Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

I became a cultural and medical anthropologist in the United States through a rather unusual and winding path. I was born and raised in an impoverished peasant family in Shandong Province, North China. To simply fill my belly, during and after college I worked as a milk salesman, a leaflet distributor, a home tutor, a Walmart stockroom worker, a restaurant runner, and a security guard. Growing up in structurally deprived rural China afforded me more opportunities than many of my peers to experience hardship and humiliation, learn from ordinary peasants and migrant workers, and share their struggles to “live the daily life” (guo rizi) while maintaining meaning and hope under China’s discriminatory household registration (hukou) system and urban-rural divide.

These experiences of living and working on the very bottom rungs of Chinese society pushed me to develop a research orientation toward marginalized social groups, especially those living in rural China and county-level cities. My work examines how ordinary people pursue a good life amid structural inequality, uncertainty, and political constraint, bringing together medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, and the anthropology of hope to explore questions of healing and illness, inequality and marginalization, and everyday aspirations and struggles. My emerging research extends these concerns to aging and disability, chronic conditions, health technologies, environmental health, and the everyday implications of climate change.

My first book project, A Good Life Foretold: Hope and Healing in North China, is an ethnography of hope bound up with religious practices in an authoritarian party-state. It explores how people in North China pursue a good life and cope with uncertainty and precarity by consulting folk healers called incense seers. Faced with a competitive market-oriented economy and profound social changes, millions of Chinese seek help from seers for everyday problems ranging from health to marriage, education, career, and business success. The book probes how incense seeing deals with both “empty sickness” (illness attributed to spiritual beings and Chinese geomancy) and “solid sickness” (malfunctions of bodily organs and systems) and helps people grapple with hope-related mental distress and conflict. Following these hopes after clients depart from seers’ headquarters, the book further unpacks how spiritual experiences shape hopeful dispositions and inspire people to act and make changes in their lives under stringent social control, including China’s one-child and zero-COVID policies. An ambitious goal of this project is to extend the boundaries of the anthropology of hope and to mark new paths along which future research on hope might fruitfully proceed.

My long-held hope of doing research that would benefit Chinese peasants motivated me to make an early start on my second book project, Sweet Apples, Bitter Lives: Aging Peasants, Chronic Illness, and Living a Good Later Life in North China. This project offers an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and hopes of older peasants who are chronically ill and disabled. An article from this project, published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, builds on a local narrative that paints the hospital as a place where people are made ill. It traces an elderly couple’s experiences navigating healthcare in an urban hospital and develops the concept of “sickening landscapes” to enrich studies of therapeutic landscapes, iatrogenesis, and hospital ethnography.

I’m also committed to public-facing scholarship that centers on storytelling through digital media and documentary filmmaking, carving out spaces for reflection, voice, and action.

Research Interests

• Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Anthropology of Hope and the Good Life
• Science, Technology, and Medicine
• Environmental Anthropology
• Aging, Chronic Conditions, and Disability
• Care and Abandonment
• Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Environmental Degradation and Rural Health
• Rural-to-Urban Migration
• China Studies
• East and Southeast Asia