Bio

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 Asian Cultures and Civilizations. My trip in academia started in my sophomore year, when a friend brought me an edited book on sexuality studies from Stanford as a gift (I am still wondering 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 from that project on. 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 provides theoretical insights and empirical evidence that reconstructs the meaning and parameters of gendered violence by elucidating the lived experiences of Chinese and Chinese-American populations through historical and sociological lenses. I continued my scholarly inquiry in graduate school, studying how the communist government utilized gender to achieve its own political and cultural utopia during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), resulting in a women's health crisis for an entire decade. I published “The Annihilation of Femininity in Mao’s China” in a refereed journal, China Information, with a co-author. My doctoral dissertation studies the Chinese state’s transformative legal responses to domestic violence from the mid-Qing dynasty to the contemporary period (1740–2020). 

Stemming from the dissertation, my first book, When Law Says Little: China's Morality-Based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents (Oxford University Press, under contract) provides a constructivist grounded theory analysis of ethnographic data collected in Northeast China, police documentaries, and historiographic work from the 1950s onward. I show how Chinese frontline police officers mediate non-criminal domestic violence incidents using gender- and family-based moral coercion, thereby perpetrating symbolic violence that silences and revictimizes victims, regardless of their gender. Bringing state, police system, and individual police officers into the limelight, I also demonstrate how such mediation strategies intersect with the Chinese state’s transformative and divergent social governance goals. 

In my second book, No More Iced Coke: Invisible Violence in First-Generation Chinese Americans' Postpartum Practices, I transition from examining overt violence within romantic liaisons in mainland China to unveiling the more covert violence faced by Chinese immigrants in the US. My ethnographic research expands the scope of the reproductive justice framework to include racialized postpartum health disparities, offering an intimate look into the lives of new mothers of color. 

In addition to these book projects, 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. I am also interested in examining translation issues in multilingual and/or cross-cultural qualitative research, especially how international scholars in English-speaking countries who study their home cultures translate "non-translatable" terms between their home language and English. 

Facing the emotionally demanding scholarly topics, I take teaching as a coping strategy. My teaching embodies a commitment to cultivating social, cultural, and collaborative learning by advocating for a human-centric approach to education and emphasizing active learning. Drawing upon my years of teaching experience in gender studies, sociology, and Asian Studies at Grinnell College and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I have also come to deeply value cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations. Ultimately, my pedagogical designs are geared toward reshaping the unsustainable atomization of students in the post-pandemic era.