A group of our undergraduates recently founded the McGill Chinese Drama Club and, within just three months, successfully staged a public performance of Love, Peach Blossom (《我爱桃花》). The production was such a success that I encouraged them to continue with another performance in the fall semester.

I was fortunate to see the play when it premiered in Beijing in 2003, back when I was an undergraduate myself. It feels wonderfully full circle that, more than twenty years later, my own students are staging an English-language production of the drama here in North America.

To the best of my knowledge, this may well be the first English production of the play anywhere in the world. The students completed the translation entirely on their own. A compelling love story can travel across millennia, languages, and national boundaries.

I’m once again impressed by McGill students.

More information about the performance can be found here.

After more than two years of preparation, the conference Poetics and Politics of Embodiment in Premodern China has finally taken place at McGill during April 17 and 18. Paola Zamperini and I first began brainstorming the idea during the pandemic. Centered on the human body, the conference sought to bring together scholars of China working across literature, history, art history, religious studies, and related fields, in the hope of fostering the kind of cross-disciplinary conversations essential to understanding a complex topic such as this. Special thanks are due to Dorothy Ko, who generously read all of the conference papers in advance and offered invaluable commentaries throughout the event.

I was thoroughly impressed by the papers presented, many of which were grounded in years—if not decades—of research. The intensity and profundity of the intellectual exchanges made the conference a deeply rewarding experience for everyone present.

I am particularly grateful to the Geiss Hsu Foundation and a few other institutes for their generous financial support, which made this event possible. I am also deeply grateful to—and proud of—the group of McGill students whose dedication and assistance were indispensable in making the conference such a success.

Montreal also did its part by gracing the conference with two days of beautiful weather amidst its still chilly, and occasionally snowy, spring. I hope—and believe—that all of the participants left with memorable experiences, both intellectual and personal. May we continue to create more gatherings like this as scholars.

I am truly delighted to announce the launch of a new website for our Established through an endowment from the late Professor Paul Hsiang around 2000, the Foo-hooa Se program—best known for the Hsiang Lecture on Chinese Poetry—remains one of the earliest academic endowments in the Western world dedicated exclusively to the research, teaching, and appreciation of classical Chinese poetry.

Under the previous leadership of my esteemed colleague Grace Fong, the Paul Hsiang Lecture Series on Chinese Poetry has flourished for more than two decades. Papers presented in the series have been published in eight volumes of our journal, Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry (with vol. 9 forthcoming).

The current Hsiang program has expanded beyond the flagship lecture series to support workshops, conferences, and cultural events related to classical Chinese poetry. We will continue to develop and enrich this platform in the years to come.

Special thanks are due to our MA student in EAS, Ms. Yan Lang, who single-handedly designed and built the website from the ground up.

When the world witnesses increasing tension among countries and peoples, it is ever more necessary to increase connections and mutual understanding, especially for the younger generations. In that spirt, and thanks to the leadership of my colleague, Dr. Juan Wang, McGill has founded its Centre for Global Chinese Studies for which I am serving as the Associate Director.

Our Centre is grounded in research on China and global Chinese studies; at the same time, it seeks to engage both local and global communities and to provide policy input for Canadian governments.

Since its founding, the Centre has hosted a series of conferences, talks, cultural events, and has been actively fostering connections in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and globally.

A lot yet to come; a lot yet to be anticipated!

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

During the winter of 2020, in the heat of the presidential election, international students, especially those from China, became easy scapegoats targeted by some mean and malicious politicians in the U.S. I was angry. I was infuriated. I designed and offered a course that I called “Overseas Encounters: Reading the World through Students Abroad”. The subtitle is too long to fit into the registrar catalogue, but I insist on keeping it on my syllabus. This is a course about international students, those to and from U.S., who travers the world and make history.

The 2021 spring course was taught online, with students participating from around the world–thanks to covid. While searching for materials for this class, I ran into the documentary about Finding Yingying directed by Jenny Shi. My students watched the movie and had a virtual conversation with Jenny.

Two weeks ago, in the spring of 2023, Jenny visited Vanderbilt and met with my students in the Overseas Encounters class. It’s such a powerful movie; Yingying’s dead body was not found, but Yingying is discovered and remembered by all of us thanks to Jenny’s courageous work.

Students in my class shared their experiences of accepting rides from strangers in the U.S., about the challenges related to languages, religions, and ideas about race and gender. One student who transferred from UIUC talked about passing by Yingying’s tombstone on the roadside every day.

I also recall that, fourteen years ago, I borrowed money from my former college roommate to buy a one-way ticket to attend graduate school in the U.S. It’s been more than a decade. Now we encounter each other in this classroom, former and current international students.

Thanks so much to Jenny Shi for producing this documentary and for visiting Vanderbilt and my class. We are trivial beings; but we are all significant enough to be known and remembered.

A special issue for The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture co-edited by Grace S. Fong and myself is now in press and scheduled to come out in April 2023. It’s been such a rewarding experience to work with the great colleagues who contributed to this project! Please find the TOC of this special issue below.

I’m glad that Trans-Pacific Links: The Vanderbilt Asian Alumni Project is among the first group of projects to receive a Vanderbilt University Sesquicentennial Grant ($50,000, 2022-2024). The Trans-Pacific Links project aims to uncover the history and stories of Vanderbilt University’s Asian alumni and the university’s linkage with Asia. The project will involve Vanderbilt undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members in Asian Studies, as well as librarians and staff.

As a first step, students in my class ASIA 2610 Overseas Encounters will work in groups to track down Asian students who came to study at Vanderbilt since the late 19th century, including Charlie Soong (China) and Yun Chi-ho (Korea), among others. It will involve archival work, field work, interviews, and website building.

The project will be co-directed by my colleague Gerald Figal and myself.