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Practicing Self-Care Beyond Self

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Jung Eun Kwon
December 27, 2024

It was a beautiful day in October 2022, and the leaves were turning vibrant shades of red and yellow. I was interviewing Yuna (all names in this article are pseudonyms), one of my interlocutors for my research on suicidality—including suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts—among young South Korean women in their twenties and thirties. Yuna, a 34-year-old woman, had been experiencing suicidal thoughts since she was around 13 and had attempted suicide multiple times since the age of 21. Throughout our conversation, I noticed that she kept glancing around the coffee shop and asked to use the restroom several times within the hour and a half we were talking. I felt a sense of concern for her, and my initial instinct was to think that I could or should help her in some way. However, what Yuna said next completely shifted my perspective.

“Usually [for me], an intense suicidal thought lasts about 15 minutes or so, no more than an hour, or it ends within 3 hours at the longest. But in the meantime, with the right intervention, you can get through it. So, I have an automatically-run protocol [created and implemented by myself]—for example, I call a suicide prevention center, and after receiving the consultation, I wait a few minutes. If the suicidal thought is still severe, I just call an ambulance [to stop myself from attempting suicide].”

Alt text: An SOS hotline phone on a bridge over a river with a view of city buildings in the background, unrelated to Yuna’s crisis experience.

An SOS suicide prevention hotline phone on a bridge in South Korea, providing help for those in crisis. This phone was not used by Yuna during her experience of crisis. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon

Her self-analysis and the creation of her own “protocol” by strategically using institutional care services left me in awe. It led me to reflect on my own assumption that I needed to help her, an assumption partly influenced by South Korea’s broader social discourse on mental illness and suicide. In South Korea (hereafter Korea), mental illness has increasingly been viewed as a psychiatric disorder that requires medical treatment, and suicidality is largely seen as an unusual condition caused primarily by depression. This framework, which stems from disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology, positions people experiencing suicidality as patients or objects of intervention, reducing them to passive recipients of care.

Since the late 1990s, Korea’s suicide rate has risen significantly, ranking among the highest globally since the early 2000s. Although young women do not have the highest suicide rate, their suicidality has sharply increased since the 2010s, in contrast to other demographic trends. In response, the Korean government launched a national suicide prevention project to expand access to psychological and psychiatric support, framing suicide, particularly for women, as a result of ‘mental difficulty” (jeongsinjeok eoryeoum). This view individualizes the issue, also overlooking the creative and diverse care practices these individuals use to manage their suicidality.

An infographic in Korean presenting the leading causes of suicide in South Korea in 2022, categorized by gender and age group.

The Infographic of 2022 Suicide Motives by Gender and Age Group in South Korea. Data Source: 2024 White Paper on Suicide Prevention (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2024). Credit: South Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare

However, Yuna’s skillful management of her own mental health made me wonder: Is Yuna uniquely skilled at taking care of herself? Or might others who experience suicidality also be this adept at self-care? If so, what do their care practices look like? As I tried to answer these questions, my interlocutors’ various care practices came to my mind.Although most of my interlocutors had received institutional care, such as medication and psychotherapy, they were dissatisfied with these disciplines’ focus on individualizing their experiences. Thus, my interlocutors’ self-care practices tended to stretch toward communal practices, extending attention to society and their roles within it.

Creative Care Practices

I regularly asked the question, “How do you take care of yourself in your everyday life?” during the interviews to explore my young women interlocutors’ care practices, and I was often met with creative and unexpected responses. What impressed me was how these women expanded the boundaries of (self-)care, diverging from institutional care, which emphasizes paying attention to one’s inner self and emotions, as seen in psychology, or to biological factors, as seen in psychiatry. Institutional care often guides individuals to immerse their attention inward, rather than allowing them to explore sociocultural factors beyond their family. Rather, their practices pushed these narrow boundaries, allowing them to reflect on themselves concerning broader social issues prevalent in Korea, such as socioeconomic inequality, discrimination, and marginalized others.

Da-In, a 28-year-old woman working at a small company and living with her mother, offered one such example.She had been writing fantasy novels since high school, a practice she began after experiencing her first suicidal thoughts at 11 and attempting suicide at 14. Initially, she started with short stories, but over time, her narratives expanded into longer works. By the time of our interview, she had completed multi-book-length fantasy novels. She hinted at the pride she felt in her lengthy writing and spoke of her love for writing novels. When I asked her what aspects of writing fantasy novels drew her in, she said it was the ability to create a better world that she hopes to see.

“First of all, [in the fictional world,] the gap between rich and poor is extremely small, there is no discrimination at all, no unreasonable things happen. [People from] this world goes around to civilize other worlds [where the gap is wider, and discrimination and unreasonable things pervade].”

I realized that the setting of her novel both reflected and subverted the difficulties she faced as a teenager. Earlier in the interview, she had spoken at length about her family’s lower economic status, which caused her significant distress during her adolescence. She also mentioned that her classmates disliked her because she was considered “weird or peculiar” for enjoying philosophical books and showing herself off with those books, leaving her isolated most of the time. My interlocutors were deemed unusual in that they desired different paths from what is considered “normal” tracks of life in Korean society. As students, for example, the focus should be on getting into an elite college, then securing a high-paying job with tenure. As daughters, they are expected to obey their patriarchal parents and aim for heteronormative relationships and families to reproduce middle- or upper-class status. The continuous norms and roles imposed throughout their lives contributed to many of my interlocutors’ suicidality, as did the exclusion they experienced when veering from these prescribed paths.

Alt text: Photograph of a construction wall with the words “Talchul" (escape, in Korean) and “Suicide” (in English).

Graffiti reading “Talchul (escape, in Korean)” and “Suicide” on a construction wall in front of high-rise apartments. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon

Against this backdrop, Da-In was flipping the script through her novel on the circumstances that had caused her pain and the prevailing norms, aiming for a society characterized by equality and the absence of discrimination.Imagining and bringing to life a society she hoped to inhabit within the pages of her story brought her a sense of joy and healing. This creative self-care practice reminded me of what Da-In and my other interlocutors commonly shared with me regarding institutional care: they believed it disregarded social issues and did not question social norms, which, in fact, caused their suicidality. Although institutional care was partially helpful to continue their everyday lives through medication and temporary emotional uplift, it could not address their fundamental factors of suffering. In this vein, Da-In was turning toward seeking alternatives that gave her hope, and she was trying to raise her voice through her novel.

Yoobin and Misun, whom I met through a support group meeting, had also been practicing an unexpected kind of self-care. Yoobin, a 32-year-old woman, was a freelancer relying on unemployment benefits at the time, having previously worked as a designer for a startup NGO. Misun, a 36-year-old woman, worked full-time as a support worker for the visually disabled. At the beginning of the group interview with both Yoobin and Misun, they commonly talked about how broader social issues—specifically mentioning the Russia-Ukraine War and climate crisis—were vividly embodied in their suffering, making them feel powerless and their lives useless. They expressed having developed a “deeply rooted distrust against this world” by observing a series of disasters, both far and near.

When I asked them what they do for self-care, their answer first took me by surprise: volunteering. Their response sounded paradoxical to me because I had specifically asked about self-care, not care for others. However, I came to understand their motivations for volunteering as driven by both their own well-being and care for others, especially in light of their discussions about social issues and feelings of powerlessness. Against these feelings, Misun wanted to “feel a sense of accomplishment in this really harsh and unfortunate world,” to feel that she was at least helping others. Yoobin also stated that she is “quite selfish about” volunteering in a similar vein. Rather than being self-absorbed in their emotions and situations, as institutional care often recommends, they directed their attention outward, searching for their space to connect with others, thereby expanding self-care to include care for others and society. In doing so, they situated themselves within a broader world, seeking to contribute to a more livable society.Shedding light on these creative care practices from “suicidal” women shifts our focus from viewing these individuals purely through the lens of their suffering towards recognizing their unique capabilities and resourcefulness. In other words, we realize their active roles in shaping their own well-being rather than viewing them as passive recipients of institutional treatment. This recognition also challenges the narrow boundaries of institutional care, which urges attention inward. In contrast, my interlocutors’ practices of care are oriented not only inward but outward, expanding the meaning of self-care by situating themselves within broader worlds and seeking their roles within it. Similar to Black feminists’ radical perspectives on self-care as a tool for social justice, their care practices encourage us to rethink both self-care and institutional care, emphasizing the need to go beyond self-absorption and foster social connections and collective efforts.

Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology.

