Society for East Asian Anthropology

SEAA Highlights from the 2024 Business Meeting

January 10, 2025 by Aaron Su

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

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

Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize

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

Winner

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mentions

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

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

David Plath Media Prize

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

Winner

Beneath the Rubber Trees. Directed by Song Qu

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

Japani. Directed by Dipesh Kharel and Asami Saito

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

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

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

2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize

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

Winner

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

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

Honorable Mention

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

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

New Board Members and Anthropology News Column Updates

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

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

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

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

Practicing Self-Care Beyond Self

December 28, 2024 by Jieun Cho

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].”

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.

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.

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

December 28, 2024 by Jieun Cho

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.

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.

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

July 25, 2024 by Jieun Cho

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).

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 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.

Being Global and Chinese on WeChat

February 24, 2024 by Aaron Su

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

Does using WeChat qualify someone to be “Chinese”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Can White Paper Do?

January 30, 2024 by Aaron Su

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

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

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

“Why did you take away their white paper?” 

“What threat does the white paper pose?” 

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

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

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

Why White Paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ghostly Public to Fragmented Solidarity 

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

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

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

After the Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

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

Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea

December 13, 2023 by Aaron Su

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mourning to Remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

July 10, 2022 by Jieun Cho

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 hu m an 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 means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing

April 11, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Hanna Pickwell
April 11, 2022

Aging residents of a Beijing neighborhood give new value to old and used household objects, creating a community space rich with a feeling of belonging in an ever-changing city.

When entering the Guest Living Room (GLR) in a narrow hutong alleyway in Beijing’s old city, you would immediately find yourself encircled by glass cabinets crowded with colorful, outmoded stuff: old phones and video games, painted pigs’ knuckle bones that had once been used to play a game like jacks, collections of ration tickets from the 1950s through the 1980s, and candy wrappers from the 1970s. In the large main room extending behind this display, you might encounter a group of senior citizens chatting over tea or making crafts together. From time to time, tourists or visitors to the neighborhood are drawn inside by the items on display and exclaim that they haven’t seen something like that since they were a kid. How do outmoded objects come to have a renewed appeal to neighborhood residents and tourists, old and young alike, rather than being seen as junk? By giving value to otherwise valueless objects, regulars and visitors at the GLR produced a sense of warmth and hominess in the midst of disorientation and disconnection in an ever-changing urban environment.

Image Description: Shelves and cabinets, bedecked in old telephones, storage tins, televisions, clocks, thermoses, books, and other items are surrounded by brightly colored hanging paper décor. To the right of the frame is a plant, close to a large window that is partially obscured by the many objects in the photo.
Caption: One part of the collection, comprised of objects from neighbors’ homes, at the Guest Living Room. Hanna Pickwell.

Although the GLR somewhat resembled a shop or a museum with its displayed collection of interesting objects, it was more akin to a community center where aging neighborhood residents would come to socialize. I had never visited anywhere like it. Everything in the space had been brought to the GLR by regulars there. They told me that when the space opened in 2017, the founder had appointed it with old furniture, including the glass cabinet they recognized from 1980s and 1990s shops, which displayed a few items and had plenty of space for more. Over the next two years, community members filled every surface and empty stretch of wall with old things they no longer had a use for. As things accumulated there, the GLR became a metonymic extension of the neighbors’ homes. The everyday objects they had once lived with now intermingled on the shelves, sometimes receding into the background as ambient décor, and sometimes drawing attention to prompt commentary or stimulate personal or shared memories.

Some of the items remained in use. More than a dozen drinking vessels, each belonging to a different GLR regular, were kept clustered together in a tray, ready to be used when their owners stopped by, indexing the many cups of tea they had shared and would share together in the future. Even marks of inhabitation like scraps of food, the resident cat, or excess items stacked tightly into corners made the space feel inviting to the neighbors, who referred to it as a second home or a niang jia—a woman’s natal family home that she would move away from after marriage, but that she could return to intermittently and always feel like she belonged. In his study of a London neighborhood, Daniel Miller found that lives rich in relationships with material things were often also the richest in their relationships with people, since the routines and patterns that built up around things provide comfort and stability. This was also the case at the GLR, where objects were not passive decorations or mere clutter; they were integral to the sociality that unfolded in the space.

