Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Forgotten Dreams (Forgotten Dreams of Mao’s Ousted Class: An Intimate Ethnography on how the Chinese Intelligentsia Survived the Mao Zedong Era)
Berichtszeitraum: 2025-05-01 bis 2026-04-30
Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts
1. EXPLANATION OF THE WORK CARRIED OUT AND OVERVIEW OF THE PROGRESS
1.1 Objectives
My project fills a scientific gap in research and conveys the role that the educated elite have played in shaping the contemporary history of Communist nations, such as China. Drawing on unique and rare empirical evidence, Forgotten Dreams accounts for the aspirations and uncertainties; the poetics and euphoric dreams; the love and commitment that Chinese intellectuals expressed at a time when an imagined socialist future seemed within grasp.vi The project sheds light to how political affect was radically revised when dreams were disrupted with the turn of events in the 1960’s and 1970’s during which intellectual families were attacked vehemently as targets of the so-called class prerogatives. Silenced and pushed to the shadows of history, understanding this transmission of loss contributes to literature on China’s intellectual class and goes beyond the current SOA research to offer novel and rare insight into how recollection – not only amnesia – holds Chinese intelligentsia families and present-day society together. The outcome is a timely account portraying what lurks beneath China’s autocratically monitored socialist dream that holds post-Mao Chinese society together as an enquiry to where it is heading in the future.
Forgotten Dreams goes beyond conventional research methods by bridging ethnography and biography in an innovative exploration into the personal stories of my family and the Chinese intelligentsia. I apply intimate ethnography as the project’s main methodological approach. A term coined by anthropologists Alisse Waterston – CUNY supervisor of this project — and Barbara Rylko-Bauer, intimate ethnography refers to the methodology of describing and analysing the rich and complex life histories of the researcher’s own family members. Intimate ethnography requires entering the deeply personal and private interiors of cultural frameworks, which are oftentimes only accessible to family members.
Due to the proximity of situating a family member at the centre of an anthropological project of critical inquiry, a more nuanced analysis comes to life that does not fall into essentialized or homogenised depictions of people and places. I position my family history alongside larger social processes to reveal the enduring power of memory and how the past is made personal. To account for this requires deep immersion that takes into account the dialectic processes of the personal and political; the past and present. The outcome is an integrative, multi-layered personal story that offers deep insight on the disruptions as well as the transmission and embeddedness of contemporary history within Chinese intelligentsia families.
As a daughter-anthropologist, I have access to a wealth of rare, uncovered first-hand empirical evidence that offers deep insight into the lives of intelligentsia families living at the dawn of the Mao Zedong era.
This includes:
• Interviews and multi-sited fieldwork. Currently, I have completed over forty hours of in-depth interviews on oral histories with my uncle and father living under Maoist rule; and six hours of in-depth interviews with family in Taiwan. Interviews have been completed over seven years (2015 to 2022) and is combined with ethnographic based practices of anthropology including participant observation, spending prolonged periods with my research subjects to build on the trust required of a researcher and producing field-notes that examine my reflexive role as a researcher.
In addition to my anthropological approach to retrieve empirical evidence, I also draw on textual archives to gain access to past experiences, including photographs, family artefacts and material objects, testimonies, government papers, passports, and newspapers. I have access to over 700 pages of transcribed letters handwritten from 1953 to 1958 between my Chinese grandfather and my Finnish grandmother. The letters, stored in my family basement, uncover their migration history from Europe to China in the mid-1950s, keeping the couple connected in times of separation. Archival material also includes rare handwritten Red Guard pamphlets and newsletters distributed at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
1.1 Objectives
My project fills a scientific gap in research and conveys the role that the educated elite have played in shaping the contemporary history of Communist nations, such as China. Drawing on unique and rare empirical evidence, Forgotten Dreams accounts for the aspirations and uncertainties; the poetics and euphoric dreams; the love and commitment that Chinese intellectuals expressed at a time when an imagined socialist future seemed within grasp.vi The project sheds light to how political affect was radically revised when dreams were disrupted with the turn of events in the 1960’s and 1970’s during which intellectual families were attacked vehemently as targets of the so-called class prerogatives. Silenced and pushed to the shadows of history, understanding this transmission of loss contributes to literature on China’s intellectual class and goes beyond the current SOA research to offer novel and rare insight into how recollection – not only amnesia – holds Chinese intelligentsia families and present-day society together. The outcome is a timely account portraying what lurks beneath China’s autocratically monitored socialist dream that holds post-Mao Chinese society together as an enquiry to where it is heading in the future.
