Aaron Su

SEAA Highlights from the 2024 Business Meeting

January 10, 2025 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su
January 10, 2025

On November 21, 2024, SEAA members gathered in Tampa for our annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed this year’s activities, announced new board members, and awarded book and paper prizes.

Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

Committee Members: Christine Yano (chair), Susan Brownell, Ellen Oxfeld, Hyang Jin Jung, and Heather Anne Swanson (2023 prize winner)

Winner

Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers by June Hee Kwon (Duke University Press)

Kwon’s book richly weaves the multidirectional, multilayered, multivocal stories of Korean Chinese migrant workers as they move restlessly between regions, countries, and households in pursuit of dreams of a better life. Those dreams carry the precarity of borderlands in clashing claims to a future of in-betweenness. Migrants often enter South Korea in low-end, dangerous and difficult manual jobs with precarious legal status. Their family relations suffer as they are away for long periods of time, all in the hopes of bettering their futures. The author beautifully renders everything from the personal lives and tribulations of migrants to the way these are impacted by larger structural changes

Importantly, the book situates ethnic migrations within the larger context of transformations in and through East Asia. The author renders macro and micro perspectives through three interactive lenses: 1) ethnicized bodies; 2) transnational money (remittances), and 3) transnational time (waiting). Based on Chinese, Korean, and European language sources and on close fieldwork in multiple places, Kwon’s account traces multiplex tales that are both open-ended and circumscribed within political, economic, and regional structures.

Borderland Dreams makes a wonderful contribution to the literature on migration and borderlands, especially since much of the existing literature often focuses on the global south with respect to North America or Europe. Kwon ably demonstrates not only the cogency, but the necessity, of placing global mobilities at the center of our consideration. This work exemplifies where, how, and why Global Asias matters: as a frame for this elegant ethnography, it yields the yearnings, instabilities, and intimacies constituting borderland dreams.

Honorable Mentions

The Space of Religion: Temple, State, and Buddhist Communities in Modern China by Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank (Columbia University Press)

This magisterial work is based on over thirty years of fieldwork, archival research, and interviews in a Buddhist temple in Xiamen, Fujian, China. The “space” of religion refers to physical, institutional, and semiotic space, all of which are illuminated in rich detail. The authors consider the networks that bind this temple to other local temples, to the local population, to diaspora communities, and to the state. It is based on an impressive ethnography of worshippers, monks, lay monks, state personnel, and many others. Readers will come away with a better understanding of the multitude of ways the practice of Buddhism has changed from pre-liberation times to its suppression during the Cultural Revolution, to its revival in the reform period, and ultimately (to some degree), its transformation into a form of “culture” denuded of its religious underpinnings during the Xi Jinping era.

David Plath Media Prize

Committee Members: Beata Świtek (chair), Nan Kim, and Yi Wu

Winner

Beneath the Rubber Trees. Directed by Song Qu

This outstanding ethnographic film offers an intimate portrait of the Jinuo people by exploring the lifeworld that surrounds rubber tapping in the mountainous areas of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, China. Since the early 1950s the cultivation of rubber trees and harvesting of rubber have been a major economic pillar among the Jinuo, China’s most recently recognized ethnic minority. Bookended by breathtaking sequences that both speak to the natural beauty of this region and its ongoing transformation, the film is otherwise a closely observed visual ethnography that moves seamlessly between scales: from the methodical rhythms of rubber tapping to the vibrant expressions of cultural festivities, from the intimate spaces of family life to the broader canvas of community celebrations. Positioning the Jinuo vis á vis the state and development in the post-Mao reform era, the film builds upon the attentive explorations of the lives of the main characters, the He family. Their experiences are situated in a wider setting where villagers strive to navigate rapidly changing and precarious economic circumstances while also negotiating their Jinuo identity during a time of intense commercialization and marketization. This film invites a reflection upon the implications of development for ethnic groups who rely heavily on local environmental resources and have been confronted with the disruptions and uncertainties posed by economic as well as touristic development. The film provides a nuanced teaching resource for discussions about labor, identity, political ecology, and the complex dynamics of development in rural China.

Japani. Directed by Dipesh Kharel and Asami Saito

This highly accomplished multi-sited ethnographic film documents the lives of Nepalis who have migrated to work in Japan as well as the lives of their family members—particularly the children—they left behind. The film begins with documentary footage and candid interviews shot in the agrarian villages and at newly built schools of rural mountainous Nepal, then later shifts to apartment complexes and street scenes in urban Japan. A primary storyline in the film follows members of an extended family in these juxtaposed sites, framed by reflections on perceptions of monetary value and the emotional toll of family separation as experienced in both places. Taken together, the film explores the paradoxes and complexities of global migration through personal stories, including dilemmas that are at once intimate and transnational, as faced by family members among a community in diaspora. While building upon the filmmakers’ earlier film Playing with Nan (2013), which won the 2014 Plath Award, Japani represents an excellent resource for teaching about globalization, labor migration, parenting, kinship, and family.