Image Description: A neat pile of clementine fruit peels and leaves are gathered at the center of the frame, on a brown table. There is a second pile of peels and a few peanut shells in the left foreground. In the background, a blurry television set can be seen on a table crowded with indistinct objects next to a glass display cabinet and a wooden bureau. There are banners, and décor hanging on the wall behind, leaving very little white wall showing through.
Caption: Fruit and nut peels on a table at the GLR. Hanna Pickwell.

A staff member told me that neighbors were eager to donate excess things to the GLR; they had limited space in their small homes, and besides, rapid development and increasing financial resources had produced an appetite for new, modern styles of home décor that didn’t match the aesthetic of old things. According to him, the things that people tended to donate had “no value” (meiyou jiazhi), and were not even worth 10 kuai (approximately $1.50 USD). Even junk collectors wouldn’t want the stuff in the GLR. But these things must have some worth, I replied, since the neighbors had brought them to the GLR rather than simply throwing them away. He conceded, smiling, that the stuff in the GLR did give off renqingweir—a “flavor of human feeling.” I often heard regulars and visitors use this word, which combines the warm emotions of a personal relationship (renqing) with the sensation of smell or taste (weir), to describe GLR’s atmosphere.

The staffer’s simultaneous denial and acknowledgement of the value of the old, used things in the GLR—that they had no exchange or monetary value and yet gave off this homey flavor of human feeling—resonates with contradictions I had been investigating through the changing value of secondhand commodities in post-socialist China. Everyday objects like old clocks, lamps, and basins which I had seen as junk on the street and or sold for next to nothing in secondhand markets a few years before are now framed in museums, public art, and on postage stamps as nostalgic heritage. Meanwhile, historic hutong neighborhoods like the one surrounding the GLR remain popular destinations for tourists seeking a unique Beijing atmosphere. How could it be that the same things were at once seen as valueless and also key to a place’s specificity and warmth?

The objects that accumulated in the GLR, then, told a complex story of value. It was true that most of the items populating the GLR lacked exchange value and use value in contemporary Beijing. The knuckle bones have been displaced by flashier plastic toys; ration tickets can no longer be exchanged for rice or cooking oil; even a beautiful quilt, handmade from fabric scraps fifty years ago, can no longer fit with the desirable aesthetic of a modern home. This quilt was made by the GLR founder’s aunt, who had considered throwing it out since it wasn’t being used. When her nephew installed it in the GLR as a door partition, the aunt was so pleased to know that it could be “useful” again.

Thrift and resourcefulness were especially important to the aging GLR regulars, who had lived through times when material plenty could not always be expected (see also artist Song Dong’s Waste Not). The oldest among them had been children during the scarcity of the Great Leap Forward; younger neighbors were born around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and grew up accustomed to rationing of food, cloth, and other essential resources, coming of age just as economic reforms began to marketize and globalize the Chinese economy. Regulars who had donated seemed delighted by the new uses their old things had found as décor and as instigators of interest or conversation. Spared from the rubbish heap, they could remain part of the social world (see Wang 2012).

Image Description: A calico cat crouches inside a glass display case. On the glass shelf above her we can see an old video game, a tambourine, a *jianzi*—a toy that is meant to be kicked and passed between players—and other miscellaneous objects. On the same level of the cat are several balls, an abacus, a toy drum, and several wooden objects.
Caption: A cat crouches amongst the GLR’s collection in a display case. Hanna Pickwell.