Forgotten Dreams goes beyond conventional research methods by bridging ethnography and biography in an innovative exploration into the personal stories of my family and the Chinese intelligentsia. I apply intimate ethnography as the project’s main methodological approach. A term coined by anthropologists Alisse Waterston – CUNY supervisor of this project — and Barbara Rylko-Bauer, intimate ethnography refers to the methodology of describing and analysing the rich and complex life histories of the researcher’s own family members. Intimate ethnography requires entering the deeply personal and private interiors of cultural frameworks, which are oftentimes only accessible to family members.
Due to the proximity of situating a family member at the centre of an anthropological project of critical inquiry, a more nuanced analysis comes to life that does not fall into essentialized or homogenised depictions of people and places. I position my family history alongside larger social processes to reveal the enduring power of memory and how the past is made personal. To account for this requires deep immersion that takes into account the dialectic processes of the personal and political; the past and present. The outcome is an integrative, multi-layered personal story that offers deep insight on the disruptions as well as the transmission and embeddedness of contemporary history within Chinese intelligentsia families.
As a daughter-anthropologist, I have access to a wealth of rare, uncovered first-hand empirical evidence that offers deep insight into the lives of intelligentsia families living at the dawn of the Mao Zedong era.
This includes:
• Interviews and multi-sited fieldwork. Currently, I have completed over forty hours of in-depth interviews on oral histories with my uncle and father living under Maoist rule; and six hours of in-depth interviews with family in Taiwan. Interviews have been completed over seven years (2015 to 2022) and is combined with ethnographic based practices of anthropology including participant observation, spending prolonged periods with my research subjects to build on the trust required of a researcher and producing field-notes that examine my reflexive role as a researcher.
In addition to my anthropological approach to retrieve empirical evidence, I also draw on textual archives to gain access to past experiences, including photographs, family artefacts and material objects, testimonies, government papers, passports, and newspapers. I have access to over 700 pages of transcribed letters handwritten from 1953 to 1958 between my Chinese grandfather and my Finnish grandmother. The letters, stored in my family basement, uncover their migration history from Europe to China in the mid-1950s, keeping the couple connected in times of separation. Archival material also includes rare handwritten Red Guard pamphlets and newsletters distributed at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse
1.2 Explanation of the work carried out per WP
1.2.1 Work Package 1
Having already obtained most of my empirical material, the first task at the beginning of my MSCA fellowship was to synthesise material and conduct in-depth analysis of my data. An analytical lens that allows for distancing from my dual-daughter anthropologist role is crucial – and one of the biggest challenges of intimate ethnography. To overcome this challenge, I divided my empirical material into short time spans and reread them repetitively to allow for the voices of my grandparents to come through. Similarly, in the transcribed oral narratives of my father, uncle, and wider kin, I repetitively returned to my empirical material to help me visualise their past lives both in the mundane, everyday routines and at times of disruption. Repeatedly returning to my empirical evidence helped push me towards envisioning historical social contexts through the voices and lives of my interlocutors in the first phase of my MSCA fellowship.
As part of fulfilling W1, I have completed the first draft of my book, which contains 73,344 words, alongside old photos and scanned letters. The outcome is a multimodal piece of work that starts from my own family history and extends outward to explore how broader social and historical processes in contemporary China shape experiences of belonging and exclusion.