She is Still Waiting for an Apology. Directed by Hong Xiaoxin

This poignant and deeply moving documentary focuses on Luo Shanxue and Wang Zhifeng, who are a generation apart but are both victims of the system of sexual slavery imposed by the imperial Japanese army during WWII in China. Luo Shanxue is the only descendant of a ‘comfort woman’ who is openly public about his identity in China, and the film initially reflects on Luo’s life shaped by stigma. In 1944, his mother Wei Shaolan gave birth to him after escaping from a Japanese comfort station, and for more than 70 years, he and his mother depended on each other, until her death in 2019. The film later bears witness to the life of Wang Zhifeng as a survivor who has long advocated for fellow victims to attain justice and who is among the eldest of activists engaged in the struggle to secure an official apology from the Japanese government. By documenting these survivors’ final years, the film provides an invaluable historical record of the legacies of wartime sexual slavery and is an essential contribution to the understanding of historical trauma and its reverberations across generations.

2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize

Committee Members: Zachary Howlett (chair), Xinyu Guan, Kunisuke Hirano, and Claudia Huang

Winner

“Afterlife of Closure: Victimhood and Redress after Toxic Exposure in Japan” by Shoko Yamada (Department of Anthropology, Yale University)

Dr. Yamada’s critical historical perspective and long-term ethnographic lens shed new light on the politics of redress, innovatively approaching them through the lens of performativity and situating them within the larger context of post-War memory. In this way, Yamada’s work unpacks the complex aftermath of chronic illness and settlement agreements in the wake of toxic exposure from industrial pollution in the Jinzū river basin in Toyoma, Japan. Using sensitive ethnography and gripping prose, she demonstrates how so-called closures and settlements dramatize the tension between irreparable injury and the performance of finality. Her piece delivers a fresh and eye-opening argument about how such closure can become a potent ground for future redressive work, enabling people to unsettle dominant notions of victimhood and re-imagine redress.

Honorable Mention

“The (Im)possibility of Indigenous Politics: Collaborative Medical Design and the Limits of Settler Democracy in Taiwan” by Aaron Su (Department of Anthropology, Princeton University)

Dr. Su’s work advances critical discussions on settler colonialism and Indigenous politics, sovereignty, and refusal. Chronicling the way that an Indigenous Amis community in Taiwan engages with settler-state initiatives to improve public health through community-based participatory design, Su’s paper illuminates the tensions between Amis participants’ usage of these arrangements to pursue revitalization and settler-state bureaucrats’ claiming of these occasions as collaborative successes. Artfully integrating ethnography and theory, he highlights the blurring of the lines between the possibility and impossibility of Indigenous politics. In so doing, his piece makes a compelling and thought-provoking argument for the urgency of strategizing and theorizing beyond the binaries of assimilation and transcendence in articulating an Indigenous politics for the contemporary moment.

New Board Members and Anthropology News Column Updates

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Teresa Kuan (Secretary), Beata Switek (Councilor), Zachary Howlett (Councilor), Sojung Kim (Student Councilor), Jieun Cho (SEAA Column Editor), and Aaron Su (SEAA Column Editor). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Hyang Jin Jung (Incoming President), Edward Pulford (Secretary), Lynne Nakano (Councilor), Lihong Shi (Councilor), David Kok Kwan Tsoi (Student Councilor), Yanping Ni (SEAA Column Editor), and Alex Wolff (SEAA Column Editor).

Thank you to all of these members for volunteering their time and energy to keep SEAA a thriving forum for intellectual exchange! We also thank Guven Witteveen, who has deftly overseen SEAA’s Digital Communications.

Jieun Cho was an editor for the SEAA section news column from 2021-24 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. Her research investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Aaron Su was an editor for the SEAA section news column from 2021-24. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University writing up his dissertation on how new participatory design movements are transforming fields as far-flung as healthcare, environmental remediation, and Indigenous politics in Taiwan.

Being Global and Chinese on WeChat

February 24, 2024 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Xinyu Promio Wang
February 22, 2024

Does using WeChat qualify someone to be “Chinese”?

“So, you are not like a real Chinese . . . I mean, you are just someone who has Chinese heritage, right?” This was what one of my interlocutors, Fangyi, said to me in the middle of our in-person interview after I told her that I do not use WeChat, except for research purposes, as none of my friends or families were on the app. Currently holding a permanent residence visa (永住者) in Japan, Fangyi came to the country six years ago from her hometown, Shanghai, initially as a student. Upon finishing her higher education, she began to work as a medical interpreter, and then later married her Chinese husband, a pharmacist who had acquired Japanese citizenship. After I inquired about the relationship between “not using WeChat” and “not like a real Chinese,” Fangyi explained to me that using the app “is like the Chinese thing. I feel close to home when I’m immersed in this Chinese-language platform while abroad.” For her, it seems like being a “real Chinese” is not simply about having Chinese “heritage,” sharing a Chinese blood tie and celebrating Chinese culture. For her, it is also about “having a constant presence in this Chinese-language environment and sharing your everyday life episodes with families and friends back home so that they can see you, remember you, and recognizing you as one of them, instead of as a bystander.”

