• During my field work at the Taoist community, I wondered if I should blame people who starve themselves to pay for death rituals. They could've sent girls to school. I wonder if I’m missing something.

    ---in Shandong

  • I wondered how my grandmother converts to Christians at 67, and I wonder how she builds her faith with elderlies when she couldn’t read. I wonder what makes people submit their faith and how so?

    ---in Anhui

When I was very young, I realized that my mom was not only my mom but a human person like me. I’m a part of her life as her child— a categorical existence — had any other baby been born, then that person would be her child…and there would be no me. What’s up with the complexity of an individual identity & existence?

When I see my two grandmas, one, a convert to Christianity at the age of 67, a “sudden awakening," and another insisting on guarding her hawthorn trees and ceremonial practice in rural Shandong after my grandpa’s passing, “a consistent faith”… I wish to understand how people come to believe their identities, their realities, and their truth.

Beyond people.

I take more than minutes to think about chicken.

This Chicken is “exercising” its power in a political economy monopoly.

Shandong, China

2021- 2024

Ritual spending behavior in impoverished towns

Inside the Elder-Christian groups in China

With the rise of small groups among elderlies in secondary provinces, I visit church, interview people, and understand how their faith are constructed and popularized.

Why did I find the necessity and justification to explain and construct a version of truth for them? I begin to examine how my thought and their thoughts come to be. Love for the discipline and the love for the people calls for me to observe, experience, interpret, and construct my work with respect and critical reflection.