Back to Blogging

After nearly a year, I finally have some time to begin blogging again. I graduated in May, receiving my MA in Asian Studies. Here is a picture of me in my graduation finery:

The gold medal around my neck is for making the Graduate Dean's List of University Scholars and Artists. The medal beneath it is for the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.

My thesis is online, and I have a few publications out this year, with a few more in the pipeline for publication in 2013.

I was one of the translators who had the honor of contributing an essay translation to Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo's book No Enemies, No Hatred.  (My translation is on pages 177-187.)

The paper that Dr. Wright and I presented in Singapore and Hawaii in 2011 will be coming out in November in Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-cultural perspectives.

I am taking a gap year to get some things in order, and I will be applying to PhD programs at the end of the year to start in Fall 2013. I plan to continue studying Christianity in China and sociology of religion. During this year, I am officially the Office Manager of the Long Beach chapter of the California Faculty Association, and I continue with my free-lance translation business.

I have been carefully considering how to continue with my blog because I received some negative feedback from family members, who felt I had portrayed them in a negative light. I would like to reiterate that my purpose in writing is to use my experiences to shed light on the position of women in traditional Hakka families moving into a modern lifestyle. The moves from a traditional agrarian lifestyle to an urban industrial lifestyle and then to life in the United States create many tensions in families. And according to Confucian family norms, the women bear the responsibility for keeping the household on an even keel. They are constantly exhorted to endure, to ren 忍, which is the same Chinese character used in Ninja. The women are the invisible heroes of the household. My goal is not to put down the men around the women, but rather to express what I and my sisters-in-law were thinking and feeling as the family passed through so many changes. Next week, I plan to pick up the thread of my narrative and continue telling the story of my eldest sister-in-law, whom I left in the hospital almost a year ago. I would also like to mention that these traumas occurred almost 20 years ago in 1993. These are old stories, and we have all moved on. But I think the stories are worthy of being told.

Thanks for following my blog, even though I have not posted for so long.