AREAS OF INTEREST
I am drawn to the “aha” moments of discovery—the recognition that seemingly ordinary acts, such as greeting a friend, brushing one’s teeth, or washing a dish, can be carried out in countless different ways. These moments, when assumptions of universality fall away, continually reshape my understanding of the everyday and remind me that culture is embedded in even the most mundane practices.
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Looking back on the work I have produced over the past two decades, several themes consistently emerge. I am especially interested in people’s family histories and social worlds, and in the creative ways individuals navigate, reinterpret, and sometimes circumvent social norms to pursue their desires. Whether seeking love, intimacy, stability, or belonging, people demonstrate remarkable ingenuity in crafting meaningful lives within—and sometimes against—the constraints they face.
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At the center of my research is the family: how we define it, the legal and moral frameworks that sustain it, the dynamics that animate it, and the strategies people use to build and maintain it. I am particularly attentive to men’s relationships to their families and to how culturally embedded expectations of masculinity shape, complicate, and at times limit these bonds. Through this lens, I explore how gendered ideals are lived, negotiated, and transformed in everyday life.
MASCULINITY
The central thread uniting my research is a sustained focus on men and masculinity across cultural and social contexts. As an undergraduate, I examined long-haul truck drivers grappling with loneliness and estrangement from their families while on the road. My MA thesis shifted to the oral history of a young man who immigrated to escape the vulnerabilities and dangers of being young and male in a war-torn country. Most recently, my doctoral research centers on rural-to-urban Chinese bachelors navigating the structural and emotional challenges of finding marriage partners. Across these projects, I explore how men perform masculinity in relation to family expectations, economic pressures, and social belonging. I am particularly interested in how gendered ideals are lived, negotiated, and sometimes strained under conditions of mobility, precarity, and demographic imbalance.
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This intellectual trajectory is also personal. Growing up, I witnessed two contrasting models of manhood embodied by my blue-collar biological father and my white-collar stepfather. Only later did I come to understand that these divergent masculinities resonate with the Chinese concepts of wen (cultivated, educated, refined masculinity) and wu (martial or physical masculinity). My stepfather emphasized educational attainment and financial provision, while my biological father valued physical strength and manual labor.
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These dual frameworks now anchor my research in China, where I examine how so-called “leftover men” (shengnan) across social classes mobilize and reinterpret wen and wu in their pursuit of marriage. By analyzing how men draw on these classed and moralized forms of masculinity, I show how the capacity to form a family becomes a key site through which gendered worth is measured. Ultimately, my work reveals how cultural ideals of manhood both constrain and animate men’s aspirations, intimate lives, and senses of self.
QUEER KINSHIP
My interest in non-normative families is informed by my own experience as a queer non-monogamous woman growing up in a multicultural, blended family shaped by multiple marriages, wide age gaps, and siblings with varying degrees of biological relatedness. Navigating these layered kin ties cultivated an early awareness that “family” is neither singular nor fixed, but actively made and remade over time.
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This perspective inspired my academic research on kinship, chosen family, and the role of friendship in processes of kin-making. I examine how people name, legitimize, and sustain relationships that fall outside blood and marriage, as well as the legal, moral, and social systems that either recognize or marginalize these bonds.
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In the context of China, where Confucian traditions have historically emphasized patrilineage, ancestor veneration, and biological continuity, I am especially interested in how individuals who cannot (or choose not to) marry or have children cultivate alternative forms of legacy. I explore how friendships, mentorships, and other non-kin ties become sites of care, obligation, and remembrance, complicating conventional definitions of descent and familial love. By interrogating the boundaries of kinship, my work highlights the creative and often quiet ways people forge meaningful, enduring relationships beyond traditional frameworks, expanding what counts as family in both practice and imagination.
SINGLEHOOD
Like my other research interests, my focus on singlehood is shaped in part by my own experience as a single, never-married woman. Engaging the growing subfield of single studies, my work—much like my scholarship on queering kinship—examines how individuals who pursue non-normative life trajectories navigate paths that diverge from dominant expectations of marriage, parenthood, and eventual grandparenthood. Such trajectories unsettle the conventional milestones many societies treat as definitive markers of adulthood, stability, and success.
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Where much of the existing literature centers on women who opt out of marriage or on men in prolonged “waithood” (not married—yet), my research shifts attention to men who are unlikely to marry at all, whether by choice or because of structural and demographic constraints. By foregrounding their experiences, I explore how singleness is negotiated, narrated, and lived over the long term. In doing so, I analyze how enduring bachelorhood complicates cultural ideals of masculinity, provision, and filial responsibility, and I expand conversations about what constitutes a meaningful and socially recognized life course.