Activated Poetry, Almanac Life

In the summer of 2018, working alongside students in the rice paddy fields of Taiwan, I had a chance to visit several farming communities in Yilan, Taiwan, where my in-laws are, and started to know more about the farming communities in Northfield, Minnesota, where I work.

During more than a month in Yilan, we conducted interviews, lived in a local farmhouse, farmed firsthand, and visited various historical landmarks. The culmination of this research is a website that showcases perspectives about suburbanization.

What is Chinese diaspora? How to compare modern immigration with ancient exodus and exile? What about the migration of an empire and the sojourns of officials, students, and merchants? I examine the genres in their cultural contexts as well as the borders they crossed, the places they went, and the environments they tried to adapt.

Motivated by Chu T’ien-hsin’s novella “The Old Capital,” I visited Taipei in the summer of 2016 with a student and built a digital representation of the shifting cityscape.

Adopting multiliteracies pedagogy, I support students in 1) text interpretation, criticism, and creation from their positionalities; as well as 2) meaning co-construction, negotiation, and reconstruction in diverse contexts.

I have published two lesson plans, respectively on sports vlog and gender-inclusive language. I am also making an online learning space (St. Olaf account required) for students to share cross-cultural/dialectal presentations.

The Shi jing odes and hymns about the kingly work and the royal house have given an impression that the kings and heroes are the main characters; its reference to multiple states has also shaped a view that the anthology is an integration of various voices.

But there is a unique agricultural voice that is heard across the Shi jing. My article "Across the Gateless Barriers: Hyperlinked Farming Poetry in the Shi jing" activates the "hyperlinks" to hear this voice of Bin.

I explore how the early medieval court poets redefined belles lettres with their stylish manner in my 2019 chapter “Into the New Realm of Belles lettres: Intersections of the Sevens and Song Verses in Jian’an Poetry” (in The Fu Genre of Imperial China). 

My 2024 book, Poetry of Loss and the Early Medieval Chinese Court of the Warlord Cao Cao (155–220), shows how the Cao court writers employed their poetic art to sustain a community in each difficult moment of their intertwined lives.

Anthropologist James Clifford proposes that museums should be "contact zones" rather than colonial display of "the other." So how should we curate the artifacts we brought back from our trips?

My students and I decided to tell our personal stories. The digital platform Thinglink further enables us to connect our virtual exhibit spaces, and provide our online visitors with immersive audio guidance.