The Moral Complexities of Delegate Children in Aging China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Fei Yuan
December 18, 2024

What does it entail for care practices when non-affiliated strangers manage your property and make critical “life-matter” decisions on your behalf? Known as “delegate children,” these legal guardians fill gaps left by the state welfare system while navigating complex moral dilemmas.

Performing Care as a “Delegate Child” 

It was a snowy day in late December 2022 when I accompanied Xiao Zhang on her visit to a nursing home in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of northern China. It had been a month since her client, Granny Shi, moved into the facility. A steelworker who entered the factory at eighteen, Granny Shi was highly regarded for her mechanic skills. After her child’s death, she became one of the “elders who lost their single child (shidu laoren),” overwhelmed by the pressing concern of her late-life care. As an employee at a social guardianship organization, Xiao Zhang performs the role of “delegate children” (daili ernv) to Granny Shi. In China’s legal service market, “delegate children” is a new profession. Although “legal guardians” is the more formal term, staff members at the civil guardian organization often identify themselves as “delegate children”. This label underscores the surrogate care they provide, which is akin to the support traditionally expected from biological children. In this article, I explore the divergent perceptions and expectations surrounding care duties held by elders and their guardians. Elder care is becoming a key venue for the contestations of post-socialist China’s care regime, where market-driven care models are increasingly displacing the extensive welfare benefits once guaranteed by the work unit (dan wei) system, all occurring within a legal context that heavily favors familial rights. 

China is facing a critical eldercare crisis driven by a rapidly growing aging population, shrinking family sizes, and exorbitant costs of private eldercare facilities and assisted care. The repercussions of the one-child policy are profoundly evident, as it has left numerous elderly caught in a critical predicament: they struggle to access necessary care because of the lack of a family member to act as a guarantor for authorizing their hospital and institutionalized care admissions and to make medical care decisions on their behalf. Many of my interlocutors refer to this situation as a “dead end” or “impasse.”

In Granny Shi’s case, she wished to spend her remaining years in a nursing home. However, admission to such facilities requires the signature of a relative, preferably biological children. After four years of fruitless searching for a guardian, Granny Shi left her steel city home and relocated to the Jing-Jin-Ji region. This decision was prompted by the discovery of a newly founded social guardianship organization specifically designed to resolve these childless elders’ dilemmas. At the beginning of today’s visit, Xiao Zhang showed Granny Shi a list of tasks to accomplish. She accompanied Granny Shi to a nearby bank to make payments to the notary office. They then stopped by a grocery store to shop for the daily necessities Granny Shi needed at the facility. Xiao Zhang reminded Granny Shi to buy winter gloves and offered to bring a thermos from home to avoid unnecessary expenses. On the way back to the nursing home, Xiao Zhang held Granny Shi’s hands tightly, guiding her on the icy paths. These acts and gestures underscore the informal, interpersonal facets of care that are not encapsulated by the formal legal duties of guardianship. 

The 2021 Civil Code introduced multiple new articles on adult guardianship, including the provision for individuals to select their guardians when fully capable. However, the government policies fail to outline practical measures, leaving a gap in the market for exploring professional standards. During my 2023 fieldwork in China, I observed various entities—including law firms, notary offices, legal service companies, nursing homes, and household management services—attempting to fill this void. The social organization where Xiao Zhang is employed exemplifies a broader trend. In their operations, the role of delegated children extends beyond traditional “care work,” which is typically limited to daily caregiving tasks. Their responsibilities encompass navigating the constraints of established systems, collaborating with bureaucracies, bridging gaps in social services, and channeling necessary care resources. Additionally, their work often requires mediating between the client’s wishes and a legal culture that favors familial ties and the rights of biological children.

A photograph showing a young woman holding hand with an older woman. There are piles of snow at the sides of the walkway.

Xiao Zhang walked alongside Granny Shi on the sidewalk at the nursing home. Xiao Zhang’s signature is required when Granny Shi leaves the facility. Credit: Fei Yuan

The Nuances of “Guan” in Guardianship

What does it mean for elders to sign a contract with a guardian organization or individuals when they cannot depend on their children for support in their later years? Through conversations with elders, I have found that many view guardianship not merely as a legal arrangement but as a promise of security. This suggests a relationship that is fundamentally about care rather than simply fulfilling legal obligations. Elders frequently seek care in the form of “guan”—a term that captures both caretaking and an element of control, indicative of the nuanced interplay between autonomy and dependency. This dual meaning highlights the elders’ need for care models that respect both their autonomy and their comprehensive care needs; moreover, as the duties of guan are customarily performed by children, the term also implies a desire for emotional attachment. Elders who engage in guardianship contracts often pursue authentic care, which implies genuine relationships that extend beyond legal ties and form kin-like connections.

Notably, understandings of care are diverse and context-dependent. For Granny Shi, the guardianship organization serves as a trustworthy work unit (dan wei), reminiscent of the comprehensive welfare systems provided by state enterprises during the socialist era, ensuring care for her needs throughout her life. The guardians, in contrast, are supposed to fulfill a distinctly contractual role—adhering to the duties explicitly outlined in their agreements. In practice, many guardians strive to fulfill the role of “delegated children,” aiming to provide both professional oversight and emotional support for their elderly clients. In fact, guardians like Xiao Zhang view their work as more than merely “a job.” One guardian described it as follows: “Guardianship enables us to forge a close relationship [with the elders], grounded not in blood but in trust, commitment, and oversight.” This perspective is indicative of how most guardians view their roles: they consider themselves both altruistic caregivers engaged in “good deeds” and professional agents, providing a level of “professional care” unmatched by actual family members.

The image is a flowchart constituted of six blocks, each depicting a type of service. All blocks are interconnected through arrows indicating an overarching service scope.

This is a list of the services offered by a social guardian organization. They provide “all-life-course affairs services” that support elderly individuals at various stages of life, from self-independence to post-mortem affairs. Credit: Fei Yuan

Moral Dilemmas and Constraints

The notion of “professionalism” in guardianship, however, invites skepticism. Without clear professional standards, how one performs “genuine care” while maintaining professionalism lacks clear guidance. Such questions keep presenting themselves in practice. Mr. Chen, the founder of a civil organization in the process of transitioning to a guardianship organization, often finds himself facing dilemmas. As the leader of a newly established organization, he is particularly meticulous about avoiding legal disputes and maintaining the organization’s social reputation, especially given its status as a civil organization committed to philanthropy. 

During a webinar I attended hosted by a social guardianship organization, a spokesperson highlighted a recent moral quandary: An elderly client collapsed. He had signed an advance directive against any form of medical intervention. Despite this wish and the doctor’s warning about the surgery’s side effects, the guardian still chose to admit the person to the ICU. The spokesperson remarked, “If it were his son, he could decide freely. However, as an organization, we are afraid of being accused of failing to save lives.” This decision highlights the moral complexities encountered by guardians, who, despite having the legal authority to act on behalf of elders, still confront judgments within the prevailing legal culture, especially when making the aforementioned “life mattering” decisions. The guardians need to heed the rights of related kin, including spouses, parents, children, and other relatives to avoid potential charges. 

These guardians’ struggles raise profound questions about the nature of good care: should guardians honor the client’s own wishes and adhere to professionalism, or should they perform acts of filiality to comply with social expectations? And how to navigate the rights of biological children or other relatives within the legal framework of China? 

Bridging Welfare Gaps and Offering Hope

In summary, I contend that guardians like Xiao Zhang emerge as pivotal figures within the evolving care regime, bridging the substantial gaps created by the transition from the comprehensive Dan Wei system to a market-driven eldercare model. By meeting the urgent demand of care for elders like Granny Shi and numerous older people who age alone, these organizations offer hope to elders in desperate need of guardian service. However, this hope remains tenuous, as the legal status and rights of guardians are often questioned and subordinated to familial rights. The legal framework and prevailing distrust toward non-familial caretakers present significant barriers, inhibiting their capacity to effectively execute wills and to exercise the agency of the elderly client.

The guardians’ efforts to establish professional organizations do more than just tinkering or filling these gaps; they underscore the urgent need to develop new mechanisms that are attuned to the altered dynamics of eldercare. The dilemma of care examined in this article reflects broader questions about the definition of “good care,” raising important questions about whose will should be honored, and how China’s transitional and transforming care regime can be supported by more refined legal regulations for these crucial services. 

SEAA section contributing editors Aaron Su and Jieun Cho, and incoming editors Alex Wolff and Yanping Ni, all contributed to this piece.

