Being Adrift: On (dis)Identification and The Promise of A Visa
By Haoran Xia
October 12, 2025
October 12, 2025
Just because we are in the same room does not mean that we belong to the room or to each other.
— Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
The society we are living in today is one full of risks.
In particular, these risks are tied to the conditions of life and the uncertainties of the future — the threats posed by climate change, pollution, and economic recession. In this sense, the ‘society of risk' is not an inherent quality of modern life but a construct of industrialisation and modernisation.
The ‘risk' here operates on a macro level — a collective condition that humanity endures as a consequence of industrial history. However, I’d like to argue that there is another layer of a risk, one that only belongs to certain groups of people: people of colour, females, queers, and the disabled — namely, the minors in comparison to the cis-, male, white.
The ‘risk’ that the minors experience are bound to their lived conditions, where identity, politics, and sexuality are constantly questioned, examined, and tested. This kind of risk is something micro, one that is hidden beneath the surface of larger political infrastructure that seeks to validate the state and the legitimacy of their being. And it is precisely through this process of this validation that their autonomy of life is eroded, and therefore placing their very existence perpetually at stake.
To be ‘at stake’ is to inhabit an endless affective process of drifting, where the navigation of one’s life condition becomes dependent on an external forces to reorient it back to the old orbit of validation.
In my own case, this condition of being at stake — of being adrift — finds expression in the story of my visa, an affective object that encapsulates this state of precarity.
On Being the Other
Visa was something I always had to consider whenever I wanted to travel abroad as a teenager.
I still remember a conversation with my parents when I was ten, about travelling to New York City simply because I was obsessed with Lady Gaga and her concert at Madison Square Garden. Unsurprisingly, the answer was no — my parents understood how difficult it was for a Chinese citizen to obtain an American visa in 2006.
Ever since then, I have thought about how the way I see the world — and, more precisely, the way I am allowed to see it — is defined by a piece of paper.
As a Chinese citizen, my capacity to move through the world is conditioned by political permission. I used to stare at the world map in my bedroom, pointing to all the places I longed to visit. I realised that what separated me from them was not only geographical distance but also a political one — a division not made by nature but constructed by human power and relations.
I was confused, angry, helpless — yet still hopeful.
I began travelling abroad at the age of fifteen.
At first, I visited countries with relatively lenient visa policies for Chinese citizens — Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka.
At eighteen, I went to Italy and France. It was my first visit to Europe, and also the first time I obtained a Schengen visa, which, according to my father, cost him quite a fortune.
Later that year, I moved to Israel for my undergraduate studies. I spent four years there completing my degree, travelling across continental Europe during that time and accumulating a small collection of visas.
At twenty-five, I moved to the Netherlands on a student visa for my master’s programme, and in the same year, I obtained a ten-year travel visa for the United States.
My Chinese passport was filling up with stamps and stickers, and my mother would always joke: your passport is worth so much now — you can basically travel around the world.
I begin to think: what world is my mother referring to?
Is it a world that all human beings share, or a world divided by geopolitical regulations and diplomatic hierarchies — one accessible only to those whose governments hold stronger positions in global discourse?
Or a world of risks, one not made for the “minors” to see, experience, or feel?
Or it is not one world at all, but two — defined by a visa: you have a visa, and you can go to that world; you don’t have a visa, and your access is denied, and you are treated as the other.
This is to say: to have, or not to have, a visa — for a citizen whose nationality is considered less politically powerful — defines how one sees, experiences, and feels the world through one’s physical self.
This is also to say that what a visa grants is not merely a travel experience but more of an identity experience — one deeply imbedded in the political discourses, shaping how an individual understands their position within the global collective. To understand one’s position is to identify with objects, places, and relationships that feel familiar. Yet this process of identification can only be fully activated when one has access, or even the possibility of access, to the world in its entirety. Without a visa, such identification is simply denied; one’s relationship with the world becomes incomplete, perpetually at stake.
On another level, to identify is also to belong. Belonging is a specific genre of affect that cannot be presumed and is a relation whose evidence and terms are always being contested.
Without a visa, the chance of locating one’s own belonging in the world is withdrawn, leaving only the condition of survival.