Information on training activities and courses, compared to the DoA in the grant agreement:
During the first twelve-months of my fellowship, I worked alongside other scholars and non-scholars who, like me, are building projects that draw on empirical material of their own family members. With New York City based writer and book-binder, Wah-Ming Chang, we came up with our own visual storytelling and sequencing method to assist me in sequencing my photos and written text. Our collaborative endeavors will continue in the second phase of the MSCA fellowship. Wah-Ming Chang is coming to the University of Helsinki from September 1-4 alongside anthropologist Kirin Narayan and documentary maker Solveig Qu-Suess
1. Outreach Skills: To ensure I successfully carry out WP1, WP2 and WP3, I attended book talks and courses on Chinese history, economics and political science in New York City to deepen my interdisciplinary knowledge on China. At these events, I expanded my academic network and make an active contribution to share my own expertise on China. For example, on March 12 and 13 2026, I attended the opening of “Making Mei Lanfang, A Modern Icon” at the China Institute Gallery. I was invited by the curator of the exhibition, Catherine Yeh (Prof of Chinese Literature, Boston University), and over two days I had the rare opportunity to listen to a series of curator’s talks and lectures by Prof Yeh and Dr. Kui Wang to gain a deeper understanding the significant role that performing artists, such as Mei Lanfang, play in contemporary Chinese history, and how radically this changed during Maoist rule. These themes are directly linked to my own project to better understand the major political shifts that took place under Mao’s political initiatives.
2. Creative Writing and Multimodal Ethnography Skills: In my initial proposal, I said I would be attending workshops in the craft of writing and multimodal ethnography as scientific toolkits organised by Alisse Waterston. Unfortunately, Alisse Waterston was not available during my time in New York due to her busy travel itinerary and an underlying health concern. Instead, I sought full access to other workshops in New York City. I attended a training workshop at the International Center of Photography in New York City led by photographers/artists Aarati Akkapeddi & Rebecca Mzengi Corey. These workshops provided an avenue of training for me to think more about the multiple ways that family photographs can be printed and displayed. In the workshop, I also learned about the different bookbinding and the layering options possible to showcase my own family photos which remain a central part of my research output.
Alongside the access I had to training in multimodal outlets, I also attended creative writing workshops and talks in New York City. On October 7 2025, I attended a book launch by world renowned author, Arundhati Roy. Listening to such an accomplished author talk about the making of her newest book, which largely builds on the memoir of her mother, was deeply inspiring as I embark on my own writing journey piecing together my father’s memoir.
3. Archival Research: Forgotten Dreams incorporates archival research, which as an anthropologist, is relatively new terrain for me. Upon arrival at CUNY, I organised meetings with China experts such as Professor Anru Lee who offered advice on how to extract evidence from archives that is relevant to my project. This allowed me to complete my archival research at Harvard University from June 29 - July 3, 2025.
4. Open Science and Data Protection: In my application, I had promised to undergo training in Open Science at the beginning and end of the Fellowship. Unfortunately, I did not have access to this kind of training during my time in New York City, although I did talk to colleagues and learn about data protection and open science on a deeper level.
I have also gain the following three transferable skills:
1. Project Management, Networking and Leadership Skills: Being in charge of Forgotten Dreams has put me in the position of a manager of my own research project, further strengthening my leadership skills. During my time in New York, I made use of the diverse range of intellectual minds to develop my networking skills and engage with audiences interested in contemporary Chinese history. Alongside attending workshops and talks outside of CUNY, I taught a class at CUNY’s “Global Asian Studies” course. Outside of academia, I collaborated with scholars (Fred Lai and Jennifer Lee) and non-scholars (Wah-Ming Chang) to organize a two-day public event at Accent Sisters, a Chinese-language art space and book shop in New York City. The event was called, “Archives of Longing”, and the four of us came together in a non-academic space, setting our intellectual voices aside and allowing a more intuitive mode of expression to emerge.
2. Throughout the Fellowship, I improved my teamwork skills working alongside scholars from interdisciplinary backgrounds – including Asia Scholars at Art Scholars studying Chinese intelligentsia families through organising workshops and training sessions together. Collaborating alongside Jennifer Lee (associate professor of School of Art Institute) at the “Archives of Longing” event is an example of the successful collaboration I partook in.