How Beggars Help Us Understand Public Space in China and Beyond

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Ryanne Flock
May 28, 2024

Performances of panhandling in Guangzhou teach us about public space in modern Chinese cities and elsewhere.

Guangzhou—also known as Canton—is a city of zuo shengyi, of “doing business.” As one of the oldest trade harbors in the south of China, Guangzhou opened up early when the country’s reform program of 1978 reintroduced the importance of money and markets. As a result, its bustling shopping streets are loud and radiant, with music blaring from the stores and clerks or automated megaphones shouting out the latest offers. Uniqlo, KFC, Metersbonwe—well-established national and international brands—speak of comfortable wealth and guangjie (window shopping) as a way to relax and enjoy life (Figure 1). 

Photograph of Guangzhou's Beijing Road shopping street during day time.

Beijing Road is one of Guangzhou’s most-popular shopping streets. The picture is artificially blurred to ensure anonymity. CREDIT: RYANNE FLOCK

The greater the contrast, then, when I observed a scraggy woman asking for alms by crawling in the middle of the Beijing Road Pedestrian Area, the city’s retail center. Barefoot and with rolled-up sleeves, she exhibited her body’s disabilities: no fingers, deformed toes. Amid her stuffed and worn bags stood a crying toddler. A crowd gathered around the heartbreaking scene, and a skirted lady jumped forward to help while the urban management personnel became nervous. Usually, these patrols hired under the umbrella of Chengguan—the bureau in charge of an orderly cityscape—expel beggars from the shopping street. But this time, the officials in their dark-blue uniforms did not intervene. I was intrigued by this scene and its broader implications. How do beggars gain access to public space in Guangzhou through such performances, navigating local governance and social norms?

Scholars often define begging or panhandling (I will use these terms interchangeably) as asking for money or goods in public space. However, I found performances in China more intense and elaborate than those described in the academic literature or encountered during my travels in “Western” cities. I observed various ways of asking for alms in different urban locations for four years (2010–2014) in Guangzhou and talked to people panhandling in the present or the past. I approached beggars as a vulnerable social group, aiming to create situations of trust and free of hierarchies. We met in public places where we generally felt safe while also considering the attention of public security personnel. Most beggars I met responded to Chinese regional disparity and migrated from the deprived countryside to wealthy Guangzhou. Moreover, their capacities for physical work were limited due to age, illness, or disability, and they lacked family and state support. The turnover rate among this group was high during my fieldwork, and I cannot say how many are still in Guangzhou. Their agency, however, teaches us about public space in China and in a modern city. In the following, I will show how panhandling adapts to a changing spatial culture and the local state’s attempts to “beautify” the commons.

In Guangzhou, ways of panhandling differed according to space. There was a strong contrast between religious sites versus areas of commerce, entertainment, and transport. Some beggars slept in areas near temples and churches in the evening, stored their belongings in the bushes, and stayed longer during the day, panhandling but also chatting and relaxing with acquaintances. Visitors to these places of worship gave a few Yuan to most of them. Interestingly, at shopping and bar streets, and other commercial spaces of lively foot traffic, the performances were unusually comprehensive and layered, incorporating sight, sound, and story.

Contrasting with the middle-class environment, beggars stood out with their simple and sometimes worn-out clothes, sad demeanor, and stooped postures. Many exhibited injuries, mutilations, and burned and diseased skin. One day, I saw a healthy-looking man in his mid-30s stripping down to his underpants (Figure 2). He stood silently, his head bowed, his clothes at his feet. The skin expressed his neediness and desperation by renouncing his social “face” (mianzi). Additionally, he laid out a big poster in front of him to tell his story. Later, I realized that many beggars explained their reasons for poverty and panhandling in writing. I saw smaller notes and big declarations arranged with photos, hospital reports, and other official documents. “I suffer from rheumatism, the many years of treatment have not been effective, and I became disabled, for a long time I could not get out of bed, and [the challenges] of daily life are [still] difficult for me to handle.” The author of this piece specified his home village via province and city; others presented their ID or added phone numbers. In most of these scenes, passers-by stopped to read and some put a few Yuan in the beggar’s cup. Andrew Travers argues that begging is a staged “self-destruction” to create a hierarchy which argues: You are better off; you are in the position to help me.

The photograph shows a panhandling man from behind and someone from the audience watching from some distance. The beggar has stripped down to his underpants, put his shoes, jeans, and shirt, in front of his naked feet, and spread a poster before the cloth pile. We cannot read what is written on the poster, but in other cases, beggars often explain why they ask for alms. The beggar exposes his skin, holds his head high, but puts his hands on chest and stomach in a protective posture.

A photograph of a young man panhandling

A panhandling man in his 30s in Guangzhou’s city centre. The picture is artificially blurred to ensure anonymity. CREDIT: RYANNE FLOCK

When I met 70-year-old Mr. Song, he too was lying on his stomach, moving on a rolling board. However, he was busy writing calligraphy with a moist brush on the pavement, completing an ever-growing artwork by outlining the characters with colorful chalk. Three years ago, he told me, he was panhandling by waiting for alms with a bowl in his hand. But people insulted him because they could not see his leg disease, and he feared their contempt. Thus, he started street calligraphy, feeling that he would give something back, nurturing his self-esteem. Other panhandlers combined performances of misery with music, singing, or playing an instrument. Referring to Mr. Song’s explanation, we can understand this not only as a strategy to gain more attention and alms but also to deal with the stigma of begging and handling the hierarchy toward the audience. However, his answer also made me think of the “deserving poor”—a ubiquitous discourse in Chinese society—and the words of panhandling Mr. Mo: Only when you see someone’s disability can you be sure a beggar is “real” (and therefore deserving). Could emphasizing physical challenges as part of panhandling performances be a form of empowerment to have a claim on help and even access to public space? 

Today’s Chengguan Bureau was established in the late 1990s to create an orderly and “civilized” city inspired by the clean streets of other world metropolises. At the same time, however, the social issues caused by the market transition intensified and urged more “humanist” governance, according to the official jargon. Thus, on the national level, the State Council emphasized that panhandling is not forbidden; instead, those in need should be offered assistance and not be harassed in any way. Yet, on the local level, Guangzhou and other cities issued regulations defining panhandling as an aesthetic disturbance which should be punished and removed from public space. The policy contradictions leave patrols in a legally grey area when approaching beggars. 

Chengguan tolerated asking for alms at religious settings. Once in a while, I saw them drive by Guangzhou’s famous Guangxiao Temple, but their patrols were nowhere to be seen most of the time. Instead, they concentrated on areas of commerce, entertainment, and transport. Mostly in groups, by foot or electrical cart, Chengguan personnel moved back and forth within the radius of their responsibility. They expelled beggars from these popular and prestigious areas, sometimes with a frown or harsh words, while most beggars avoided the confrontation. Mr. Song wrote his calligraphy near Beijing Street—not under Chengguan’s immediate gaze, but within a regularly controlled radius. He would panhandle until a patrol shooed him away, he explained to me. Watching the comprehensive performances, I realized that most beggars seemed to make the most of the time given, trying to convey the message of misery and deservingness as fast and efficiently as possible.

Moreover, variations in governance and performance relate to the specific spatial culture grown through a place’s history and social functions, connected to social norms and accepted behavior. If we think of religiosity as a market of transcendent ideas whose members gain self-affirmation through charity, then beggars belong to churches, temples, and mosques. Observing how visitors gave alms almost automatically, I understood that those asking for alms were integral to the ritual of piety and did not need to perform elaborately. However, shopping streets, tourist spots, and metro stations are different: for the Guangzhou city government, they display ideals of modernity and the city’s political and economic success. As this success is contradicted by visible poverty, the number of Chengguan personnel concentrates on those bustling areas. One could argue that panhandling performances adapted to this spatial culture of an entertainment-hungry society as they became themselves a spectacle of sight, sound, and story.

When we encounter ideas of public space—in politics, academia, or the media—the concept is often idealized and defined as open and accessible to allmembers of society. In our everyday lives, however, we recognize that space is structured; it enables, guides, and limits the agency of individuals and groups. Chengguan’s management is one example of how the state can influence the spatial order and access strategies of marginalized groups. Beggars in China develop various performance skills to fit in, be seen, be heard, and convince and deal with differentiated governance. Thus, access to public space is more than being present; the hierarchy of public space raises questions about social status and performance expectations to benefit from the commons and participate in urban society. Public space is a medium of ordering urban society—a characteristic we must acknowledge if we want to understand its future. For whom and how to lower access barriers and hierarchies, then, is another story.

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.