Identification then becomes an impossible mission, pushing the subject into a state of crisis — drifting, uncertain, and thus compelled towards disidentification.
To disidentify is to invent new strategies of survival against the normative and the dominant discourse, to negotiate a public sphere in which one can breathe, communicate, and experience the world that has been denied. Disidentification becomes a form of rerouting — an act that allows those on the margins to read their life narratives differently, outside the traditional orbit of imbalanced global politics.
Disidentification is not something given; it is something one must fight for. Identification, in the first place, is never truly an option. To put an end to this state of ‘being at stake’, one must reorient oneself in ways that feel almost impossible and difficult — transforming the condition of drifting into one that can be lived with.
In this sense, disidentification becomes a process of auto-identification — a means of returning, of decentralising the condition of ‘the other’, of experiencing the world not as two, but as one, even if in unofficial forms.
Life After - A Form of Optimism
But what happens when the visa is no longer an issue?
Does that mean one’s life escapes the condition of being at stake — that the drifting finally comes to an end?
From January to August this year, I spent at least five hours each day searching for a job that could sponsor my visa in the Netherlands. In this pursuit, there were moments of hopelessness, helplessness, and despair.
Time was slipping away, and dealing with rejection became a daily practice. I found myself emotionally submerged, feeling depressed, as this condition of being at stake gradually became a normalcy of my life.
I became my own precarious object — torn between two worlds: one that is home, and another where I have built a life yet remain politically denied, my autonomy beyond my own control.
I became my ten-year-old self again — confused, angry, helpless, but this time, hopeless.
By producing the same emotions again, I found myself guided by them — as if they were pointing me toward a clearer understanding of the Western world. They revealed a direction: toward the cause and the evidence of a life denied, a world divided and torn apart by the state of my visa.
Interwoven with my earlier experiences of travel, these emotions situated me in a position of recognition — an awareness of the injustice and imbalance embedded in my identity. It became clear that it was not only my identification process that had been denied by a visa, but also my life itself: my friendships, intimacy, and citizenship were all bound to the power contained within that single document, awaiting legal and political validation.
These emotions spoke with me, and with each other, producing affects that allowed me to disidentify — to accept the condition of being at stake, of drifting, of moving between two nations without a promise.
After seven months of searching, I found a job, and my visa was extended.
At this stage, it seemed that the visa was no longer an issue — that a promise had been made.
But the feeling of relief came too soon, and I found myself asking the same question once again: has my life truly emerged from the condition of being at stake?
Yes and no.
I realised that the visa I had longed for so eagerly had become the impasse of my life.
It was meant to make my life flourish and bring ease, yet somehow it placed my life back at stake — turning into the opposing reality of what I had imagined. The desire for a visa transformed into an emotional complex: my identity was legally tested, and my pursuit of the life I wanted became the very obstacle preventing me from reaching it.
This feeling of wanting began with optimism — an optimism that seemed to promise an end to a long and exhausting journey — yet it arrived here, at this moment of attainment, where that same optimism turned hollow: a void where a promise had been made.
There is a certain fragility in this optimism — the optimism of still being here, still moving, still forming a shape that no state can contain.
The promise it generates appears to guarantee a good life, a stable life, a life free from precarity and drift. But the fact that all these layers of life are embedded within a single piece of paper exposes the fragility of its political quality — one not solid enough to anchor my hope to the life I desire.
So the promise here is rather an empty one. Its emptiness lies in its political limitations, rooted in an imbalanced global power system that divides the world in two, denying minors the right to identify, to locate themselves, to belong. Yet its emptiness lies, most of all, in the hope, the optimism, and the promise it generates — and in the hardship, struggle, and pain it conceals beneath.
The life after, for those who stay, may be a good one.
But for me, it is an endless process of disidentification — of moving forward without a promise, of remaining perpetually at stake, of being adrift: still moving, but never arriving.
Works cited
Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2004), Introduction.
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992), Introduction.
Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), Introduction.
——, The Inconvenience of Other People (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), Chapter 2.
Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), Chapter 5.
Muñoz, José Esteban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Introduction.