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Research Overview

I became a cultural and medical anthropologist in the United States through a rather unusual and winding path. I am a first-generation college student and scholar, born and raised in an impoverished peasant’s family in Shandong Province, North China. Although my parents tried to protect my time as a young student, I was no stranger to back-breaking manual work and the bitter life of Chinese peasants. When I was not at school, I planted and harvested corn, wheat, and peanuts, weeded apple orchards and sprayed pesticide with my parents and fellow villagers in the 105-degree heat, guarded the watermelon field, herded the bull, and picked apples and hawthorn fruits until I “jumped over the village gate” (tiaochu nongmen) to attend college. To simply fill the belly up, during and after college I worked as a milk salesman, a leaflet distributor, a home tutor, a Walmart stockroom worker, a restaurant runner, and a security guard. My life growing up in structurally deprived rural China ensures that I had more opportunities than my peers raised in cities to experience hardship and humiliation, learn from ordinary peasants and migrant workers, and share their struggles for “living the daily life” (guo rizi), while maintaining meaning and hope under China’s discriminatory residential registration (hukou) system and urban / rural divide.

This experience of living and working on the very bottom rungs of Chinese society pushed me to develop research orientations toward marginalized social groups (e.g., peasants, migrant workers, long-haul truck drivers), especially those living in rural China and county-level cities. I felt a moral imperative to write about the lives of rural residents and their children—many of the younger generation had migrated to county-level or prefecture-level cities amid China’s rapid urbanization in the reform-era.

My first book project, A Good Life Foretold: Incense Seeing, Hope, and Healing in North China, is an ethnography of lived hope bound up with religious practices in an authoritarian regime. It explores the practices of incense seeing to ask how people in North China pursue their hope for a good life and cope with uncertainty and precarity by consulting folk healers called incense seers. Faced with a competitive market-oriented economy and profound social changes, millions of Chinese seek help from incense seers for diverse everyday problems in attaining a good life, ranging from health to marriage, education, career, and business success. The study is based on 17 months of fieldwork among seers and their customers in Xia County (a pseudonym), Shandong Province: 13 months continually from 2021 to 2022 under China’s zero-COVID policy, and summers in 2018 and 2019. It details how incense seeing deals with both “empty sickness” (a state of being unwell attributed to the power of spiritual beings and Chinese geomancy) and “solid sickness” (a malfunctioning of body organs and systems), and helps people grapple with hope-related mental distress and conflict through “affective therapeutics”— healing people’s negative emotional states through religious practices. In exploring what happens to these hopes after customers depart from seers’ headquarters, the study unpacks how spiritual experiences influence people’s hopeful dispositions and inspire them to act, resist, and make changes in their lives in contexts of stringent social control such as China’s one-child and zero-COVID policies. An ambitious goal of this project is to extend the boundaries of the anthropology of hope and to mark some new paths that future research on hope, including but not limited to anthropological analysis, might fruitfully proceed.

My long-held hope of doing research that would benefit my hometown and Chinese peasants motivated me to make an early start on my second book project. The major field site is Chenjia (a pseudonym) in Shandong Province’s apple growing region, the village I call home. The extent and rapidity with which the population is growing older poses a serious challenge to Chinese society and other communities around the world. Rural elders and their experience of aging are disproportionately impacted by migration and China’s hukou system, which still creates systematic discrimination against rural households and prevents their equal access to welfare systems, medical care, education, and job opportunities. An ethnographic study attuned to older rural residents’ feelings and hopeful actions is crucial, as China’s half a billion peasants are aging and dying in silence. Titled Sweet Apples, Bitter Lives: Aging Peasants, Chronic Illness, and Living a Good Later Life in North China, this project will provide an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and hopes of older peasants who are chronically ill and disabled.

An article from this new project has recently been published by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. A local narrative paints the hospital as a place where people are made ill. The article ethnographically explores the experience of an elderly couple and my countrymen as they navigate accessing healthcare in an urban hospital in North China. It argues that “sickening landscapes,” a concept built upon the local narrative, provides a fertile ground for enriching the studies of therapeutic landscapes, iatrogenesis, and hospital ethnography. Incorporating ‘sickening landscapes’ into the theory of care helps us better attend to the trivial, easily neglected things and places that directly bear on health and well-being. Perhaps in this way, we can better comprehend elderly rural patients’ and caregivers’ concerns in China and vulnerable populations’ misery further afield. In so doing, we might find better ways to care for one another, rethink the institutional supports needed by those silenced, and tackle the problems that inhibit people from imagining and crafting hopeful lives worth living.

Research Interests

• Medical Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Anthropology of Hope
• Aging
• Healing
• Popular Religion and Daoism
• Health Inequities
• Mental Health
• Chronic Illness
• Disability
• Ethics of Care
• Hospital Ethnography
• Addiction
• Migration and Health
• Rural Environments and Health
• China Studies
• East and Southeast Asia