After working at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN USA) for eight years (2015-2023), I left Vandy to join the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) during last summer. It was difficult to bid farewell to the great colleagues I’ve worked with at Vandy, but my family decided to reunite at a place where we can all work, study, and live together.

As with any international move, the past year has been exciting with all the promises and challenges. I have found Montreal to be a peaceful, diverse, and reassuring city, a place one can consider calling home. It takes time to learn about the institutions and local cultures, especially the four centuries of Quebec history and the ongoing negotiations among different linguistic communities. But overall I feel privileged to challenge myself with adjusting to a new country and new culture in the 4th decade of my life.

Recently I was named the Richard Charles & Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Cultural Studies in the EAS department at McGill. It is truly an honor. In the EAS department, I will teach courses on a range of topics involving Chinese drama, martial culture, gender, crime literature, and Asian diaspora. I will coordinate the Paul Hsiang Lecture Series on Chinese Poetry, and I will be happy to advise prospective MA and PhD students.

In recent years our family have developed a tradition of writing new year couplets to commemorate our ever-shifting life. This is a belated post and I would like to end it with our couplet for the year of dragon:

暮雨初霽朝雲江山勝跡
春華開罷秋實下自成蹊
此間忘言