Into the In-Between: Siyu Zhang reflects on time as an East Asian Studies MA student at Duke

I was born by the Yangtze River. My earliest impression of relocation came from the families who moved in next to my home after the dam was built upstream. Their houses, put up uniformly by the government, with white walls, black tiles, and eave corners curved upward like a swallow, stood out among the self-built homes around them, marking their owners as guests from another place. 

Every time we passed, the adults would lower their voices: those are the people who were relocated. But in everyday life, they looked the same as us, spoke a dialect not so different from ours, and like the other neighbors, they spread golden rice out to dry and chatted in the afternoon sun.

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Years later, I joined a cruise heading upstream along the Yangtze. Beneath the waterway shrouded in thick fog lay submerged county towns, the hometowns where those families had lived for generations. In high school, I read Peter Hessler's River Town, which documented with clarity and restraint the everyday life of a small river county before the water rose.

It struck me then that what was drowned beneath the river was not just buildings, but history, memory, and the ordinary fabric of daily life. Hessler offered an outsider’s perspective: within a vast state project, what do the very small individual lives look like? Yet I also found myself questioning: Why is it that only outsiders seem able to record honestly?

These questions troubled me for years. It was not until I encountered sociology and anthropology that my curiosity found a place to call home, allowing me to see that biases can be acknowledged, that social mechanisms have their own logic, and that the world is complex and grey.

In college, I studied higher education policy. I went to the UK for graduate school thinking I would keep doing quantitative work, coding, statistics, that kind of research. But somewhere in the middle of it, I realized what I actually loved was ethnography. The British weather and the British food helped me decide where to go next. That is how I ended up in East Asian Studies, in the United States.

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Around that time, I started looking back. The migrants who had moved in next to my family when I was small, the river towns I had grown up beside, books like River Town that I kept returning to. I began to think these things were not passing through my life. They were what I had wanted to study all along. Then I began to move like a migratory bird, following the paths of different people’s migrations.

I documented livelihoods in small villages, followed Han Chinese merchants to small towns in Tibet, and followed young Tibetans to see how they found their footing in big cities. Gradually, I came to realize that how an individual survives, the joys, sorrows, and emotions of a single life, is what I care about most, and what I want to record.

Two years ago, when I received the offer from Duke, I was in a monastery in Lhasa, turning a prayer wheel. I had been doing fieldwork on Han and Tibetan migration, and I assumed I would just keep going, that Tibet would continue to be where my work lived. I will admit I also have a soft spot for mysticism, and standing there in the quiet of the monastery, I thought: maybe Duke is fate. Looking back now, I think it really was, though, as it turned out, fate had something a little different in mind.

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There are many people I want to thank for making those two years possible.

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It was my advisor, Professor Engseng Ho, who first opened the door, and his anthropology courses were the threshold I crossed. I still remember not knowing how to find a topic in the mess of fieldwork, or whether I was capable of anthropology at all, and requesting his help, half-expecting no answer. He answered. From the ground up, he built a way of thinking I could stand on, and never stopped telling me to keep going.

Professor Prasenjit Duara, the director of APSI, had shaped my thinking long before I ever met him. His work had taught me since my first encounter with social science, and it still feels faintly unreal that someone I had read and admired from a distance became someone who would patiently help whenever I asked. It was he who, at the very beginning, pointed me toward the Inner Mongolian plateau, the place where these two years came to live.

Others steadied me along the way. APSI was not only a kind of harbor, with Alex and Renate always there, always warm, but also the place that organized and encouraged us to take part in academic conferences; it was at one of these that I met Professor Yi Wu, my external committee member, whose work on land and property in rural China lit corners of my own research I could not see on my own.

Sociology professor Bai Gao carried me through the hardest stretches of the thesis, offering theory as sharp and wide-ranging as his reading. Prof. Eileen Chow gave help freely, on any matter, at any hour. And APSI's previous postdoctoral associate, Professor Jieun Cho, who, amid her demanding work and teaching at APSI, still made time to support me, from academics to daily life. I am deeply grateful for her kindness, which carried me through the hardest spring. Also Dr. Mingxing Wang, APSI's current postdoc, offered more thoughtful suggestions than I can count.

Here I also found friends who cared about the same things I did. My partner and my parents, too, kept me steady in the simple, stubborn act of chasing what I love. Through three changes of major, through me running off to other countries and remote field sites, they have only ever told me to follow what I love, and to walk that path a little longer.

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I know they have worried about me. And still, they have always told me to follow what I love, and to walk on that path a little longer.

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On the very first day of anthropology class, Professor Ho told me: "If you don't control theory, theory will control you." I have to admit: back then, I didn't like theory. It felt difficult, abstract, hard to hold on to. But now, I think I am only beginning to understand what he meant. The social sciences have given me more than a lens for telling specific stories, they've given me a way of looking at the world. Past the dominant narratives. Into relationships, tensions, and the small possibilities that live in between.

I arrived unsure that I belonged here. I leave Duke knowing that anthropology is something I want to keep with me, not only as a discipline, but as a way of walking through life.