We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Alex Wolff
October 24, 2023

Queer activism often includes public visibility. But everyday surveillance and economic risk complicate LGBTQ+ politics in South Korea.

Author’s note: All the names in this piece are pseudonyms and locations have been withheld.

In 2021, I attended a protest held in a bustling shopping district near a local university in South Korea. It was organized by LGBTQ+ student groups and a regional LGBTQ+ advocacy group supported by Korea’s progressive party, Jeong-uidang, to raise public consciousness of LGBTQ+ Koreans’ presence in everyday life and the need for an anti-discrimination law. Some organizers held placards bearing phrases like “The youth want a comprehensive anti-discrimination law!” Others marched the streets, wrapping LGBTQ+ flags around their bodies like capes. We took photos and videos and later uploaded them on social media with #WeAreHere and #StopDiscrimination. The protesters, largely in their twenties, chanted, “We are here!” (우리는 여기 있다!), a phrase often repeated in queer activism in South Korea. To me, it sounded like saying, “We exist!”

But beyond the celebratory colors and phrases, this event was carefully planned and executed to manage the risks activism posed for each protester. The organizers made sure that we recorded ourselves during the protest in case we were refused entry into stores or harassed because of our outfits. Protesters also hid their faces with rainbow-patterned surgical masks during the march. When uploading the recorded footage and photos later online, they censored participants’ faces and altered their voices for anonymity. These measures were taken in response to a well-founded fear of being “outed,” both online and off, which could ultimately cost their social connections and chances for employment.

LGBTQ+ Koreans build politics between a desire for collective visibility and individual invisibility even as the possibility of being “outed” haunts their public and private lives. By selectively concealing and revealing their identities and intentions to others, queer and trans young adults manage to be with and keep a distance from the largely heteronormative public.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Undisclosed city, South Korea. Protest for a national anti-discrimination law and awareness of LGBTQ+ Koreans in 2021.
Image Description: A group of 14 people standing in a public park on a rainy day, waving “hello” at the camera. They are wearing rainbow flags like capes, rainbow surgical masks, and holding umbrellas. Their faces are censored with a digital mosaic pattern.

Queer life under a heteronormative gaze

Following student activism that helped bring about Korea’s shift from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy in 1987, LGBTQ+ student groups flourished at top universities. Yet compared to the youths who risked their lives to participate in democratization, contemporary Korean young adults are often portrayed as risk-averse, self-interested, and generally indifferent to politics because of economic pressures.

Since economic liberalization following the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), irregular employment with lower job security, benefits, and income became normalized in South Korea. The brunt of these transformations has disproportionately affected those in their twenties and thirties. A recent report suggests that nearly 40 percent of those in their twenties depend on parents for primary financial support, and over half of unmarried people in their thirties live with their parents.

Yet this narrative of depoliticization is contradicted by young adults’ key role in activism related to the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster and mass uprisings against government corruption in 2016–2017. Though often unrecognized in public discourse, LGBTQ+ student groups have also been instrumental in the recent groundswell of youth activism in Korea. Over the past decades, queer and trans students have worked to promote anti-discrimination, legislative reform, and destigmatization. Their activities significantly expanded in the mid-2000s, creating groups at more than seventy universities and even cross-university organizations.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Flier for the 2021 anti-discrimination protest. The translated text reads, “Gender and Sexual Minorities are nowhere to be found. But we’re everywhere without a doubt. So now we’re going to show you. We are here now.”
Image Description: Protest poster for a LGBTQ+ activism event. Depicts a stylized street with rainbow flags and the message is depicted in a handwritten font in Korean.

Still, as was evident in the protest I attended, students participating in LGBTQ+ activism frequently expressed anxiety over potential harassment and the long-term effects of discrimination. The ubiquity of surveillance in both public spaces and interpersonal relationships have largely contributed to this concern. Like many other countries, in Korea surveillance infrastructure is pervasive and social practices of self-and-other monitoring are a part of daily life. With almost a million security cameras installed by public institutions alone, being recorded in everyday settings is nearly inevitable. People’s daily routes are also logged by banking institutions whenever they use bank cards to pay public transportation fares. The ubiquity of smartphones and social media such as Twitter are also creating a condition for what Brooke Erin Duffy and Ngai Keung Chan call “imagined surveillance”: users’ conscious control over what information they publicize online based on the anticipated scrutiny of peers and employers.

Combined with public homophobia and transphobia, surveillance culture enacts an imagined heteronormative gaze for LGBTQ+ folk—something underscored by regular anti-LGBTQ+ organizing at pride events. At a queer festival hosted in Incheonin 2018, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ protestors from conservative civic groups harassed and physically injured festivalgoers.

They also stoked LGBTQ+ attendee’s fears of being outed by recording them without consent. According to a festival organizer, they taunted, “If you’re proud, then don’t cover your face!” Fears of being surveilled while participating in facets of queer life were further emphasized by the pandemic, as individual privacy was often curtailed to create public safety. In May 2020, state-led contact tracing methods even led to the outing of a twenty-nine-year-old man to his family and employer after his visiting businesses in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s few explicitly queer-friendly neighborhoods.

Although many LGBTQ+ Koreans I met were already out to certain friends, family members, and peers, they frequently worried that mismanaged publicity could jeopardize their employability. Young adults are broadly impacted by economic insecurity, but the situation is more fraught for LGBTQ+ Koreans because there are no enforceable anti-discrimination laws for protection in the workplace—or anywhere else—in society. A 2015 report by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea detailed that 44 percent of LGBTQ+ workers who came out or were outed in the workplace faced discrimination, including pay reductions, exclusion from promotions, or even forced resignations. One college group leader, Yeoungho, clearly summarized this situation when he told me, “Doing activism is burdensome, especially because many of us aren’t economically stable yet. I feel like I won’t be hired if they find out I’ve been doing queer activism. There are so few queer-friendly careers that I can count them on one hand.” For these reasons, many LGBTQ+ interlocutors in their twenties and thirties were particularly concerned that being associated with queer politics could cost their social connections and professional careers.

Between risk and possibility

Under these circumstances of pervasive heteronormative surveillance and a volatile labor market, interlocutors practiced what I conceptualize as a queer politics of “discretion,” in reference to Lilith Mahmud’s definition of the term as “a contextualized set of revealing and concealing practices, of knowing how much to say, to whom, and when.”

For many LGBTQ+ young adults, discretion is a way to stay engaged in collective politics while preserving themselves. One college group leader, Sungwoo, explained various strategies taken to mitigate the risks of being outed in activist and more mundane situations. Group members often don masks and costumes during protestsand commonly use pseudonyms (hwaldong-myeong) when referring to one another. When organizing LGBTQ+ students’ events on campus, the members of Sungwoo’s group would describe their events as “human rights festivals for minorities” to stave off harassment. When confronted by other students, they often claim to be allies—because being a queer ally is more socially acceptable than actually being queer. They also removed the label from their official meeting room door to prevent defacement, rumors, and bullying, making it a kind of open secret. As another group leader, Narei, explained in an interview, “We take a lot of care to secure participants’ anonymity. The primary goal is that everyone ends up safe and that no one is outed. If we let one person get outed, it becomes pointless and contradicts the existence of our group and the purpose of our activism.”

But the outcomes of queer discretion are not always liberatory. Sungwoo confessed, “Finding the balance between activism and the rest of my life is becoming harder as I get closer to graduation, because I actually have to think about my future now.” To practice queer discretion entails the constant anticipation of discrimination, which creates a heavy affective burden of self-regulation—in line with the neoliberal demands of the market and discourses of hetero- and cisnormativity.

When we discussed the future of queer politics in Korea, Yeongho said he was more worried about the people doing activism than the activism itself. He likened this tension to activists “passing a bomb around” (pogtan dolligi) among themselves, not knowing when it would explode. As Sungwoo described, it invites both risk and possibility: “Finding people to do activism is so hard because there’s always a possibility of being outed and experiencing even more economic instability. It’s exhausting. All my friends worry about this. But we have to do it to make ourselves real to the rest of the world.”

Many interlocutors, including Sungwoo, emphasized the significance of cultivating discretionary politics that entailed not just visibility but also invisibility as a means toward both everyday survival and activism. As Naisargi Dave and Cymene Howe have observed, the dominant logic of visibility politics—a belief that more visibility leads to increased tolerance—does not always define queer activism transnationally. On the one hand, queer Koreans’ careful work to ensure each other’s mutual invisibility emphasizes the vulnerability of their subject positions. On the other, it highlights the importance of ethical discretion within queer politics and the very practice of ethnographic research. As my larger work explores, queer discretion exists alongside other semi-public forms of politics, allowing queer and trans interlocutors different political and social possibilities, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. More than just being “out” or “passing” as heterosexual or cisgender, their politics attempt self-preservation while aspiring to build a future of collective recognition and rights for queer and trans Koreans.