3. I have been working towards acquiring grant writing skills by preparing funding proposals to secure a future in academia. I have already started to draft an application for the ERC Starting Grant, with the help of Vilma Hämäläinen at the University of Helsinki.
1.2.2 Work Package 2
To develop a deeper understanding of how the People's Republic of China transmits history to the public, I have conducted extensive literature reviews on how museums, history textbooks, and popular media shape historical narratives. This has deepened my understanding of how national histories are communicated in contemporary China and how these narratives have shifted in response to changing political movements.
1.2.3 Work Package 3
I carried out archival research at the Henry Murray Research Archive at Harvard University from June 29 - July 3, 2025. American psychologist, Henry Murray, played a fundamental role in the development of military psychology in early 1940’s China. My grandfather worked alongside Murray during his expeditions with the Nationalist Army in Southwest China. After the liberation of the Communist Army, access to Murray and my grandfather’s experimental findings have been removed from the Chinese public eye. Access to the Henry Murray Research Archive at Harvard will change that. Spending five days working through Murray’s archival research helped me fulfill the second objective in my project to document the contemporary histories of China’s intellectual class.
Etc.
Aside from my archival and collaborative work, during the first year of my fellowship, I was invited to give talks at numerous universities in North America, including Syracuse University, Art Institute of Chicago and Wesleyan University. These visits contributed to the outreach of my project to new academic audiences.
1.3 Quality of the supervision, training and two-way transfer of knowledge between the researcher and the host
During my twelve-month stay at CUNY, I was supervised by Professor Alisse Waterston, an internationally renowned cultural anthropologist and a leading scholar of intimate ethnography. Her work, particularly My Father's Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century (Routledge, 2014), has been highly influential in shaping scholarship on intimate ethnography, including my own research. Shortly after my arrival, however, Professor Waterston's extensive travel commitments and health-related circumstances meant that opportunities for supervision were more limited than originally anticipated. My integration into the host institution also differed from the original plan. Although I was provided with office space, there were fewer opportunities for institutional integration and scholarly exchange than expected, and some practical aspects of becoming embedded within the department proved difficult to arrange.
As a result, the reciprocal exchange of knowledge envisaged in the original application was more limited than planned. To make the best use of my time at CUNY, I redirected my efforts towards writing and manuscript development. This proved highly productive, enabling me to complete the first full draft of my monograph and prepare two peer-reviewed journal articles. Alongside my writing, I committed my time to networking and collaborating with individuals outside of CUNY, which explains the success of my public engagement initiatives during my time in New York City.
1.2.1 Work Package 1
Having already obtained most of my empirical material, the first task at the beginning of my MSCA fellowship was to synthesise material and conduct in-depth analysis of my data. An analytical lens that allows for distancing from my dual-daughter anthropologist role is crucial – and one of the biggest challenges of intimate ethnography. To overcome this challenge, I divided my empirical material into short time spans and reread them repetitively to allow for the voices of my grandparents to come through. Similarly, in the transcribed oral narratives of my father, uncle, and wider kin, I repetitively returned to my empirical material to help me visualise their past lives both in the mundane, everyday routines and at times of disruption. Repeatedly returning to my empirical evidence helped push me towards envisioning historical social contexts through the voices and lives of my interlocutors in the first phase of my MSCA fellowship.
As part of fulfilling W1, I have completed the first draft of my book, which contains 73,344 words, alongside old photos and scanned letters. The outcome is a multimodal piece of work that starts from my own family history and extends outward to explore how broader social and historical processes in contemporary China shape experiences of belonging and exclusion.