Comments like this show how social interactions taking place in digital spaces can be an important means through which Chinese migrants negotiate and represent their senses of identity. As Fangyi indicated, digital media such as WeChat allow many Chinese living overseas to establish a unique public presence in a particularly “Chinese” space. Being seen and visible to her fellow Chinese consequently helps Fanyi not only to maintain her “Chinese roots” but also to acquire senses of being a “real,” somewhat more “authentic” Chinese. However, as I will show, Fangyi’s expression of her “authentic” Chineseness on WeChat as a migrant in Japan is markedly different from, say, that of her friends who use WeChat while living in China. This article aims to nuance the understanding of digital media’s impact on how Chinese migrants see and represent themselves. A closer look at the way people like Fangyi maintain their public presence on WeChat tells us how the use of digital media itself is shaped by desires for mobility as a privilege.

Following the launch of the app Weixin, targeted for mainland China, in January 2011, WeChat went to market in August 2012, created by Chinese tech company Tencent. WeChat and Weixin provide essentially identical functions, such as personal and group messaging, “Moments” (similar to Facebook’s “Wall” function), and news subscriptions. The difference is that Weixin is designated for users whose address is physically registered to China. Free of such territorial restriction, WeChat soon became one of the most popular apps within Chinese-language-speaking publics. Sometimes it is even considered the most important—if not the only—channel through which Chinese migrants and diaspora can maintain their emotional and familial ties with the mainland while living abroad.

While WeChat has some similarities with sites like Facebook and Twitter, it also has some differences. For example, content that users share on WeChat, such as their profiles and posts, are inaccessible to others who are not on the user’s contact list. In this sense, WeChat has a unique social logic that prefers and promotes one’s existing social relationships, rather than encouraging users to discover new connections. This closedness by design explains how Fangyi equates using WeChat with constructing a “constant presence” among her Chinese circles. Keeping up on WeChat gives her a sense that she is being recognized by her close ones as “one of them.” Being constantly present in this setting by, for example, sending out messages and updating information does not simply indicate wanting to be seen by and communicate with anonymous others, as is often taken to be a feature of exchanges on digital platforms. Rather, following the embedded logic of closed publicity, it is driven by the desire to virtually stay close to “us” among families and friends back “home.”

To this point of “staying close to us,” Fangyi stressed the importance of individual messages in managing her diasporic life. She said, “No matter how many years I’ve stayed in this country [Japan], chatting with family is an irreplaceable part of my life. It gives me a sense of intimacy and makes me feel warm.” This perspective is shared by my other interlocutors, who often emphasized that interactions in the closed social spheres on WeChat made them feel connected to “home”—in both senses, as families and as homeland. Another interlocutor, Youan, echoed this point in an interview. Despite having lived in Japan for more than three decades, he said, “Chatting with friends and relatives on WeChat is the most intuitive way to feel my Chinese [roots], like how our culture is always family-oriented, and how we try to keep our friends close [to us].”

However, interestingly, “staying close to us” does not necessarily mean that Chinese migrants like Fangyi wish to identify themselves with this “us.” For example, her “Moments” show how she tries to manage senses of both intimacy and distance as she constructs her migrant self in specific ways. On the one hand, she frequently shares episodes from her everyday life in Japan, posting several photos coupled with short writings two to three times a day. On the other hand, the majority of these posts are written either entirely in Japanese or in a combination of simplified Chinese and Japanese, being partially or completely inaccessible to those who do not understand Japanese. In fact, when I counted, out of 154 “moments” posts she created over three months, only 19 of them were fully written in simplified Chinese.

A screenshot of a man in traditional Japanese clothing talking to a rabbit; the text message below describes Fangyi’s thoughts of “loving the country you reside in.”

Screenshot of one of Fangyi’s “Moments” posts. (A screenshot of a man in traditional Japanese clothing talking to a rabbit; the text message below describes Fangyi’s thoughts of “loving the country you reside in.”) CREDIT: AUTHOR

About her Japanese posts on WeChat, Fangyi confirmed to me that most of her WeChat contacts cannot read Japanese and therefore wouldn’t be able to understand her posts. Moreover, when Fangyi wants to communicate in Japanese, she uses a separate app called LINE, arguably the most popular messaging app in Japan. When I asked her why Japanese is her main language in cultivating her online presence on WeChat, she said,

“As someone who lives in Japan, I feel naturally I should write things in Japanese because I’m part of its culture . . . and so my friends know that I’m abroad. I may not necessarily enjoy a better material life here in Tokyo compared to my friends in Shanghai. But we are different. (I want to show that) I’m not your typical, average Chinese who has never seen a different world [outside China].”

As with Fangyi, digital media platforms can inspire a complex range of self-positionings and identifications among its users. In contrast to her private messages, Fangyi’s language choice in the public realm of “moments” seems more like a strategy to distinguish herself from, instead of aligning herself with, those “typical” Chinese who are “at home.” In this sense, her transnational mobility and foreign-language skills acquired through that position serve as capital that she can leverage to perform and claim her identity to be, say, an “above-average” Chinese.

A screenshot of a picture that consists of two photos. The one on the left shows the back side of Fangyi’s head, and the one on the right is a photo of cherry blossom; the Japanese text message below translates as “both the cherry blossom and my hair wither away.”

