This study explores what community-based archiving can mean for Chinese adoptees whose histories are marked by uncertainty, fragmentation, and institutional control. The title of this work, pulled from a Tiktok comment written in response to China’s 2024 suspension of international adoption, speaks to a central challenge for our community at present: how will be remembered amongst records that are incomplete, misrepresentative, or were never there at all?

This study emerges from my own lived experience as a Chinese adoptee and my engagement with other adoptees as I seek to understand how existing archives have denied our voices, and how we might reclaim them by imagining new ways of storytelling and sense-making. Following a practice-led approach through interviews, focus groups, and archival co-design workshops, I explore how participatory and co-design practices can support more ethical, adoptee-centred modes of remembrance rooted in care, curiosity, and ownership over how our stories are created, stored, and circulated.

Against a backdrop of critical adoption studies that highlights the harms of institutional narratives that deny lived experience, adoptees reveal how they navigate a landscape in which both official and unofficial records carry pain, contradiction, and fabrication, and how reclaiming narrative control becomes central to restoring agency. Reflecting and making sense of their records as a community that can make room for these dynamics is also essential for adoptees’ sense of belonging.

My findings culminate in a high-fidelity prototype of a digital archive designed with four central values: Multiplicity of Dialogue, Agency and Representation, Privacy and Care, and being Motivated by Joy. The prototype demonstrates how community-led archives can create space for fragmented memories, evolving meanings, and unresolved stories, rather than seeking closure or resolve in existing ones. Most importantly, it highlights how adoptee spaces are constant sites of negotiation, where navigating power, resistance, and becoming is as dynamic as the lives adoptees live.

BSc capstone thesis, Fall 2023

Ethnic tourism in China has grown rapidly in the last decades. It is now every upper-class Chinese person’s dream to have their perfect weekend-getaway tucked in the rice patties of Yunnan, or the Miao villages of Guizhou. The pinnacle of tourism concerns itself not with lavish living site-seeing, but escaping the stresses of urban life, travelling to China’s most remote regions to experience a culture different from one’s own. This ideal can be and is realized on nearly all Chinese social media platforms, where images and videos showcase religious rituals, colorful local dishes, and minority women dressed in traditional clothing that are a must-see for urban elites.
 
This paper examines how this phenomenon is situated against the backdrop of the concept of wenming, the Chinese word meaning ‘civilization’ or ‘civilized.’ I aim to dissect the implications of online ethnic tourism as it relates to ethnic identity and wenming as a raced, classed, and gendered system.  Digital ethnography conducted on the social media platform Kuaishou, demonstrates the ways in which the civilization script is re(produced) within ideals of internal orientalism and ethnicity. I illustrate the paradoxical nature of wenming which works within bodies/identities/ethnicity to fixate what is ‘civilized,’ while simultaneously upholding its own unnatainability and ambiguity. Chinese ethnic minorities self-civilize so long as they maintain status as a perpetual, internal Other, complicating the notion of a ‘self-written’ identity. 

Part I, Part II
Based off of three weeks of fieldwork I conducted during my internship at GRAMMAR in New York City, this three part ethnography answers to one of the core values of the brand’s identity: love. Through engaging with different customers, partners, and designers within GRAMMAR, these articles ask what it means to love what we wear, and why such an intersection is so important in the industry.

This artist statement expands on my printed zine of the same title,  where I situate my art practice within queer studies of lalas (lesbians) in China during the late 1980s and 90s and Wang’s (2011) concept of ‘passionate aesthetics’.  What are the implications of the queer ambiguity provided by passionate aesthetics and the recent evolution of T and P roles. What does it mean to perform the gender roles of T and P in the ‘right,’ and what do they mean for lalas’ path towards subverting heteronormativity?

Through answering such questions, this paper argues for the paradoxical nature within lala labels, demonstrating how gender conformity and non-conformity can co-exist. It also draws our attention to queer media that portrays lala lives as multifaceted, whole, multifaceted, authentic, and lived.

This two-part ethnography is based off of my semester-long fieldwork at a nail salon in Manhattan's Chinatown. I investigate the connotations of an “Asian-owned” nail salon and “community” within the Chinese diaspora of New York City. I also explore how my own positionality as an adoptee complicates my goals as an anthropologist to be an “outsider looking in,” influencing the capacity of the salon as a site to unpack Chinese American identity.  

Artificially Intelligent, Undeniably Asian

This ongoing research projects dissects the relationship between AI assistants, techno-orientalism, and docile yet exotic Asian female sexuality through a case study of several virtual AI assistants, among them being the 2021 ‘Samsung Girl’. I demonstrate how harmfully presentations of race and gender are transmitted across time, space, and media, expanding on Said’s orientalism and the scholarship of techno-orientalism in Hollywood films.