Information on training activities and courses, compared to the DoA in the grant agreement:
During the first twelve-months of my fellowship, I worked alongside other scholars and non-scholars who, like me, are building projects that draw on empirical material of their own family members. With New York City based writer and book-binder, Wah-Ming Chang, we came up with our own visual storytelling and sequencing method to assist me in sequencing my photos and written text. Our collaborative endeavors will continue in the second phase of the MSCA fellowship. Wah-Ming Chang is coming to the University of Helsinki from September 1-4 alongside anthropologist Kirin Narayan and documentary maker Solveig Qu-Suess
1. Outreach Skills: To ensure I successfully carry out WP1, WP2 and WP3, I attended book talks and courses on Chinese history, economics and political science in New York City to deepen my interdisciplinary knowledge on China. At these events, I expanded my academic network and make an active contribution to share my own expertise on China. For example, on March 12 and 13 2026, I attended the opening of “Making Mei Lanfang, A Modern Icon” at the China Institute Gallery. I was invited by the curator of the exhibition, Catherine Yeh (Prof of Chinese Literature, Boston University), and over two days I had the rare opportunity to listen to a series of curator’s talks and lectures by Prof Yeh and Dr. Kui Wang to gain a deeper understanding the significant role that performing artists, such as Mei Lanfang, play in contemporary Chinese history, and how radically this changed during Maoist rule. These themes are directly linked to my own project to better understand the major political shifts that took place under Mao’s political initiatives.
2. Creative Writing and Multimodal Ethnography Skills: In my initial proposal, I said I would be attending workshops in the craft of writing and multimodal ethnography as scientific toolkits organised by Alisse Waterston. Unfortunately, Alisse Waterston was not available during my time in New York due to her busy travel itinerary and an underlying health concern. Instead, I sought full access to other workshops in New York City. I attended a training workshop at the International Center of Photography in New York City led by photographers/artists Aarati Akkapeddi & Rebecca Mzengi Corey. These workshops provided an avenue of training for me to think more about the multiple ways that family photographs can be printed and displayed. In the workshop, I also learned about the different bookbinding and the layering options possible to showcase my own family photos which remain a central part of my research output.
Alongside the access I had to training in multimodal outlets, I also attended creative writing workshops and talks in New York City. On October 7 2025, I attended a book launch by world renowned author, Arundhati Roy. Listening to such an accomplished author talk about the making of her newest book, which largely builds on the memoir of her mother, was deeply inspiring as I embark on my own writing journey piecing together my father’s memoir.
3. Archival Research: Forgotten Dreams incorporates archival research, which as an anthropologist, is relatively new terrain for me. Upon arrival at CUNY, I organised meetings with China experts such as Professor Anru Lee who offered advice on how to extract evidence from archives that is relevant to my project. This allowed me to complete my archival research at Harvard University from June 29 - July 3, 2025.
4. Open Science and Data Protection: In my application, I had promised to undergo training in Open Science at the beginning and end of the Fellowship. Unfortunately, I did not have access to this kind of training during my time in New York City, although I did talk to colleagues and learn about data protection and open science on a deeper level.
I have also gain the following three transferable skills:
1. Project Management, Networking and Leadership Skills: Being in charge of Forgotten Dreams has put me in the position of a manager of my own research project, further strengthening my leadership skills. During my time in New York, I made use of the diverse range of intellectual minds to develop my networking skills and engage with audiences interested in contemporary Chinese history. Alongside attending workshops and talks outside of CUNY, I taught a class at CUNY’s “Global Asian Studies” course. Outside of academia, I collaborated with scholars (Fred Lai and Jennifer Lee) and non-scholars (Wah-Ming Chang) to organize a two-day public event at Accent Sisters, a Chinese-language art space and book shop in New York City. The event was called, “Archives of Longing”, and the four of us came together in a non-academic space, setting our intellectual voices aside and allowing a more intuitive mode of expression to emerge.
2. Throughout the Fellowship, I improved my teamwork skills working alongside scholars from interdisciplinary backgrounds – including Asia Scholars at Art Scholars studying Chinese intelligentsia families through organising workshops and training sessions together. Collaborating alongside Jennifer Lee (associate professor of School of Art Institute) at the “Archives of Longing” event is an example of the successful collaboration I partook in.
3. I have been working towards acquiring grant writing skills by preparing funding proposals to secure a future in academia. I have already started to draft an application for the ERC Starting Grant, with the help of Vilma Hämäläinen at the University of Helsinki.