Screenshot of one of Fangyi’s “Moments” posts. (A screenshot of a picture that consists of two photos. The one on the left shows the back side of Fangyi’s head, and the one on the right is a photo of cherry blossom; the Japanese text message below translates as “both the cherry blossom and my hair wither away.”) CREDIT: AUTHOR

In my digital ethnographic observation, I found that many Chinese migrants tend to manage their online presence in ways that are similar to Fangyi’s. Despite the fact that WeChat is a platform designated for Chinese-speaking audiences, I frequently see Chinese migrants using languages such as Korean, French, German, and Italian in relation to their respective migratory experiences. In this way, whether consciously or unconsciously, their privilege of international mobility becomes leverage that allows them to de-homogenize a uniform Chinese identity and to allude to the difference between themselves and their nonmigrant counterparts in the publicly visible digital sphere. While understanding migrants’ identities as a fluid and multilayered concept is not new, this illuminates that such multilayeredness is partially inspired by their engagement with multipublic digital spaces. In this sense, their experiences invite us to think about the way that our own identities and relationships with our home(lands) are now constructed in relation to digital connectivity and technological affordance.

This piece is part of the SEAA series “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology. Contact them at jieun.cho@duke.edu and aaronsu@princeton.edu.

What Can White Paper Do?

January 30, 2024 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Mengzhu An, Jing Wang & Wei Ye
January 9, 2024

During #A4Revolution, protestors used blank white paper to express their voices while remaining in the shadows of state censorship and surveillance.

On November 26, 2022, a college student in black clothes, black hat, and black mask was standing on campus, holding aloft a blank piece of white paper. A middle-aged man walked up to them and ripped away the paper from their hands.

“Why did you take away their white paper?” 

“What threat does the white paper pose?” 

The questions of angry observers remained unanswered. Even after the paper was taken away, the young Chinese protestor stayed in their posture, holding nothing in their hands.

This scene at Nanjing Media College, in Nanjing, China, was captured in a video clip that went viral online. The determined image of a young Chinese person holding a blank white paper was so powerful that it became an icon in what was the then-emerging #A4Revolution protests. In small and large cities across China, people stood in the cold night air holding up sheets of white paper, silently demanding freedom from the extreme levels of surveillance and control enacted under the country’s zero-COVID policies. The protests against such policies that broke out around the world have come to be considered as the most influential public defiance in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. What can a blank piece of paper do? As this article shows, blank white paper presents both strategic opportunities and ambiguities for social movements in China. In the case of #A4Revolution, protestors used blank white paper to express their voices while remaining in the shadows of state censorship and surveillance. 

IMAGE CREDIT: NONENULLNAN
IMAGE CAPTION: The Elephant
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A grayscale image showing a person with a baseball cap, holding an A4 paper, facing a large elephant across a diagonal divide of light and shadow. Hashtags #白纸革命 and #A4Revolution are written below.

Why White Paper

White paper originated from local protests that were triggered by a tragic fire at a Uyghur-majority residential building in Ürümqi on November 24, 2022, killing at least 10 people living there. Some blamed the incident on the government’s zero-COVID restrictions, where the discovery of one COVID case could lead to the grounding of all residents until the neighborhood became free of COVID again. Such long-term lockdowns severely limited residents’ capacity to respond to emergencies, such as the fire in Ürümqi. But people stressed that this disaster could have happened anywhere, not just in Ürümqi. One Weibo user posted, “After waiting for more than a hundred days, what we got was not freedom, but a raging fire and thick smoke.” In another viral post, Ürümqi officials’ irresponsible explanation of the fire was sarcastically rephrased as “The road is open, they don’t run,” implying that residents were at fault for not being able to escape the disaster. Such criticism against government officials was met with swift censorship. The accumulated resentment and anger were partly why people began to appear on the streets across China with blank paper on the evening of November 25, 2022.

In contemporary China, people have long strategized means of expression to deal with government censorship and surveillance. Netizens learn to maintain anonymity and adapt to the ever-changing codewords and techniques to discuss “sensitive” topics online. Such tactics of playing hide-and-seek with Big Brother were also evident in the protests against zero-COVID policies. The #A4Revolution was particularly “ghostly,” in Jacques Derrida’s terms, as it engaged in invoking the “visibility of the invisible” and “tangible intangibility.” Protests painted slogans in unmonitored public restrooms, posted flyers on telecom poles in the dead of night, communicated through anonymized channels, and stayed masked at events to avoid identification.

But this did not mean that they were immune to surveillance. The omnipresence of state censorship and violence is equally spectral. As Derrida says, “We do not see who looks at us.” In the video clip referenced at the beginning of this article, the white paper was eventually taken away without explanation from a silent protestor by a street-level bureaucrat who also remained silent. Political dissent is met by arbitrary crackdown through vague charges such as “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” (xunxing zishi) or a “pocket crime” (koudai zui). Though existing before the pandemic, such control and violence have been greatly intensified and normalized under zero-COVID policies. Always in danger, white paper protestors consciously used anonymity and silence as a counter-strategy. Not a single word was written on the countless sheets of white paper, but their silence loudly defied state tools of repression.

