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? I am interested in comparing modern immigration with ancient exodus and exile, in addition to comparisons with the migration of an empire, and the sojourns of officials, students, and merchants. I examine not only the genres in their cultural contexts, but also the borders they crossed, the places they went, and the environments they tried to adapt.

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

I am committed to support each member of a learning community in...

• text interpretation and creation from their unique perspectives;

• meaning construction and negotiation in diverse contexts.

I am also making an online learning space (St. Olaf account required) for students to share cross-cultural/dialectal presentations and in the meantime, to cultivate career readiness competencies such as communication and equity & inclusion (see NACE for more details).

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.

I argue, however, there is a unique agricultural voice in the Shi jing. My article "Across the Gateless Barriers: Hyperlinked Farming Poetry in the Shi jing" activates the "hyperlinks" to hear this voice.

I research early and medieval literature, exploring the intersection of one genre with another.

My paper “Into the New Realm of Belles lettres: Intersections of the Sevens and Song Verses in Jian’an Poetry,” included in The Fu Genre of Imperial China: Studies in the Rhapsodic Imagination, revisits the Three Kingdoms era, showing how poets redefined the realm of belles lettres with their stylish manner.

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.