1.2.2 Work Package 2
To develop a deeper understanding of how the People's Republic of China transmits history to the public, I have conducted extensive literature reviews on how museums, history textbooks, and popular media shape historical narratives. This has deepened my understanding of how national histories are communicated in contemporary China and how these narratives have shifted in response to changing political movements.
1.2.3 Work Package 3
I carried out archival research at the Henry Murray Research Archive at Harvard University from June 29 - July 3, 2025. American psychologist, Henry Murray, played a fundamental role in the development of military psychology in early 1940’s China. My grandfather worked alongside Murray during his expeditions with the Nationalist Army in Southwest China. After the liberation of the Communist Army, access to Murray and my grandfather’s experimental findings have been removed from the Chinese public eye. Access to the Henry Murray Research Archive at Harvard will change that. Spending five days working through Murray’s archival research helped me fulfill the second objective in my project to document the contemporary histories of China’s intellectual class.
Etc.
Aside from my archival and collaborative work, during the first year of my fellowship, I was invited to give talks at numerous universities in North America, including Syracuse University, Art Institute of Chicago and Wesleyan University. These visits contributed to the outreach of my project to new academic audiences.
1.3 Quality of the supervision, training and two-way transfer of knowledge between the researcher and the host
During my twelve-month stay at CUNY, I was supervised by Professor Alisse Waterston, an internationally renowned cultural anthropologist and a leading scholar of intimate ethnography. Her work, particularly My Father's Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century (Routledge, 2014), has been highly influential in shaping scholarship on intimate ethnography, including my own research. Shortly after my arrival, however, Professor Waterston's extensive travel commitments and health-related circumstances meant that opportunities for supervision were more limited than originally anticipated. My integration into the host institution also differed from the original plan. Although I was provided with office space, there were fewer opportunities for institutional integration and scholarly exchange than expected, and some practical aspects of becoming embedded within the department proved difficult to arrange.
As a result, the reciprocal exchange of knowledge envisaged in the original application was more limited than planned. To make the best use of my time at CUNY, I redirected my efforts towards writing and manuscript development. This proved highly productive, enabling me to complete the first full draft of my monograph and prepare two peer-reviewed journal articles. Alongside my writing, I committed my time to networking and collaborating with individuals outside of CUNY, which explains the success of my public engagement initiatives during my time in New York City.
Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)
1.4 Impact
The Scientific and career impact of the project:
As scholars working with multimodal analysis have proven, incorporating more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experience attends to a mode of scientific inquiry that is open-ended and diversified.
To fulfil beyond the state of the art research that remains multimodal and honest, I have gained new skills in creative writing and multimodal ethnography skills during my fellowship. I have collaborated with scholars (Fred Lai and Jennifer Lee) and non-scholars (Wah-Ming Chang) and organized a two-day public event at a Chinese-language book shop in New York City. The event was called, “Archives of Longing”, and the four of us came together in a non-academic space, setting our intellectual voices aside and allowing a more intuitive mode of expression to emerge. Through family history, and the voids around them, we explored different threads of Chinese biographies as a way of gathering a different kind of archive – those shaped by longing. The event was sold-out and audience members, who mainly came from ethnically Chinese backgrounds, mentioned the significance that our workshop carried for them as they try to piece together and make sense of their own family history.
These opportunities of outreach have helped me in working towards the completion of my book monograph, as part of main research outputs of the MSCA project.
1.3.1 Communication and dissemination
Dissemination: The main output of Forgotten Dreams is a monograph. As of 5 August 2026, I have written 73,344 words, and the first full draft of the manuscript is complete. To further develop the book, I am organizing a manuscript workshop on 31 August 2026 with Professor Maarit Forde, Professor Kirin Narayan, and Wah-Ming Chang as invited readers. In my original application, this workshop was scheduled to take place during months 33–34 of the project. However, owing to the faster-than-anticipated progress of the manuscript, it has been brought forward to month 16. In addition to discussing the manuscript, the workshop will provide an opportunity to consider potential publication strategies and suitable publishers for the next stage of the project. In my application, I indicated that I intended to submit the manuscript to the Intimate Ethnography series at Berghahn Books, edited by my supervisor at CUNY. Since then, I have decided to broaden the range of potential publishers and book series under consideration. Before making a final decision, I would like to carefully assess which press and series provide the strongest intellectual fit for the manuscript.
