Affective life of Mongolian proverbs in times of COVID-19 lockdown in China

This study examines how recontextualised Mongolian proverbs during the COVID-19 lockdown reframe and make sense of crisis events as Inner Mongolia enters lockdown and its residents go through daily PCR testing since October 2022. The study finds that reworked well-known Mongolian sayings centring on COVID testing act as a form of sociopolitical commentary, a coping strategy, and a language community-building device. The light-heartedness and delight inherent in the process of recontextualising Mongolian proverbs not only discursively create distance between the difficult time experienced by people and themselves but also generate a space for linguistic creativity as the Mongolian online users experiment with and recontextualise the new Chinese terms hesuan jiance, PCR testing. It also finds that the affect of immuno-apparatus discharged by these reinvented proverbs offers us an important insight into people’s changing responses to pandemic policies during the very last phase of China’s ‘war’ against the virus. The study contributes to our understanding of multilingualism, affect and agency in times of crisis.