The GLR collection also kept the past present. Younger tourists and students often had no idea what the objects filling the GLR had once been used for, and older regulars were eager to tell them about how these things once fit into their everyday lives, bridging generational difference. Moreover, China’s cities, and especially Beijing, have undergone accelerated material transformations that accompanied the dramatic political and social changes of the past century. Although they are now seen as rich with historical charm, hutong neighborhoods like this one have aging and inadequate infrastructure, and many were targeted for demolition in the 1990s and 2000s. They are now often redeveloped into more upscale versions of themselves, and purged of lower income residents, migrants and their small businesses, and unauthorized buildings. In this context, history and community feel continually at risk of being blasted away.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that I often heard renqingweir, that “flavor of human feeling” that evokes the sensory and emotional warmth of relationships, invoked to name what is often lost in the processes of rapid development and modernization. Brought together by a community of aging residents in a neighborhood that has seen its share of change in a rapidly changing city and society, the gathering of objects at the GLR was a stabilization of an atmosphere of renqingweir. Like the domestic objects in Miller’s research, collections do seem to have a special power of shoring up identity by externally objectifying the collector’s senses of self and of control in the world (Baudrillard 1996[1968], Stewart 1992). In this case, the collection was collectively authored. Like the collection itself, any “identity” or quality that the GLR helped to stabilize was not fixed but continually being altered and added to by community members. But the most dramatic change came when the GLR closed its doors due to the pandemic in early 2020. After months of uncertainty, the space was eventually permanently closed, and the collections were moved to into storage, where they will remain until a suitable place can be found. Renqingweir is indeed a fragile quality.

The mostly outmoded things, brought to the GLR from nearby homes, set the scene for a particular flavor of social life to unfurl there. Casual social drop-ins, collective meals, handicraft workshops, and holiday celebrations took shape organically in a space that felt like it belonged to the neighborhood regulars and where they felt they also belonged. The regulars shared the GLR, which they called a second home, with a diverse array of objects of little economic value that seemed to materialize the hominess and “inclusivity” (baorong) that they said set this place apart. The atmosphere of renqingweir, then, was produced both materially and socially, ineluctably linked to broader political, economic, and social contexts beyond the particular place where it was, however briefly, given space.

Hanna Pickwell is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research on the social efficacies of used and outmoded commodities in China has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, and the China-US Scholars Program.

Cite as: Pickwell, Hanna. 2022. “A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing.” Anthropology News website, April 11, 2022.

Digital Sociality in COVID-19 Japan

December 14, 2021 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Kimberly Hassel
December 7, 2021

How has the heightened digital mediation brought about by the pandemic reconfigured sociality, intimacy, ideas of “normalcy,” and even ethnographic practice itself?

In the summer of 2019, I set off to begin my yearlong dissertation fieldwork on Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and digital sociality in Japan. During the first half of my fieldwork, I was immersed in in-person interactions with my interlocutors—high schoolers, university students, and postgrads in their mid-twenties who were avid users of platforms such as Instagram. In our conversations on the role of SNS (the local term for social media) and smartphones in everyday life, youths told me that social media and smartphones were often a “normal,” or even “natural,” part of their lives. However, this perception has changed due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, which coincided with the second half of my fieldwork. The pandemic has reconfigured the embeddedness of digital mediation. Youth interlocutors came to question what they used to think as “normal” in pre-pandemic digital sociality, even reconsidering the idea of normalcy itself. They confessed a desire to share the same space as their friends, to be able to touch and hold them. This seemed to suggest the extent to which digital sociality is constituted by in-person sociality. This was highlighted by the pandemic, when social media and smartphones became the primary means of communication. In turn, I began to deeply consider the ethical implications of my own digital communications with interlocutors.

Although social media and smartphones are perceived to be ubiquitous, these technologies are localized within particular historical and societal contexts. In their ethnographic projects spanning across multiple countries, Daniel Miller and colleagues have highlighted how the nuances of local context impact how people use and transform these technologies in their everyday lives (Miller et al 2016; Miller et al. 2021). Japan has been at the forefront of mobile Internet technology since the 1990s. The smartphone fits within the rich genealogy of keitai (mobile phones)—what Mizuko Ito calls a “snug and intimate technosocial tethering” that translates literally to “something you carry with you” (2005, 1). Prior to the pandemic, young interlocutors spoke enthusiastically of the informative, communicative, and entertaining functions of social media and smartphones. Different iterations of the phrase “I can’t imagine life without it” emphasized the necessity of both technologies in daily life. At times, they cultivated a corporeal connection with the device itself, expressing this as smartphones being “part of my body.” For example, Haru, a postgrad in her mid-twenties, once dropped her phone on the train tracks during her morning commute. A day without her phone impacted her daily rhythm; she was unable to entertain herself with videos during her lunch break and was unable to receive work communications. Since this “traumatic” experience, Haru now wears her phone on a strap around her neck wherever she goes.