In addition to my monograph, two peer-reviewed articles have been submitted to internationally reclaimed Open Access journals. In my original application, these articles were scheduled to take place at the end of the second year but it has been brought forward to the end of the second year.
Prior to submitting one of the two articles (“The Other in Beijing's Revolutionary Past: Belonging, Exclusion, and a Family History” submitted to positions politics), I summarised and presented the key findings at the East Asian Anthropological Association conference from November 1-2 2025 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou.
In my original application, I suggested I would be receiving feedback from a monthly peer support writing groups with colleagues at CUNY. This unfortunately was not possible to fulfil because colleagues were too preoccupied by teaching to take part. I sought other readers in greater New York and organized my own virtual writing group with Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee (Associate Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago University).
I also organized two virtual workshops with a multidisciplinary group of scholars affiliated globally all working on China. In the workshop, we shared our papers, read them and offered critical advice to help one another with revisions. The writing workshop consisted of the following members: Jennifer Dorothy Lee (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Harriet Evans (University of Westminster/London School of Economics), Qing Shen (Berlin School Institute for Social Inquiry), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Fred Lai (London School of Economics), Jay Ke-Schutte (University of Zhejiang), and me.
Communication and Public Engagement: Alongside the more topical annual conferences, I found that the virtual workshops I had already organized—and the collaborations that emerged from them—led me to reconsider my original plans. Rather than organizing an additional academic workshop aimed at China scholars, anthropologists, and non-specialist audiences, such as university students, as outlined in my original application, I chose to devote my time and energy to developing public storytelling events. In my original application, I intended to collaborate with the Research Centre of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) at the sixteenth and seventeenth months of the Fellowship. When I learned that the museum was not vacant for bookings, I reached out to other collaborators instead, including the Chinese-led artist space and book shop, Accent Sisters. From January 9-10 2026, I organized “Archives of Longing”. The general public, in addition to journalists, musicians, artists and writers were invited to join the events and learn about the cosmopolitan lives that Chinese intellectuals took on in the middle of the twentieth century. In involving the civil society in the event, the project was fulfilling open science practices (as highlighted in the work package). Photos and videos were shared alongside stories to personify the lives of Chinese diaspora and the important roles they played in the international development of science. The event increased awareness on the enduring power of Chinese diasporic history to counter crude assumptions imposed on East Asians through racial stereotypes. The event also encouraged audience members, most of whom were diaspora from East Asian family backgrounds, to uncover their own personal histories. We set aside a workshop to offer a safe space to listen and share to audience member’s own family stories. The magnitude of the offline events was profound – “Archives of Longing” was sold out and we had a waiting list of people who were not able to attend. Marketing for the events were shared widely through our own curated social media pages, and Accent Sisters active online followings of 16.2K Instagram followers. After the event, we gathered personal family histories and circulated the outcome of the workshop through imagery, video, poetry and written narrative. With the support of Accent Sisters online interface and our own, we reached around 20K netizens per posting.
The Scientific and career impact of the project:
As scholars working with multimodal analysis have proven, incorporating more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experience attends to a mode of scientific inquiry that is open-ended and diversified.
To fulfil beyond the state of the art research that remains multimodal and honest, I have gained new skills in creative writing and multimodal ethnography skills during my fellowship. I have collaborated with scholars (Fred Lai and Jennifer Lee) and non-scholars (Wah-Ming Chang) and organized a two-day public event at a Chinese-language book shop in New York City. The event was called, “Archives of Longing”, and the four of us came together in a non-academic space, setting our intellectual voices aside and allowing a more intuitive mode of expression to emerge. Through family history, and the voids around them, we explored different threads of Chinese biographies as a way of gathering a different kind of archive – those shaped by longing. The event was sold-out and audience members, who mainly came from ethnically Chinese backgrounds, mentioned the significance that our workshop carried for them as they try to piece together and make sense of their own family history.
