The Boundaries of Chinese-ness in Global Foodways
This project will examine the historical development of the term “authenticity” as it relates to Chinese food in the Chinese diaspora. Often used as a “litmus test” for ethnic identity, the term “authentic” is often portrayed by its user as an objective measure of connection to an idealized ethnic culture. Building upon my interest in how cultural phenomena like language are reimagined and redefined to construct ethnic identities, this project will explore the various ways in which a global understanding of authentic Chinese food came to define Chinese-ness both inside and outside of China in the twentieth century. I hope to examine not just how flavors and ingredients, but also restaurant architecture, interior design, and racial performance by servers and chefs, helped Chinese abroad to negotiate their own sense of ethnic identity with the experience of being an immigrant throughout the Pacific Rim—from the United States and Canada to Vietnam, from Korea to Australia.
Women and Grassroots Activism in Post-War Hong Kong
Hong Kong history has long been shaped by grassroots activism. A city often rocked by power struggles among greater empires, and a colony without a direct way to consent to their own government, the people of Hong Kong have often found grassroots organizing, public protest, and even organized violence the most direct way to compel structural change and challenge the hegemony of colonial power. This history explores the history of Hong Kong activism in the latter half of the twentieth century by focusing on the role of women in shaping it. By telling the stories of the underground anti-Japanese smugglers, the local party organizers, the charity activists, the student protestors and the radical writers whose experiences as women framed their postionalities and defined, or limited, their power, this series of personal histories will bring to light the largely untold stories of Hong Kongs female activists and, more broadly, rewrite the history of anticolonial activism in colonial Hong Kong through the lens of gender.
Peer Reviewed
"Decolonizing Chinese History: A roundtable" The Historical Journal 67 (1) (2024)
"Democracy in Hong Kong: The benefit of a Gender Mainstreaming Approach" in Lucas Myer, ed., Understanding China amid Change and Competition (Wilson Center Publications, 2024): 373-396.
""Our Roots are the Same": Hegemony and Power in Narratives of Chinese Linguistic Antiquity, 1900-1949" Comparative Studies in Society and History 65(1) (January, 2023): 27-54. Open Access
Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960. Cambridge University Press(April, 2020).
““Orbiting the Core”: Politics and the Meaning of Chinese Linguistics, 1927-1957.” Twentieth-Century China Special Issue on National Language, Dialect, and the Construction of Identity 42, no. 3 (August, 2016)
Book Reviews
The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. Edited by Lu Pan (2023) positions: asia critique (2023)
Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (2021) MCLC (2023)
Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism. Wen Liu, JN Chien, Christina Chung, and Ellie Tse, eds. (2021) PRC History Review (2022)
Fang Xu, Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China (2021) China Quarterly (August, 2022)
Jeremy Brown, June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 (2022) Pacific Affairs (May, 2022)
Christian Sorace, Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (2017) Journal of Asian Studies (2020).
Joshua Hill, Voting as Rite: A History of Elections in Modern China (2019) Twentieth-Century China (2020)
Martin T. Fromm, Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (2019). English Historical Review (2020).
Ming-sho Ho, Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (2018). Pacific Historical Review 88 (4) (2019).
Peter Zarrow, Educating China: Knowledge, Society and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902-1937 (2015). Chinese Studies 35 no. 3 (September, 2017).
Wing Chung Ng, The Rise of Cantonese Opera (2015). The Chinese Historical Review 23 no. 2 (October, 2016)