Protesting with provocative silence, like holding a white paper, is not unique to China. Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian streets were swept by antiwar protests. In March 2022, the Russian Federation parliament passed a law that criminalizes the spread of “fake information” about the Russian army and forbids referring to the invasion as war. The protestors with “no to war” signs became targets for arrests based on this law. As with the #A4Revolution, Russians came up with creative ways to express dissent against their authoritarian government. One woman, for example, held a paper saying dva slova (two words), gesturing to the forbidden slogan net voine (no to war), and other demonstrators just held blank paper, like their Chinese counterparts. These show what white paper can do as a symbol of civil resistance against authoritarian regimes around the world.

A four-panel comic. The first panel draws a huge red two-dimensional code on the floor, which is erased by a person in the second panel. The third panel leaves only the person standing on the floor. In the fourth panel, many people walk around with red traces of the code on them, symbolizing the lasting impact of the trauma caused by the zero-COVID policies that cannot be erased. This four-panel comic illustrates how even though the government may have tried to erase the visible signs of violence, the psychological scars on those who experienced it cannot be easily healed.

IMAGE CREDIT: NONENULLNAN
IMAGE CAPTION: luminol
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A four-panel comic. The first panel draws a huge red two-dimensional code on the floor, which is erased by a person in the second panel. The third panel leaves only the person standing on the floor. In the fourth panel, many people walk around with red traces of the code on them, symbolizing the lasting impact of the trauma caused by the zero-COVID policies that cannot be erased. This four-panel comic illustrates how even though the government may have tried to erase the visible signs of violence, the psychological scars on those who experienced it cannot be easily healed.

From Ghostly Public to Fragmented Solidarity 

Both in China and overseas, protestors shared a common challenge of not knowing what to chant. Without a singular rallying cry, blank white paper could be used to obscure dissonant claims or internal rivalries within the movement. While some simply held up blank sheets of paper in silence, others cursed Xi Jinping and called for his removal. Fearing that such explicit words would give the police an excuse to enact suppression, many insisted on a more practical demand to end the zero-COVID policies and return to a normal life. Meanwhile, the national anthem sounded at some of the rallies, which was intended to strengthen solidarity, but also provoked mixed reactions. Some non-mainlanders who originally came to show support left the rally as soon as they heard it out of distaste for such nationalistic symbols. Beyond holding up blank paper, it was a challenge for protesters from different groups to identify any other code or symbol upon which to build connections.

The disputes over symbols, slogans, and language on-site and after the protests reflected the varied agendas within the #A4Revolution. This revolution became a reincarnation of public grievances and a gathering of revenants, including the suppressed protestors of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement, the Uyghurs and Tibetan victims of anti-religious policies, and feminists and young dissidents in exile. The mishmash of revenants infused the superficial solidarity with implicit fragility, which reflects the precarious conditions of civil disobedience and the limits of public protest under authoritarian rule. 

Although the vast majority of the dead and injured in the fire that triggered the #A4 Revolution were Uyghurs, some of whose families had been imprisoned in the government-run “re-education camps” or exiled overseas, the protests everywhere were dominated by Chinese-chanted slogans centered on the demands of urban Han people. One anonymous Han Chinese woman criticized this for overlooking the structural violence imposed on the Uyghur community by the Chinese state. At the vigils in two cities in the United States that some of us attended, young women spoke out against the misogynistic words that some male participants used to curse Xi Jinping and the CCP. They preferred chanting slogans such as “End Patriarchy” and “End Police Violence.” However, when such gendered frictions and disparities were pointed out in online group chats after the rally, they were dismissed by some people as “overly sensitive.” Ironically, while many women’s complaints were met with contempt, they made up the majority of those arrested and unexpectedly became the iconic symbol of this revolution.

After the Revolution

In December 2022, shortly after the rise of the #A4Revolution, the Chinese government rolled back its stringent zero-COVID policies. But it is debatable whether this was a gesture of surrender to the white paper protesters. In the aftermath of the #A4Revolution, the police continued to arrest those who were presumed to have participated in the #A4Revolution. Several female participants in vigils in Beijing were detained for about four months. The ghostly publics of the A4 movements and their temporary solidarity seemed to have dissipated, or so we thought—until a female protester suggested otherwise. With difficulty, she delivered a message from the detention center:

“Even though they made us feel like we were betraying each other during the interrogation, I still believe that we are in solidarity. On New Year’s Eve, A, B and I [all arrested protestors] had a concert through the doors of the prison, singing songs together . . . and we will join you again, start preparing.”

This message has circulated anonymously on encrypted social media platforms. It has inspired a renewed belief in the significance of resistance and the potential for solidarity. “A specter is always a revenant,” and the ghostly publics of the A4 movements will continue to haunt the future.

Some participants of the White Paper Movements made cards in solidarity with the girls in detention, with their faces drawn and names written, as well as the words “Release Our Friends.”

CREDIT: @ANOSARTOR
IMAGE CAPTION: Girls in detention.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Some participants of the White Paper Movements made cards in solidarity with the girls in detention, with their faces drawn and names written, as well as the words “Release Our Friends.”