These opportunities of outreach have helped me in working towards the completion of my book monograph, as part of main research outputs of the MSCA project.
1.3.1 Communication and dissemination
Dissemination: The main output of Forgotten Dreams is a monograph. As of 5 August 2026, I have written 73,344 words, and the first full draft of the manuscript is complete. To further develop the book, I am organizing a manuscript workshop on 31 August 2026 with Professor Maarit Forde, Professor Kirin Narayan, and Wah-Ming Chang as invited readers. In my original application, this workshop was scheduled to take place during months 33–34 of the project. However, owing to the faster-than-anticipated progress of the manuscript, it has been brought forward to month 16. In addition to discussing the manuscript, the workshop will provide an opportunity to consider potential publication strategies and suitable publishers for the next stage of the project. In my application, I indicated that I intended to submit the manuscript to the Intimate Ethnography series at Berghahn Books, edited by my supervisor at CUNY. Since then, I have decided to broaden the range of potential publishers and book series under consideration. Before making a final decision, I would like to carefully assess which press and series provide the strongest intellectual fit for the manuscript.
In addition to my monograph, two peer-reviewed articles have been submitted to internationally reclaimed Open Access journals. In my original application, these articles were scheduled to take place at the end of the second year but it has been brought forward to the end of the second year.
Prior to submitting one of the two articles (“The Other in Beijing's Revolutionary Past: Belonging, Exclusion, and a Family History” submitted to positions politics), I summarised and presented the key findings at the East Asian Anthropological Association conference from November 1-2 2025 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou.
In my original application, I suggested I would be receiving feedback from a monthly peer support writing groups with colleagues at CUNY. This unfortunately was not possible to fulfil because colleagues were too preoccupied by teaching to take part. I sought other readers in greater New York and organized my own virtual writing group with Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee (Associate Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago University).
I also organized two virtual workshops with a multidisciplinary group of scholars affiliated globally all working on China. In the workshop, we shared our papers, read them and offered critical advice to help one another with revisions. The writing workshop consisted of the following members: Jennifer Dorothy Lee (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Harriet Evans (University of Westminster/London School of Economics), Qing Shen (Berlin School Institute for Social Inquiry), Jenny Chio (University of Southern California), Fred Lai (London School of Economics), Jay Ke-Schutte (University of Zhejiang), and me.
Communication and Public Engagement: Alongside the more topical annual conferences, I found that the virtual workshops I had already organized—and the collaborations that emerged from them—led me to reconsider my original plans. Rather than organizing an additional academic workshop aimed at China scholars, anthropologists, and non-specialist audiences, such as university students, as outlined in my original application, I chose to devote my time and energy to developing public storytelling events. In my original application, I intended to collaborate with the Research Centre of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) at the sixteenth and seventeenth months of the Fellowship. When I learned that the museum was not vacant for bookings, I reached out to other collaborators instead, including the Chinese-led artist space and book shop, Accent Sisters. From January 9-10 2026, I organized “Archives of Longing”. The general public, in addition to journalists, musicians, artists and writers were invited to join the events and learn about the cosmopolitan lives that Chinese intellectuals took on in the middle of the twentieth century. In involving the civil society in the event, the project was fulfilling open science practices (as highlighted in the work package). Photos and videos were shared alongside stories to personify the lives of Chinese diaspora and the important roles they played in the international development of science. The event increased awareness on the enduring power of Chinese diasporic history to counter crude assumptions imposed on East Asians through racial stereotypes. The event also encouraged audience members, most of whom were diaspora from East Asian family backgrounds, to uncover their own personal histories. We set aside a workshop to offer a safe space to listen and share to audience member’s own family stories. The magnitude of the offline events was profound – “Archives of Longing” was sold out and we had a waiting list of people who were not able to attend. Marketing for the events were shared widely through our own curated social media pages, and Accent Sisters active online followings of 16.2K Instagram followers. After the event, we gathered personal family histories and circulated the outcome of the workshop through imagery, video, poetry and written narrative. With the support of Accent Sisters online interface and our own, we reached around 20K netizens per posting.