hold onto my identity as an outsider, shaped not by theory but by experience. Yet the act of passing—as PhD holder, as scholar, as collaborator—becomes a choreography, a strategic movement across institutional thresholds. To craft an application that seems to align with what Fulbright might support is to enter a performance. It raises questions—ethical, political, uncomfortable—about what is seen, what is funded, and what is quietly excluded. Some collaborations are cross-national, others cross-narrative. Not all are recognized. Through this inquiry, I name and acknowledge the pain—chronic, invisible, immobilizing. Newman (2013) might call it a condition without brutality.

Through embodied encounters that spark creative response, the discourse of passing surfaces—at once visible and invisible, operating both within and against the machinery of class politics and the subtle architecture of intellectual capital. I have now “come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by [some] people seeking to justify my circumstance” (Everett, 2024, p. 90). Through a prolonged process of reading and writing, I find myself overwhelmed by a succession of similar situations, recurring across different locations, each demanding a response.

Why live with one anxiety after another? Perhaps constant anxiety is survival in a present without promise. I cannot sleep; instead, I chase deferred dreams. Now, in sleep, I dream the impossible—the only horizon left to me. I stared at the distant past. Without realizing it, I am dead, only to “have death revitalized in the living forms and apparatuses of the body politic” (Shields et al., 2014, p. 434). In this framing, death is not just an end, but a mirror—reflecting the disproportionate weight placed on individual presence in a system that rarely acknowledges its absence.

But is the dignity that you cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from yourself the single truth? Now it is time for you to shed your shell. Purge your hoard of dreams. Start anew. It is time to move on. ¹²

...

Now, I sit here drafting my Fulbright research proposal, spiraling into “becoming-other” (Wyatt, 2019, p. 42), trying to imagine the kind of contribution that might persuade a selection panel.

And then it hits me: I’m just a person. Ordinary.

With dreams scattered across the timelines of my life. I begin to question my place in the world, and the long years of despair that brought me here.

This body of mine—once the source of so much frustration—is now destined for the flames. Strangely, there is no regret in that. I wanted to strip life down to something ordinary, just as I had once tried to do while I was still alive. Nonetheless, I am, in some ways, one of the fortunate: I was educated. I learned English. It transformed this small life of mine. I might have struggled to move beyond the damage the past inflicted on my body and psyche, but you must remember that personal history is a “complex weave, with constant slippages between past and present, giving the scene of the former constantly intruding on or shadowing the latter” (Smith, 2016, p. 5).

A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass—only when we are shattered do we realize its simplicity. “Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired,” as Hanya Yanagihara (2015) urges us to believe; yet “in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss – sometimes in wonderful ways.” A life of migration is a quiet journey: beautiful not because it is extraordinary, but because it insists on being remembered, no matter how ordinary it seems.

In the space between the physical and the passable, boundaries blur—national, cultural, economic, political, and intellectual. They shift, take on meaning, then shift again. A frustrating event triggers pain, not only in the body but in memory. The body knows. Newman (2013) reminds us: pain teaches us something. From the margins of knowledge production, I ask: can a migrant worker from mainland China become a Fulbright scholar without burying experience beneath “theory” and “justification” (Moreira & Diversi, 2010, p. 457)? If so, at what cost?

The Passable Conclusion

To this end, I have offered a loosely woven narrative—part personal philosophy, part politics—that asks us to look again. This critical-relational inquiry is not merely a method but a political act—an effort to make the invisible visible (Wyatt, 2019). By employing creative methodologies, I do not seek to explain the self but to illuminate it—to trace the subtle politics that shape inner lives and the quiet resistance they offer. In this inquiry, I use my “privileged position” as a seemingly successful PhD candidate to uncover the familiar, to ask what a given experience might reveal about being human (Pelias, 2009, p. 354).

Anchoring inquiry in the moving body reveals how society’s fixation on embodiment shapes the cultural impact of death (Shields et al., 2014). To grasp the tangled architecture of ordinary life, one question endures: Can we imagine a community where ordinary people are not forced to confront meaninglessness to sustain the elite? As Nagel (2012) notes, judgment relies on reflection, imagination, and alternatives. My writing and immanence is personal and political (Gale, 2023)—a response to history, a gesture toward collective flourishing, and a site for interrogating identity through academic passing. In the shadow of migration and the politics that follow, I turn to new ways of seeing—dialogical, intersubjective, unfinished. Imagination becomes method. It sustains, nourishes, transforms.

Critical awareness—perhaps the most terrifying of human faculties—gnaws at us: the “sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own” (Han, 2020, p. 121). This liberation carries a cost: negative feelings often accompany transformation, shaping mental health, confidence, belief, and the ways we navigate the world. In A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (2015) writes that “fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.” She names the truth I prefer to ignore—unspeakable loss fuels the melancholic’s resistance to transformation.