Alex Wolff (they/she) received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Their piece draws on field research conducted between 2018 and 2022 with LGBTQ+ folk in South Korea. Their research examines intersections among economics, temporality, and politics, through a focus on issues of gender and sexuality in Korea.

Wolff, Alex. 2023. “We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here.” Anthropology News website, October 24, 2023.

Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association

Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Daniel White
September 27, 2023

The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence sheds surprising light on how engineers in Japan are reimagining diversity through companion robots.

Stories of humans and robots cohabiting harmoniously have long been popular in Japan. In recent years, Japan’s robot manufacturers have increasingly attempted to bring this idea to life by equipping robots with capacities to care for others. For example, Softbank’s four-foot-tall humanoid robot Pepper, introduced in 2014, is marketed as the “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” The animated hologram Azumi Hikari, produced by Gatebox Inc. in 2016, is designed to realize the “ultimate return home” for those who do not otherwise have or prefer a human companion. Fujisoft’s Palro is created as a communication partner for the elderly. And Sony’s pet robot AIBO (1999–2006) and re-released as “aibo” in 2018—a name that combines “AI” with “robot” but that also plays on the Japanese word for “partner” or “pal” (aibō)—is imagined as a constant companion.

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: A small silver canine-like robot is standing on a small stage and facing the camera. To the right of the robot, in the background, is a sign that reads “aibo” in red letters.
Caption: aibo by Sony, featured at a conference on AI in Tokyo in 2019.

In a fieldwork project on the rise of emotional technologies like these, my colleague Hirofumi Katsuno and I ask how practices of modeling emotion in machines are transforming expressions of human emotionality more generally in society. As we have described elsewhere, at the heart of these experiments is heart itself. Across different models of companion and care robots, Japanese engineers attempt to build robots that can express a sense of heart (kokoro) by leveraging artificial emotional intelligence to contribute to a future of human-robot care. Technologies like cameras connected to software that reads facial expressions, for example, or sensors that respond to affectionate forms of touch with haptic feedback can give these robots elementary capacities to display affection.

Intriguingly for many, these machines also raise discussions about whether robots should be granted the right to be considered as legitimate members of Japanese society. While such discussions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans.

Robot-inclusive diversity

In 2018, the robotics startup GROOVE X introduced a small furry robot on wheels called LOVOT that was designed for just one thing: “to be loved by you.” In the updated release of LOVOT 2.0 in 2022, GROOVE X shifted its marketing campaigns to add to this message on love an emphasis on diversity. A tagline for the new LOVOT on the company’s official website reads, “All to express the diversity and complexity of life. 10+ CPU cores (central processing units), 20+ MCUs (micro controller units), 50+ sensors reproduce behavior like a living thing. A new relationship between robots and people begins here.”

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: Two small brown furry robots on wheels stare at the camera with LED eyes. One is wearing a beige onesie; the other is wearing beige overalls.
Caption: LOVOT by GROOVE X

When GROOVE X introduced its new PR materials on “diversity,” it also institutionalized what the company’s founder and CEO, Hayashi Kaname, had been promoting for years: the idea of a society of genuine human-robot coexistence (kyōzon). Importantly, the use of the word “diversity” (tayōsei) is applied here to refer to all “living things” (seibutsu), a category which GROOVE X proposes could be inclusive of robots like LOVOT. Thus,GROOVE X’s framing of LOVOT as a “living thing” promotes the possibility of welcoming LOVOT into a future society where “diversity” might be extended to nonhuman robot persons.

Prior to GROOVE X’s latest campaign, at an event called Industry Co-Creation held in 2020, Hayashi outlined in detail his vision of an emerging future of robot-inclusive diversity. Building on themes of diversity and social justice—which had gained attention in global advertising cultures—he proposed to an audience of fellow technologists and mass media that his company’s latest companion robot exemplifies a model of diversity.

What kind of era will the world face in the future? I think we are facing an era of the robot native [robotto neitibu no jidai]. Until now diversity has been used to refer to skin color and gender, but in the future, I wonder if the borders between living and nonliving things will be erased. Ultimate diversity leads to peace. I want to create that kind of technology and disseminate it from Japan.

Hayashi is familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, where AI media images have been criticized for their explicit “whiteness” and AI algorithms for their ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic biases based on machine learning data. By framing the inclusion of robots like LOVOT into society in terms of global social justice, Hayashi presents robots as equally deserving of it as people.

Other robot advocates agree with Hayashi’s perspective that robots deserve a place in societies as a distinct species. The legal scholar Inatani Tatsuhiko has been working for several years on creating legal codes that can promote a society in which humans and robots coexist in harmony. This is imperative, in Inatani’s view, because there exist no uniform codes of law for regulating human-machine relations in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. He suggests that “rather than trying to determine what the essence of machines and human beings is, everyone should think about what kind of society we want first, and then discuss the distribution of legal responsibilities appropriate for that purpose.”

Inatani further recommends that we gradually develop a “synthesized society” between human beings and artificial intelligence by considering “what we want to be with them.” Inatani’s point is that public discussions on the philosophical nature of humans, machines, and AI cannot provide a useful guide for living well with machines. Instead, he proposes to consider human-machine relationships as an open-ended experiment which will yield new models for harmonious cohabitation.

Together, Hayashi and Inatani—among many others—seek to make a place in society for nonhuman robot persons by reconceptualizing the constituency of Japan’s future publics in relation to emotional and interactive capacities. The future of a robot-inclusive society may thus depend less on the makeup of its members than on those members’ abilities to generate what is seen as socially appropriate emotionality toward others, human or otherwise.

More-than-human or all-too-human diversity?

With such an emphasis on the inclusion of robots into society expressed by figures like Hayashi and Inatani, however, there is reason to wonder if the extension of care to robots may contribute to “socially appropriate” emotions that come at the expense of other humans.

While Japanese society has long been admired for its fantastically imaginative fictional characters and robot friends, it has also been criticized for its cultural homogeneity and far less friendly immigration policies. In fact, some ethnographers of Japanese robotics have pointed to an overt lack of diversity among Japan’s mostly male robotics engineers and its implications for the disproportionate number of robots gendered as female. Other ethnographers have raised concerns that certain government endorsements for employing robotic technologies in the elderly care sector attribute more rights to robots than to potential foreign care laborers, particularly from Southeast Asia. Still others have suggested that while robots may not prove to be a replacement for migrant care workers in Japan, they may ultimately deskill the forms of labor in which they are trained. As James Wright has argued in an intimate study of the use of the robot Pepper in a care home in Japan, these robots are still elementary and need the help of human staff to operate. Accordingly, a better word than replacement to describe the impact of care robots is displacement, as “the introduction of care robots displaces skills and practices,” “direct human-human contact,” and “caring for people.”

Such critiques point to practices in Japan of privileging technological diversity by protecting perceptions of human homogeneity. Importantly, these emerging debates over who will be incorporated into future imaginations of diversity in Japan are playing out in a marketplace increasingly focused on feeling. Corporations defend the value of developing robots that care given a Japanese society in which care is in deficit.

Seeking to capitalize off perceptions of increasing alienation and loneliness in contemporary Japan, given an aging society and decreasing birthrates, companion robot companies release prototypes in part to test how people respond to them affectively. Different designs—a furry robot on wheels (LOVOT), a puppy-like pet (aibo), a headless cushion with a wagging feline tail (QOOBO)—evoke different reactions among consumers that are not easy to anticipate or define. Robot makers intentionally focus on positive affect, amorphous feelings of comfort that can be produced by just being with robots. Producers imagine that this palpable but not always explainable form of comfort might expand the abilities for positive emotionality between humans and robots in so much that it is not dependent on the limits and expectations that come with human language, and can thus attend more directly to heart.

Image Credit: Yukai Engineering
Image Description: A woman photographed from the nose down, wearing a white blouse and blue jeans, is sitting on a gray sofa. In her lap she holds a black cat-like cushion robot with a tail and no head. To the right of her on the couch is another gray cat-like cushion robot with its tail sticking out to the left.
Caption: QOOBO

GROOVE X’s robot LOVOT is at the leading edge of building these companions with heart. Despite critiques that investment in robots may discount the value of certain human relationships, GROOVE X argues that the cultivation of affection for fictional and “haptic creatures” like LOVOT 2.0 is not a problem but is rather part of the promise of robot diversity. Hayashi and staff often claim that LOVOT is a “technology that cultivates humans’ power to love”; as Hayashi has qualified in conversation, such love need not be limited to humans or even to nonhuman animals. “When I look at LOVOT, I feel like we are entering an era in which we need not discriminate between humans and robots or even between robots and other living things.”

