Guanyu Xu

For the question you asked, I would say I haven't influenced too much by it since I have been living in the US for over 6 years now. I was certainly really worried and spent hours reading news from different sources every day this January as I was really worried about the situation in China. It's also because I'm from Beijing and I remember I didn't go to school for a semester when I was ten years old and of course the cover-up before that. I also witnessed (mainly online) the growing censorship this past few years. However, since I mainly live in the US, I don't affect by that a lot. I was certainly pissed by the early cover-up this time and the censorship on wechat. Also, there was the frustration to communicate the dark side of government that my family cannot access/don't believe especially they when they benefit from the system for their entire life. It's really funny that my father and I would use wechat to post different articles as argument in our family group chat but not really communicate to each other.....And my mom would try to stop us.

Since I live in the US, I would say I mainly experience the coronavirus here. Probably similar to many Asians/Asian Americans living in the US, I was highly concerned in the January and kind of afraid of even going to Chinatown in Chicago and also facing potential hate crime (an ongoing issue that seems just getting worse and worse). In mid-February, I lowered my concern and thought it shouldn't be a problem anymore. However, of course it's too naive as we are seeing the pandemic unfolding here now. I've been trying to communicate to my American friends about the seriousness of the virus. But of course, because the idealogical lens of the media reporting China, most of them didn't take it seriously in the beginning. As an emerging artist who are trying to figure out O-1 visa (and its lawyer fee) and as a part-time lecturer without any benefit from University of Illinois, I certainly most worried about what I could face right now here in the US.