My first encounter with masks came before the coronavirus.
It was 1991 and I had just returned to Saudi Arabia as the first Gulf War was coming to a close. As Iraq departed Kuwait, they had set fire to the oil fields. The fields burned, turning the sky a cloudy black. My home was a four-hour drive to the south of the fields, in Saudi Arabia—a neighboring land. But in the sky there are no borders and the soot drifted this way and that way with the wind. It hovered over my small town like an ecological specter. Day after day, I would walk out and see the dark sky—it reminded me of the black cloud that followed Pigpen around in my Peanuts comics.
After school, I would come home, blow my nose, and fill the tissue with blackened mucus from my sinuses. At the age of 11, I understood the fragility of the human body. Waking up in the middle of the night from smoke-filled nightmares, I intuitively understood that we live intertwined with the sky, the earth, the petroleum, and the plastics. We are deeply enmeshed within this ecology—living lives full of ecological intimacies. When faced with our own mortality, we finally acknowledge it.
In late 2019, I sat at a dinner table with friends, drinking wine and discussing the mysterious new virus dominating news reports. It seemed far away from our dining table in Philadelphia. But I had learned at age 11 that under the right circumstances borders can evaporate and distances can collapse. Just as dark clouds of soot move in their own spaces, so too do viruses. They move in large and diminutive ways, on geographic and cellular scales, across continents and the pores of membranes.
The next day, I went online. With a few clicks, I bought rice and dried beans—enough to last a few months. I drove to the grocery and bought water—by the gallon. I scrolled through my phone and bought hand sanitizer and masks. I called my mother in Portland, Oregon, “Mama, I sent you some packages of rice and beans. I know, it’s a lot, but just put it on the side and wait.” The virus hovered in the background of our lives for several months—a virological specter. Finally, it descended upon Philadelphia, and the routines of our daily lives began to shut down—slowly at first, like the wind before a storm. And then suddenly, quickly.
We retreated inward collectively and individually. The unbearable intimacy of this virus forced us to face our mortality as it entered our bodies and moved between us, proliferating and dominating. It awakened us to the connectedness of our breaths in the air and the cells of our skin that mingle with a stranger’s. It reminded us everyday that our body fluids flow through the whole ecosystem. Under the right circumstances, the borders that separate our bodies can also evaporate.
During the early months of the lockdown, trapped together in a small city apartment, my partner and I bickered about dishes, Zoom calls, and clutter. Every offense of the last eight years of our marriage seemed to rise to the surface during our mutually intolerable confinement. I would go for long walks and listen to podcasts by Esther Perel, a marriage therapist with a soothingly husky voice. “The erotic is an antidote to death,” she declared convincingly. She knew that mortality and intimacy are two sides of the same coin. Faced with death, intimacy beckons us back to life.
We do not live in a world of binary and hierarchical intimacies—we live in a world of queer intimacies. I meet my friend for dinner. Our masks come off and our breaths fuse in the air above the table. My friend goes home to her partner and her child. Her partner receives kisses—their saliva transfers in droplets upon the lips. The partner goes to work, rubs an eye, and opens a door—remnants of tears touch a stranger’s hand. This stranger and I are connected and the virus connects us. Timothy Morton refers to the mesh framework of a queer ecology [1]. In this mesh, we are linked—human to human, microbiome to animal, and breath to wind.
Faced with death, we seek intimacy. During the Gulf War evacuation, my mother and I went to Maryland, living there while my father continued his work as an engineer in Saudi Arabia. Listening to the news of Scud missiles and threats of chemical warfare, I developed acute anxiety. I muddled through as the new kid at a new school in America. My father visited once during that year. I walked into the living room the last evening before his return to Saudi Arabia. My mother sat on his lap as they watched the evening news. It was the first and only time I ever saw them sitting in such a way—a surprising moment of tender interaction that acknowledged an unspoken truth. Within the geopolitical forces of our world, my father’s body was so fragile. Perhaps this was when I first connected the fear of death with the feeling of love.
[1] Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 273–82.
Sue Huang is a new media and installation artist whose work addresses collective experience. Her current projects explore ecological intimacies, human/nonhuman relations, and speculative futures. Huang has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Rhizome at the New Museum in New York; Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; among others. She is a co-founder of the media arts collaborative Knifeandfork and a committee member of the Services to Artists Committee (SAC) of the College Art Association (CAA). Huang is currently a member of Creative Science, NEW INC, supported by Science Sandbox, Simons Foundation, and is an assistant professor of Digital Media and Design at the University of Connecticut.
Cite This Essay
Huang, Sue. “Intimacy Beckons Us Back.” Biodesigned: Issue 10, 28 February, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].