If the future of diversity in Japan is robot-inclusive, it is also one incorporating a history of people grappling over certain human exclusions. As the current biases of emerging AI and machine learning technologies are increasingly brought to light, both in Japanese and global technocultures, we might also question how optimistic visions of diverse machine-inclusive publics of the future in part trade on discounted visions of human diversity. For robot makers like Hayashi, however, the enlarged capacities of “heart” in LOVOT 2.0 have far-reaching implications for how we pursue human values such as diversity in the future, even redefining emotionality itself in and beyond Japan.

Daniel White is a research affiliate in anthropology at the University of Cambridge and author of Administering Affect. He researches emotion modeling in AI, social robots, and other affective and emotional technologies. His publications and ongoing projects can be found at modelemotion.org.

White, Daniel. 2023. “Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan.” Anthropology News website, September 27, 2023.

Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association

Making Waste Visible in Qinghai

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Yanping Ni
November 18, 2022

A heavy metal band seeks to counter state imagery and bring issues of waste management and pollution to the general public.

Even those least familiar with Qinghai would be shocked by the scene of waste burning all over the province. Most evenings by the Winter Gecuo Na Lake, “the sacred lake” for Tibetans, fires are lit inside rusty dustbins, burning plastics, papers, foods, metals, and animal remains into ash. Smoke spreads in the air before being swallowed by the blue sky. Toxins sediment into the ground and are slowly absorbed by the soil. Home to Indigenous Tibetans and source of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers and called the “water tower of Asia,” Qinghai was once portrayed by the poet Hai Zi as a pure, pristine heaven. Yet residents describe a life of smoke and foul smells. As environmental activists captured in their survey of the locals, “We are living in a gas room. Such strong stenches make me dizzy. We never dare to open the windows.”

And yet the issue of piling waste in Qinghai has remained largely unseen by the public. For one, only a small proportion of waste is produced by locals; the majority is left by domestic tourists, who neglect their behaviors’ long-term impact and how these undesirables flow back into their own cities via water, air, and soil. Without a proper waste management system, Qinghai residents often resort to Tibetan customs and burn the unaddressed waste. But, unlike the clean spaces created by burning fallen tree leaves, incinerating modern materials like plastics and metals pollutes the environment further, rather than purifying it.

Image Description: Bright flames and smoke rise from a large trash can with two open doors on top. The orange and yellow flames stand in stark contrast to the cold grey of the ground and walls surrounding it. Just beyond are housing estates. The slogan painted on the can reads “Let the harmonious and beautiful environment be more beautiful because of us” (rang hexie youmei de huanjing, yin women er geng meihao!).
Caption: Trash cans burn in densely populated residential areas, sometimes as close as 10 meters from peoples’ homes. Image credit: Tian Xi.

The two conflicting portrayals of waste in Qinghai by state media and grassroots activists show how the issue’s visibility is actively contested. On the one hand, the state’s recent politico-ecological agendas have reinforced Qinghai’s image as “heaven.” In 2015, the Three-River-Source Park was chosen a pilot site for China’s ambitious National Park project, and in 2021, it was made an official one. State channels such as CCTV have created four celebratory documentaries on Qinghai in just the past two years (e.g., Qinghai: Our National Park). Such promotion of Qinghai as a place of “pure[ness], innocence, and eternity” makes it hard to openly discuss issues like waste, rendered invisible in circulating images of Qinghai despite its devastating impact on the ground. On the other hand, environmental activists, artists, and NGOs (e.g., Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association and Green Rivers) have been countering the state’s agenda by making Qinghai’s waste issues visible to the general public.

“Waste Qigong” as a new daily norm

“People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage / In Qinghai, from south to north, toxic gas follows you /… / People produce waste, waste produce toxic air / stink, stink, stink / poison, poison, poison / … / one year, five years, ten years, years after years.”―Lyrics from “Waste Qigong” by Bing Huang (translated by the author)

In the summer of 2021, a group of musicians arrived in Qinghai for a special performance, as one stop on their “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour.” Heavy metal bands were invited to tour the country’s most polluted areas, their audience local villagers and viewers watching the live stream online. The band’s slogan was, “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music!” By linking heavy metal toxins with a musical genre, the musicians combined their performance with environmental activism, critiquing the exploitative nature of China’s industrial development and proposing a new way of taking immediate, public-facing actions.

Tian Xi, a key figure in the project, was a tourist business owner in Qinghai for many years. As a semi-local, he identified waste discarding and burning as Qinghai’s most severe and urgent crisis, which inspired the flash composition of a song titled “Waste Qigong.” Intended as a pun on Qigong, a traditional healing practice combining breathing, meditation, and bodily movements for balance and peace, “Waste Qigong” indicates how breathing waste has become a new daily norm, poisoning Qinghai residents. “People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage,” the song repeats. Bing Huang, the lyricist, explained her creative intentions in our interview, “Qigong is systemic. And waste management should be as well…. But in Qinghai, this system involves no public discourse or voices from below. I use Qigong to critique this irony.” Surrounded by rank grass and in front of piles of rusty trash bins, the musicians performed with their hazmat protection suits on and gas masks covering their faces.

Image Description: A screenshot of the band Laotoule performing their song “Waste Qigong” in a deserted patch of land in Qinghai. Five musicians wear hazmat suits and gas masks. Behind them are two banners: one (above) reads “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour” and the other (below) reads “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music.” The song’s title, in white, has been added to the music video post-production.
Caption: A screenshot from the “Waste Qigong” music video. Image credit: Laotoule

What influence can this experimental performance have? While Nut Brother, the well-known performance artist who initiated this campaign, achieved remarkable success in the Xiaohaotu water pollution case, he understands the unpredictability of practicing activism in China and embraces the strategy of taking “one step at a time.” Online forums are one avenue where further conversations can take place between those committed to keeping this movement forward, slowly yet daringly. On one forum, an anonymous user writes, “I don’t know what kind of spirits sustain their actions. How many, among 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, can do this?” In the chat group maintained by Nut Brother, people from diverse backgrounds, including Chinese diaspora communities, ask, What does Qinghai need (funding or human resources)? Who should be responsible for waste management (the state or citizens)? What can we learn from other countries’ waste governance models? Answers diverge, unsurprisingly. But the bottom line is, one member writes, “to increase exposure and draw the public’s attention;” another echoes, “we need to offer support, engagement, and advice, as a collective.”

Tian Xi’s fieldwork and stumbling blocks en route

Bridging music and activism to raise public awareness isn’t new, and one may be reminded of The Beatles and Bob Dylan in the 60s, or Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen since the 80s. Yet Nut Brother has added his own flair to the tradition by initiating what the group calls “fieldwork heavy metal (tianye zhong jinshu),” meaning that field research lays the foundation for his themed performances. Specifically, Bing Huang’s lyrics are based on two months of ethnographic investigation conducted by Tian Xi. Tian did his fieldwork while regularly interviewing locals, observing their daily interactions, sampling 20 kilograms of toxic chemicals, and documenting scenes of waste running amok.

Image Description: A photograph of an overfull trash can. In the foreground a large rusty trash can is full to the brim with beige- and black-colored plastic garbage bags. The sweeping yellow and grey roofs of two traditional buildings stand in the background, and behind those, dark mountain peaks.
Caption: An overfull trash can near the Rwa Rgya Dgon Monastery (Lajia si), the most well-known Gêlug Ba Monastery by the Yellow River. Image credit: Tian Xi.

Despite his familiarity with Qinghai and years of experience in activism, Tian’s fieldwork was full of stumbling blocks. Running out of funds, Tian experienced days with no food or gas. Spotted by local security staff, he had to deal with threats and physical violence. But what concerns him the most are the conditions of doing environmental activism in today’s China. Activist projects involve constant negotiations of what can be done and how to reach that end when such actions are inevitably conditioned by political dynamics that penetrate daily life. In their proposal stage, Nut Brother and Tian tried to seek funding from established environmental NGOs who showed interest in their project. But the plan was rejected for being “too radical” in its aims to expose ecological and human costs by economic development of local industries (see Chen Gang’s Politics of China’s Environmental Protection for discussion of the challenges facing Chinese ENGOs). On other occasions, Nut Brother had to turn down enthusiastic sponsors because having “western” connections could make their projects and those involved vulnerable to accusations of colluding with anti-Chinese powers. When international rivalries are broadly defined and perceived, nationalist sentiments may quickly translate into vehement attacks on social media.