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Anastasiya Miazhevich for sharing her observation of the anti-war protests in Russia as a comparative perspective. We also want to thank the two editors Jieun Cho and Aaron Su for their generous feedback and editorial work.

Jieun Cho and Aaron Su are contributing editors for the SEAA section in Anthropology News. This piece is part of the SEAA series “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” Contact them at jieun.cho@duke.edu and aaronsu@princeton.edu.

Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea

December 13, 2023 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Shinjung Nam
October 12, 2023

Following the 2022 Halloween crush disaster in Seoul, South Koreans gather to remember the young victims and the nation’s history of human-made disasters and formations of publics in furious mourning.

On the eve of December 16, 2022, thousands of people filled the main street of Itaewon, a former US camp town in Seoul, South Korea. My husband and I were standing among the assembled, feeling the temperature drop far below the freezing point as gusts of wind rushed through town. The town has a long history of foreign military occupation, transnational exchange of goods and fashion, and festivities that, like Halloween, inspire creative self-expression in public and a sense of belonging among young people. We were gathered in memory of those who were crushed to death on the night of October 29, 2022, in a narrow alley that shoots off of the one on which we were standing; 152 were injured, 159 died, including a teenage survivor who committed suicide. Most of the crowd crush victims were in their teens and 20s, out with friends on Halloween weekend. December 16 marked the 49th day of mourning for the lives lost—a day believed to be the last day spent by the spirits of the dead among the living before their final departure to the yonder. Throughout the history of contemporary South Korea, collective mourning in the streets for the wrongful deaths of youths has been central to the social and spatial materialization of publics, that is, assemblies of stranger-others woken to the reality of their common fate as citizens subject to state violence. Earlier on the morning of December 16, select family members of the crush victims had held a memorial service at a Buddhist temple, just north of Itaewon. The ritual had come to an end by burning the name tags of the lost in a metal pit amid the sounds of cries, bells, and monks chanting. About 300 of the family members then relocated to Itaewon, wrapped in red scarves to symbolize the blood of their kin to continue the memorial service among thousands of other citizens in the main street of the town. When the clock hit 6:34 p.m.—the officially recorded time of the first emergency call made to the local police on the eve of the disaster warning of possible crush deaths—the crowd closed their eyes, lowering their heads in silence. On the screen set up at the head of the assembly appeared the words of the caller, her urgent voice ringing through town, followed by the victims’ names, their portraits, and messages of longing from their families and friends.

Up until the 49th day of mourning, people had to gather for weeks before a faceless and nameless altar set up by the South Korean government in front of the city hall in Seoul. The current administration, under Yoon Suk-Yeol, withheld the backgrounds of the victims from being publicized in the news media, making it difficult for the bereaved families to contact one another. The initial footage of the victims—lying side by side on the streets of Itaewon covered in white sheets—had evoked in me much older photos from the 1980s of youths murdered by the state under military dictatorship. While interrogation, torture, and murder of youth protesters by police had become a thing of the past in South Korea, the mass loss of young people continues as they fall victim to human-made disasters in the most ordinary spaces in their everyday lives.

But the Itaewon crush also brought back memories of another recent disaster that took hundreds of lives of young people. In mid-April 2014, a ferry capsized near the southwest coast of South Korea, drowning 304 people, including 250 high school students on a field trip. As the search and rescue was prolonged amid a lack of government response, the entire country watched innocent youths disappear into the abyss, broadcast real-time on television and on YouTube. Realizing how easily the lives of youths could be forsaken in a neoliberal democracy, without guns or tear gas, people gathered across the country to mourn for the victims who had been left to die at sea. In the aftermath of the 2022 crush disaster, publics formed again to collectively remember the victims’ names, faces, and histories.

A large crowd of citizens and the family members of young crush disaster victims gather in front of the Seoul City Hall building to set up an altar for the dead on the 100th day of mourning.

The family members and their supporters stand on guard as the police readies to remove the altar from the site any moment. (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)

South Koreans’ collective mourning for the young victims of state violence and human-made disasters has been long shaped by their experience of becoming witnesses. Mourners would stand in the streets, hear the names of the victims called out loud, one after the other, see their faces enlarged on screens, and shout, “The state was absent!” The assembled would bear witness to not only the fact that the lives taken away had once fully existed but also the very experience of collective mourning. Such an experience of becoming witnesses is crucial to revitalizing a public that embraces the pain of others and its roots in their shared fate of being citizens responsible for the democratically elected government and its actions.

The South Korean public’s rage has only intensified since their recognition of the government’s undeniable role in the unfolding of the crush disaster. The Yoon administration had set the large gathering of the youths at Itaewon on the weekend of Halloween celebration as a stage for what. Yoon had called “a war on drugs,” replacing the crowd control police, once regularly dispatched to the town on such festive occasions, with police officers dressed in plainclothes for their undercover operation against drug trafficking and drug use. This “war on drugs” was engineered as a key strategy for empowering the authority of the former prosecutor-turned-politicians now heading the government and for legitimating their monopoly on executive powers. And the strategy has pivoted around the criminalization of innocent youths and their occupation of the street space.