Youths also had particular characterizations for popular social media platforms. For example, LINE, a popular messaging platform, was “the norm” in communicating and arranging general logistics of everyday life because it provided “quick” (subayai) chat and call functions. Instagram was identified as the most popular social media platform in Japan throughout my fieldwork, for its role in allowing people to stay in touch with friends by letting them view each other’s daily updates, and “follow” accounts of shared interests. Without Instagram, my interlocutors told me, it would be difficult to stay “on top” of trends or happenings in acquaintances’ lives. Despite their deft use of various platforms, young interlocutors emphasized that social media and smartphones are useful tools that should supplement in-person sociality, though never replace it. According to interlocutors, digitally mediated communication could cause miscommunication because facial expressions, bodily cues, and the general atmosphere of the conversation might be hard to read. In actuality, they often misinterpreted text messages, emoji, or “stamps” sent by acquaintances on LINE. This decentering of the digital contests the often hyper-technologized imaginations of Japanese society worldwide.

Image Description: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone, protected by a black cloth phone cover. The phone cover bears an image of a cat, followed with the caption: “Don’t touch my cell phone.”
Caption: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone personalized with an amusing cover.

As digital sociality became the form of everyday sociality amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, young interlocutors began to reconsider the presence of digital technologies in their lives as a taken-for-granted part of the everyday, completely integrated into the rhythms of daily life through work and personal communications (see Ling 2012) for a detailed discussion of this “taken for grantedness.” Interlocutors appreciated how social media such as Instagram and LINE became crucial avenues for ensuring the safety and health of their friends and family. For many, social media was also often the only way to feel “like a part of society” due to the inability to engage in activities outdoors or physically meet with others. This counters the pervasive pre-pandemic perceptions that social media is the culprit of “shallowing” relationships. Rather, the pandemic suggested a variety of possibilities as to how one can strategically recalibrate social/digital life. Young interlocutors relied on their friends’ own social media profiles to seek information during the early stages of the pandemic, fully aware of the caveats of misinformation and disinformation. Some refrained from uploading any photos or videos on their Instagram Stories that might reveal that they had been going outdoors, in fear of being judged by their friends and followers, including critical online users nicknamed “quarantine police” (jishuku keisatsu). In this case, the portable intimacy provided by smartphones and social media transformed into a site of hostile criticism and surveillance.

In the ensuing global health crisis, my fieldwork transitioned from an online and offline mixture of in-person interviews and participant observation to purely “remote” digital methodologies. Follow-up video interviews with interlocutors bore a more somber and fatigued air, yet were reflexive and intimate. I reflected deeply on what ethical implications there may be for digital methods when they have become the new “norm” in ethnography in the wake of the pandemic, in and beyond Japan. The digital poses opportunities for forms of intimacy and sociality as well as new challenges regarding boundaries. Video interviews often meant that I would be virtually “present” in interlocutors’ homes. I had to be mindful of those with whom my interviewees were living and what topics might be “risky” to speak about out loud.

This caveat became apparent during a video interview with Riko, a university student. In a previous interview, Riko spoke extensively of the role of social media in her life, particularly her use of a “secret” Instagram account as a diary. Riko’s sister perceives social media as “her private universe,” while her mother is a flip phone user and does not use social media at all. During our follow-up interview via video call, I began to ask Riko about her sister. “She’s right here!” Riko said aloud. I froze, not knowing that her sister had been there for the entire interview. Riko was not wearing headphones. Riko offered to relay any questions that I wished to ask her sister, to which I responded that I would at a later date. I then began to ask about her mother, but was quickly cut off by Riko. “Wait a second, wait a second!” Riko suddenly exclaimed, whil