In today’s mainland China, grassroots activists face increasingly limited choices for what can be done. Under these circumstances, as shown by the essay collection edited by Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds, figuring out how to change tactics is simply the norm or necessity. According to Tian, in the “environmentalist community (huanbao quan),” one unspoken rule is that “one shouldn’t intervene in environmental affairs close to one’s home.” By “home,” Tian means the province in which one’s residence is officially registered in the hukou system and thus the judicial authority one is subjected to. In Tian’s case, he isn’t registered in Qinghai; even if he was identified as “suspicious,” Qinghai’s government might be deterred from taking significant actions against him because of the complicated inter-province extradition process. Centralized power ironically provides a shield for non-locals like Tian. Reporting a chemical plant miles away in one’s own residential area would be more dangerous than flying hours to investigate issues in other provinces, he explained.

Our long interviews were filled with Tian’s resolutions and witty remarks as well as feelings of disorientation: “Born in the age of ‘reform’ (gaige) and growing up in the wind of ‘opening up’ (kaifang), our generation was told the country was prospering and moving up… Now the world is pushed frantically by something invisible and powerful. It’s sliding to the abyss, and you’re on the train rushing to that end. Other than screaming in horror, what can you do?” From Deng Xiaoping’s “development as the top priority” to Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization” agenda, just how much so-called progress has been made and in what sense remains an open question. Over four decades of changes in China, one thing that hasn’t changed is the oppositional framing of economic interests against environmental ones in most development practices. This is manifested in today’s Qinghai: the state sells Qinghai’s image as “heaven” to boost tourist revenues at the expense of actual environments by obfuscating issues such as waste. Grassroots activists experiment with strategies of exposing and mobilizing in their restricted positions.

In archiving these frontline efforts, it’s important not to heroize any activist practices on the one hand and on the other not to assume the repressive nature of certain environments, thus closing off a critical eye to alternative voices. Navigating shifting political landscapes and tracking these dynamics at various scales might be a major challenge for those who study activism in today’s mainland China or in other highly and complexly politicized places.

Yanping Ni is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research interests include material, space, ecology, and activism. She has published in the journals China Information and Asian Bioethics Review.

Ni, Yanping. 2022. “Making Waste Visible in Qinghai.” Anthropology News website, November 18, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

SEAA Highlights from the 2022 Business Meeting

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su
December 1, 2022

SEAA members gathered virtually on November 19 for the annual Business Meeting, where the Board and section members reviewed activities throughout 2022, announced new positions, and awarded book and media prizes.

Fancis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

Committee Members: Jennifer Prough (chair), Yi Wu, Lyle Fearnley, Miriam Driessen

Winner

The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan, written by Chikako Ozawa-De Silva, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, published by the University of California Press. 

Honorable Mentions

Glossolalia and the Problem of Language, written by Nicholas Harkness, Professor of anthropology at Harvard University, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul, written by Seo Young Park, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Scripps College, published by Cornell University Press.

The David Plath Media Award 2022

We are pleased to announce the following winner and two honorable mentions for the biennial David Plath Media Award.

Winner: 

206 UNEARTHED  

Director: Chul-nyung Heo
Producer: Sona Jo, SonaFilms

This stunning film blends documentary-style footage, interviews, and metavoice commentary to tell the searing tales of a voluntary group of amateur archaeologists, seeking the remains of civilian dead from the Korean War.  The 206 of the title references the 206 bones of the human body, at best unearthed with painstaking care and pieced together to bring the past to a final reconciliation with the present.  At worst, however, these are bones whose hauntings remain unearthed, unfound, and unresolved. The film astonishes with its elegance, ranging from the philosophical to the deeply personal to the scholarly.  It brings to the fore contemporary anthropological discussions of memory, emotion, trauma, and healing, here rooted in a particular time, place, and group of people, but reaching far more broadly.  In doing so, the film invokes the power of the medium itself to achieve its visual and auditory profundity.

Honorable Mention: 

Miles to Go Before She Sleeps

Producer/Editor: J. Faye Yuan, New Circle Films

This intense and emotionally charged film follows an activist, Ms. Yang, in her fight for the welfare protection of dogs and against the practice of dog meat eating in China. The central ethnographic conundrum of the film (China becoming the largest pet market while being world’s largest dog meat producer) is made clear within the first minutes and immediately captures attention. We are quickly drawn into thinking about the tension between perceiving non-human animals as companions versus perceiving them as food, and consequently the limits of animal—and human—rights. Compellingly combining documentary-style filming with TV news clips and ‘silent’ street scenes overlaid with music, the film is praiseworthy for being both activist-oriented and well-balanced in its approach, and for its careful and courageous way of engaging in this contentious and potentially dangerous topic.

Honorable Mention:

Hengdian Dreaming

Director: Shayan Momin

It is a lively film about hope, dreams, freedom and precarity of life as a background actor in Hengdian, a movie capital of China. As the film skilfully blends online and offline footage to address an unspoken aspect of media production and youth struggles in China, it asks us to consider the nature (and price) of hope, the relationship between mobile technologies and presentation(s) of self, and the relationship between agency and exploitation. A compelling use of visual and audio elements from the ground accentuates the lived conundrum of the background actors and attests to the close engagement of the researcher with the people he represents. There is therefore much that the film can provoke for the classroom not only in relation to the topics evoked, but also in relation to the relationship between the researcher and the people they work with and the politics of representation.

New Anthropology News Column Theme, and Open SEAA Positions

The SEAA Column in Anthropology News will be publishing pieces in 2023 under a new theme, after receiving several submissions during a call for papers: “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” The column publishes SEAA members’ reflections and photo essays based on original ethnographic research.

In addition, new SEAA positions will be open soon. Two Councilor positions and one Student Councilor position are available for those who wish to run. Please contact Ellen Oxfeld (oxfeld [at] middlebury.edu) announcing your intent to run as soon as possible.

We also said goodbye to several outgoing members: Jie Yang, Marvin Sterling, Isaac Gagne (Treasurer), and Tim Quinn (Student Councilor). We welcomed a cohort of new members as well: Jun Zhang (Treasurer), Claudia Huang (Councilor), Kunisake Hirano (Councilor), Sojung Kim (Student Councilor).

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 is an editor for the SEAA section news column. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and currently writing up her dissertation on children’s health, everyday life, and radioactive uncertainty in post-nuclear Japan.

Aaron Su is an editor for the SEAA section news column. He is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University with interests in medical and environmental anthropology, urban design, and contemporary China.

In Memoriam of David Plath (1930-2022)

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The below prose was offered by Christine Yano on November 19th as part of the annual SEAA business meeting online to honor the work and the life of our dear colleague.

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It is with deep sadness and gratitude that I offer these few words in memory of David Plath who served as mentor, friend, and inspiration to many of us.  David taught many of us through his scholarship, which often veered off the beaten path to the marginalia of culture, to the “after hours” of human life.  In this, he wished to give the messy emotional, social, and aesthetic side of culture its due.  Equally, David moved many of us through his warmth and integrity, as well as his generous spirit, which was as acerbic as it was empathetic.  His contributions to the field of East Asia Anthropology are many, but for today when our wounds are still so raw, let me place his memory in the hands and words of his many friends. 

Laura Miller, past president of SEAA:  David was one of the smartest, wittiest, kindest Japan scholars I ever met.  His undergraduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University is reflected in his wonderful writing.  He served as an officer in the US Naval Reserve’s Pacific Fleet (1952-55) before earning a master’s degree (1959) and a PhD (1962) from Harvard in anthropology and Far Eastern languages.  He often ruffled the feathers of theoryhead anthropology by being outspoken about his impatience with jargon (at a conference he once called it ‘intellectual masturbation’).

Instead of trendy “intellectual masturbation”, David preferred straight talking, from-the-heart-to-the-heart insight and expression, including poetry.  He valued beauty and integrity that shed light on the human condition, both in words and images.  And he produced both words and images in his rich body of work.  Thus SEAA named the biennial award for the best multimedia work on East Asian anthropology. the David Plath Media Award.  He loved that tribute.

Here is one of his favorite poems, bestowed upon friends, from the pen of a farmer-poet, Wendell Berry.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought

Of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 To David – now resting in the eternal grace of the world, and utterly free.  Remembering the knowing twinkle in your eye of droll humor and sly wit, we thank you.

Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sara M. Bergstresser
November 7, 2022

The movement of and controversy around items as common as baby formula powder tell a story about the changing political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China.

In Hong Kong’s New Territories, directly attached to the Sha Tin MTR subway station, there is an enormous indoor complex of continuous shopping malls. Products available to buy range from groceries and personal care products to luxury jewelry, watches, and clothing. In 2019, it was a commonplace experience for me to find clusters of people in front of the Mannings drugstore packing products into large suitcases, to the point that the entrance to the store was completely blocked. While these suitcases sometimes contained luxury products or tins of butter cookies, by far the most common sight were cans of baby formula powder, known colloquially as “baby milk.” The baby milk was not being bought by new parents; rather, it was being purchased by shoppers from mainland China to transport over the border and resell for profit. For many years, the movements of baby milk have signified changing relationships of trust between Hong Kong and China.

From 2017 to 2019, I studied changing configurations of medical ethics, public health, and regulatory governance in Hong Kong. Though my initial focus was on the workings of large institutions such as the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, I soon discovered that baby milk, a simple everyday product, was a substance that inhabited the interface of complex regulatory intersections—including food, medicine, commerce, and border control—at a time of immense change. Following mass protests, government crackdowns, and two years of a pandemic, a city that once prided itself on freedoms of speech and the press is now the subject of international criticism for its turn to authoritarianism. The commercial landscape has also shifted, with widespread concerns about erosions in economic freedom. In parallel, my reflections on this time shifted from ordinary research to an act of “witnessing” the radical politico-economic and social transformation of a city that I had known (see Wang 2021).

Image Description: A crowded hallway filled with people and their suitcases outside of Mannings drugstore.
Caption: Commodity shoppers outside Mannings at Sha Tin Centre, January 2019. Sara Bergstresser.

The “Chinese milk scandal”

In March 2008, consumers in mainland China began to complain that their children were sickened by Chinese brand Sanlu’s baby milk powder. Action was not taken by the government until months later, when international complaints prompted widespread scrutiny, leading to global recalls. These events became known as the “Chinese milk scandal.” Melamine is an industrial chemical that in large doses is toxic to kidneys, and at least six babies died from ingesting the contaminated infant milk powder, while at least 290,000 others became ill. It soon became clear that the melamine had been purposefully added to watered-down milk to make it falsely appear to have a high protein content. Chinese consumers became extremely distrustful of both the milk industry and China’s food regulatory systems. These scandals highlighted contradictions between China’s rapid economic development and its continuing political messages of Communist solidarity.

Hong Kong played a unique role in the crisis. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, the city had established extensive public health infrastructure, resuming the role of “public health defender” (see Keck 2009). Mistrust drove people from the mainland to Hong Kong to buy baby milk powder of imported European brands, which were not available in the mainland. Baby milk emerged as a cross-border commodity for the rising Chinese consumers to mitigate against their mistrust surrounding the government’s regulatory failure in the market in mainland China.

As more people travelled to purchase more baby milk up until the 2010s, baby milk came to mark the tension surrounding the increasing permeability of the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. There were formula shortages in Hong Kong, which contributed to a growing sense that Hong Kong was being turned into a “city-sized outlet mall” for shoppers from mainland China. Some regarded this as a threat to Hong Kong’s autonomy as an independent political, judicial, and regulatory entity under the “One Country Two Systems” principle.

Image Description: Two banners in orange and pink at the Kowloon side of the Bay, reading “Hong Kong Asia’s World City.”
Caption: In 2018, Hong Kong advertised itself with the slogan “Hong Kong, Asia’s World City.” Sara Bergstresser.

In Hong Kong, under these circumstances, baby milk powder tins became iconic components of artworks, often highlighting the fearful dissolution of the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. In 2013, artist Ai Weiwei released a gallery-wide map of China made out of tins of baby milk powder in an exhibit in Hong Kong. He described the piece as relevant to many problems, including the Chinese milk scandal, the failure of the Chinese food safety regulatory system, the subsequent bans of the mass internal importation of foreign formula, and the increasing tensions between Hong Kong and the mainland—which have only escalated since then. He stated, “Hong Kong people make profits from these problems, and are also victims,” pointing out both the embeddedness of the problem in systems of commerce as well as cross-border mistrust and tensions. The mistrust stemming from the 2008 milk scandal did not abate in the subsequent years; to the contrary, it only compounded focus on newer resentments.

New manifestations of mistrust

Since mid-2019, there have been dramatic changes in Hong Kong, including multiple periods of unrest, the arrival of COVID-19, selective border closures, vaccines, the enhancement of National Security Law, and major changes in Hong Kong-mainland relations. The Hong Kong administration’s attempt to allow legal extradition to mainland China sparked a series of public protests, involving millions of protesters and aggressive police intervention in the coming months. In this landscape, the situation surrounding the border has been substantially reconfigured once again; the current Hong Kong administration declared to politically prioritize reopening the border to the mainland while scaling down trade with the rest of the world.

The iconic images of baby milk appeared again. At a protest outside of the West Kowloon Rail Station, planned specifically for gaining support from mainland shoppers, artist Badiucao released a poster of a giant baby milk tin that read, “Formula Baby Safe.” According to Badiucao’s comment on his Instagram page, this meant: “The best message for mainlanders is ‘If Hong Kong’s gone, so is your baby formula.’” In another image, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who once stated herself as Hong Kong’s “Mother,” appears with guns emerging from her breasts where nipples should be. In a final illustration, titled, “Instruction: Nursing a baby in Hong Kong,” the mother is instructed to be wearing gas masks while nursing to protect the baby against tear gas, which was widely used to suppress protests. Badiucao’s focus on the dual imagery of baby milk—first, as a salient symbol of cross-border commerce, and second, as a substance associated with food, health, babies, and motherhood—shows the ways in which the protests over Hong Kong’s independence were also interwoven with everyday family life and its emotional complexities.

Image Description: Shop at the Macau Ferry Terminal prominently displays tall stacks of baby formula cans in the front window.
Caption: Baby milk formula displayed in Macau to entice mainland shoppers. Ferries from this location travel to destinations including multiple locations in mainland China. Sara Bergstresser.

Regulatory failures in areas of food and medicine continue to occur in the mainland; new scandals continue to disrupt systems, putting the health of populations at risk. For example, cross-border births are another focus of tensions over perceived encroachment. Like baby milk, places of birth are bound with symbols motherhood and hope for the next generation. In 2012, a national controversy erupted in China when professionals in Hong Kong “took out a newspaper ad depicting incoming mainland Chinese as locusts and asking, ‘Are you willing to pay 1 million HK dollars every 18 minutes to take care of mainland children born in Hong Kong?’” After the 2014 “Umbrella Movement” protests, concerns about increasing border permeability were not assuaged; instead, the mainland engaged in clear messaging that it was taking more interest in Hong Kong’s political affairs. Other regulatory shortfalls, vaccine scandals, and shortages linked to medical tourism have further stoked existing resentments. In addition, Hong Kong has become a node of global distribution for counterfeit drugs and illegally imported medicines. Across different manifestations, baby milk imagery continued to be invoked to indicate growing discomfort with the Hong Kong-mainland China relationship.

As it struggles with new outbreaks and pressure from mainland China to adhere to the “Zero-Covid” strategy, the international character of Hong Kong continues to shift. The once permeable border between Hong Kong and the foreign world has intensified through the implementation of strict travel restrictions and long quarantines, and the internal border with the mainland has become the primary focus for reestablishing traffic. The Hong Kong Free Press, one of the few remaining independent news outlets in Hong Kong, recently published a picture of a workman squatting on the ground to roll up the “Hong Kong Asia’s World City” banner while looking back at three masked policemen walking by. Instagram user otaku_5354 commented: “in 20 years’ time whenever anyone wants a photo to summarize the fall of Hong Kong, they will refer to this!” Border flows and political relationships between Hong Kong and the mainland have been reconfigured in the past few years, are these shifts are both negotiated and presaged by controversies over materials as ordinary as baby milk.

Sara M. Bergstresser is currently lecturer in the Masters of Bioethics program at Columbia University. She works at the intersection of medical anthropology, health policy, and bioethics. From 2017 to 2019, Sara was lecturer and program coordinator for Bioethics Education in the Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Bergstresser, Sara M. 2022. “Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface.” Anthropology News website, November 7, 2022.

Copyright [2022] American Anthropological Association

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of human rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial me