ABSTRACT In this paper, I revisit a spontaneous laughter event in a college classroom in China to decolonize in three steps my/our otherwise naturalized modernity/coloniality assumptions about teaching/teachers, learning/learners, gender, objects, and classroom space toward a Daoist affective ecological imaginary. First, I invoke postcritical pedagogy scholarship to theoretically recast laughter, often taken as a humorous aberrance, as a mattering pedagogy. Second, I bring in feminist ‘pedagogies of mattering’ to attend to the materiality of the laughter event, further decolonizing hierarchical power and gendered subjectivities into an experienced democracy of flesh and affective movement of collectivity. Lastly, I reinvoke the Chinese Daoist notion tiānrénhéyī 天人合一as a hope-full alternative ethico-onto-episteme to reimagine education as cultivating ecologically responsible and responsive cosmic beings. I end this paper with some penultimate thoughts on theoretical-methodological challenges in decolonizing modernity-coloniality in a Chinese context, as an overseas-returning Chinese scholar, and with/beyond the Western scholarship.