Mourning to Remember

Now occupying the main street of Itaewon that had once invited young visitors was a public in furious mourning. “Memory has such strength,” said Ms. Choi Sun-Hwa, mother of one of the high school students lost at sea in 2014, as she stood on stage on December 16, 2022, wearing a yellow scarf around her neck, facing the family members of the crush victims who sat in the audience wrapped in red scarves. For months, makeshift spaces for commemorating the ferry disaster victims had filled public spaces across South Korean cities with yellow memorabilia symbolizing the youths left to drown just when their lives were about to bloom like the forsythia of spring (Kim 2018). The main street of Itaewon now cried red and yellow.

Joined by the choir group formed in memory of the ferry disaster victims, Ms. Choi began to sing “We Won’t Forget,” promising so to the victims of the crush disaster.

We will remember, surely and everything, so not one of you feels alone.

Such were the words of promise that had brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets, awakening a public powerful enough to charge the country’s legislative bodies with an exigent sense of duty to push through the country’s first ever impeachment process in 2017. The successful impeachment of President Park Kun-Hae (2013–2017) did not stop people from remembering the loss and their duty to remember. I still regularly spot yellow stickers on the backs of people’s cellphones or yellow ribbons hanging on people’s backpacks when traveling on public transportation. Ms. Kim Sunny, whom I have known for years, is no exception.

An assortment of yellow memorabilia is laid out on a white desktop—from simple ribbon-shaped pendants to round badges of varying sizes, on all of which are written, “We are sorry, We won’t forget you.”

These memorabilia belong to Ms. Sunny Kim, a long-time interviewee of the author, who has matched each of them with one of her daily objects, including her handbags and her cellphone case. (CREDIT: MS. SUNNY KIM)

“The song was specifically written for the ferry disaster victims in 2014 by Yoon Min-Suk,” my husband whispered into my ear. He remembered Yoon Min-Suk from his college days in the mid-1980s, when the artist first started writing songs for an underground cultural movement organized as part of the student activism against the military dictatorship. The song’s promise to remember has now been stretched to address the victims of the crush disaster. Those who were young adults in the tumultuous years of the 1980s, including Ms. Kim and my husband, came of age by bearing witness to the murders of youths under the military dictatorship (Lee 2009). Adopted new roles as parents, this generation now sees their children living in an era of the state’s dereliction and abuse of power. Publics in South Korea are constituted through this chain of collective mourning, where memories of the wrongfully dead youths get interwoven across generations through colorful mantras, objects, shapes, and lyrics. This mode of coexistence has persisted against and through times of collective upheavals. Their memories of the victims and of mourning together while embodying a public resistant to forgetting and forsaking the country’s youth dwell in the most ordinary spaces, shapes, and sounds—from all things yellow and red, to the very word “memory”—beyond the spectacular moments of such a public’s materialization in space.

Bouquets of fading white and yellow chrysanthemums and a poster biding its readers to remember the young victims line up the wall along one side of the alley.

In the photograph taken on the 49th day of mourning, the poster reads, “Please, remember us.” (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)

Shinjung Nam is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for Liberal Arts & Basic Education at Sungkyunkwan University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University.

Nam, Shinjung. 2023. “Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea.” Anthropology News website, December 12, 2023.

SEAA Highlights from the 2023 Business Meeting

November 27, 2023 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su
December 1, 2023

On November 16, SEAA members gathered in Toronto for our annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed this year’s activities, announced new board members, and awarded book and paper prizes.

Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

Committee Members: Christine Yano (chair), Cathryn Clayton, Teresa Kuan, Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, and Seo Young Park

Winner

Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (2022), written by Heather Anne Swanson, Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, published by the University of Washington Press.

By unanimous vote and enthusiastic discussion, the book award committee selected Heather Anne Swanson’s stunning monograph, Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison of Japanese Salmon, as the 2023 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Award winner. The committee found Swanson’s work on salmon production in Japan to be the best kind of ethnography – one that not only engages specialists on the topic, but incites new possibilities for a broad swath of readers. Swanson’s expansiveness extends to her framing this story as one of multispecies ethnography through time and space (including Japan, Oregon, Chile).

Spawning Modern Fish tells a richly complex story of salmon production in Japan through the critical lens of modernity, power and global status. The book’s key theoretical contribution is that of “comparison”—multiply wrought as the source of assessments, aspirations, alliances, frictions, connections, relationality, and material world-making. Swanson demonstrates that practices of comparison–a human activity–get into the flesh of fish, even remaking them at the genetic and conceptual levels, as part of multi-species, transnational relations. Practices of comparison follow vectors of power: the relatively powerless draw upon comparison as a means of aspirationally embedding themselves within a larger world. In this way, comparison acts as a relational device situated within hierarchies of prestige on a global scale.

Swanson’s book offers new frames, new questions, new ways of looking at things. The scholarship is solid, the writing is elegant, the throughline is well argued. But most of all, Swanson’s book brings together creative and conceptual rigor that makes us think differently. Spawning Modern Fishbreaks new ground with the seemingly benign concept of comparison, here deployed with a deftness that is not superficial, but profound in its far-reaching implications.

