Born in Northeast China, I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 2014 and came to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2015 to pursue a Master’s and a doctoral degree in East Asian Cultures and Civilizations.
My academic journey began in my sophomore year, when a friend gave me an edited book on queer studies from Stanford as a gift (I still wonder why she chose that book as a gift). Inspired and even shocked by the scholarly works in that book, I proposed and conducted my first “scholarly” project that studied whether education and living experience in college influence undergraduate students’ perceptions of non-heterosexuality. My research has been centered around gender since that project. I do not define myself by disciplines but by research inquiries. Although I started with quantitative methods, I have gradually become more enthusiastic about qualitative methods, especially grounded theory methods and ethnographic approaches.
My scholarship investigates the evident and hidden forms of gender-based violence experienced by Chinese and Chinese immigrant populations. Building on my dissertation, my first book, When Law Says Little: China's Morality-Based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents (Oxford University Press, under contract), examines how police officers in China handle non-criminal domestic violence incidents. Through a constructivist grounded theory analysis of ethnographic, media, and archival data, this book reveals that the officers adopt gender- and family-based moral coercion strategies to mediate such cases. While these actions may provide instant emotional comfort to the victims, they also perpetrate symbolic violence, lead to re-victimization, and traumatize frontline officers. I also demonstrate how such mediation strategies intersect with China’s divergent conceptualizations of domestic violence and models of social governance.
My second book project, tentatively titled No More Iced Coke: Invisible Violence in First-Generation Chinese Americans' Postpartum Practices, shifts focus to the racialized obstacles encountered by Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through hospital ethnography and in-depth interviews with birthing mothers and their family members, I investigate how the fictions between Western biomedical practices, traditional Chinese medicinal beliefs, and the medicalization of childbirth influence the recovery of immigrant mothers of color.
In addition to gender-based violence, I am dedicated to furthering feminist and qualitative research methodologies. I have a particular interest in exploring the complexities of practicing self-reflexivity for researchers from marginalized populations, which I plan to develop into another interview-based book project.