Honorable Mentions

Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women in the West (2022), written by Fran Martin, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, published by Duke University Press.

Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West provides a nuanced account of the youth experiences of border crossing and, more broadly, the increasing translocality in and across East Asia. Through a rich collection of narratives, observations, photos, and cognitive maps from the everyday venues and routes of young female “transmigrants,” the book artfully unravels the texture of the intersecting mental, physical, social, and media spaces they inhabit and transform. Ethnographically grounded in these sites of translocal urbanity connecting China and Australia, Martin’s analyses poignantly show how the dynamics of gender and educational mobility reconfigure nationalism, racism, and neoliberalism.

Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety (2022), written by Daniel White, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, published by Stanford University Press.

Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety offers an exciting account of how Japan has invested in its “soft power” by branding itself as a “pop-culture nation.” Drawing on surprising access to the upper echelons of government and its institutions, observations at events, and textual analyses of commentaries as well as pop cultural products, White takes administration and the anxiety of male bureaucrats as an ethnographic object. The book is conceptually rigorous and thought-provoking, inviting a rethink of “soft power” and the notion of the unfeeling bureaucrat by analyzing everyday practice and cultural production in terms of gender, politics, and affect. Bridging the study of pop culture and the study of public diplomacy, debated concepts and concepts in practice, Administering Affect is a tremendous achievement.

2023 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize

Winner

“Why Does International Solidarity Matter? Parallelizing Circuits of Indigenous Political Movements between Taiwan and the Cordillera of the Northern Philippines since the 1980s,” by Yi-Yu Lai (Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii).

[From the Abstract]

Since the 1980s, cultural exchanges between Indigenous peoples in Taiwan and in the Cordillera of the Northern Philippines have had a significant impact on their political movements. The primary purpose of this article is to figure out how and why those cultural exchanges led to the solidarity between these two Indigenous groups throughout the decades, given the historical and political differences between the two countries. While much of the literature on Indigenous solidarity activism focuses on the tensions and negotiations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, this case study critically examines the factors that contributed to the growth of activism between the two groups, providing insights into the transnational ties among Indigenous movements.

[Committee commendations]

In this transnational, muti-sited, and longitudinal study, the author carefully lays bare the organizational dynamic, material conditions, and changing relations of power surrounding the two indigenous activisms connecting Taiwan and the Philippines. Using solidarity as a problematic, the author explores the emerging communities and their sustained commitment to heritage, justice, and equality, as shared by both groups. Combining rich historical research with transnational ethnographic fieldwork, the paper offers rare insight into interactions between two indigenous movements and their impacts that go beyond national boundaries. This paper demonstrates new directions in East Asian anthropology that engage with multilingual, multicultural, and transnational possibilities with the topic that is urgent, timely, and impactful.

Honorable Mention

“The Occult and the Hopeful: The Work of Hope among Ufologists in Post-socialist China,” Yadong Li (Department of Anthropology, Tulane University).

[From the abstract]

Almost simultaneously with Reform and Opening Up, the emergence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) has become a hallmark event of the post-socialist transformation for many citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although the majority of these people have only scant certain knowledge of UFOs, they believe that UFOs can bring dramatic, and largely positive changes to the Chinese society and themselves. This article situates the stories about UFOs within the changing socio-political context of post-socialist China, discussing why and how the extraterrestrial imagination strikes resonance among China’s post-socialist generations.

[Committee commendations]

Beautifully written, “The Occult and the Hopeful” captures transformative momentum of post-socialist China where fantastic objects such as UFOs are pursued with profound contemplation and captivating zeal. The author closely follows his ethnographic subjects, engaging with deep conversations, effectively delivering their introspection, which, on one level might reflect their anxiety, offers another interpretation, viz., hope for the unknowable future. With its unique topic, original discussion, and rich interpretation, this paper makes a significant intervention in the current ethnographic studies of China.

New Board Members and Anthropology News Column Updates

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Ellen Oxfeld (President), Jennifer Prough (Councilor), Yi Wu (Councilor), and Yookyeong Im (Student Councilor). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Hyang Jin Jung (President-Elect), Isaac Gagne (Councilor), Nan Kim (Councilor), and Xinyu Guan (Student Councilor).

Due to an unprecedented number of submissions, the SEAA Column in Anthropology News will continue to publish pieces in 2024 under our current theme, “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” The column publishes SEAA members’ reflections and photo essays based on original ethnographic research. A call for submissions to fill our remaining column slots will be published in the coming year.

Jieun Cho is an editor for the SEAA section news column and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. Her research investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Aaron Su is an editor for the SEAA section news column. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University writing up his dissertation on how new participatory design movements are transforming fields as far-flung as healthcare, environmental remediation, and Indigenous politics in Taiwan.

SEAA Highlights at the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting

December 14, 2021 by Aaron Su

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Aaron Su and Jieun Cho
December 15, 2021

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) convened a vibrant virtual business meeting and featured many stimulating panels in its program for this year’s AAA. Membership and finance increas