On Embodying Revolution: a conversation with Karina Lu

We recently caught up with Karina Lu (Trinity ’26), winner of the 2026 Troost Prize for an undergraduate project in East Asian Studies. We wanted to learn more about her project, her methodology, the disciplinary tools she utilized, and her approach to writing about a challenging topic while maintaining a human-centered perspective. The interview below is lightly edited for length and clarity.

APSI: Tell me a little bit about your inspiration for the thesis. What led you to focus on viewing history through a more personal lens, that of your interlocutor?

Karina Lu: This project started from a final paper. We were studying 20th century China, and I knew that I wanted to do oral history. I was inspired by The Gender of Memory, the book by Dr. Gail Hershatter, and I had known that I wanted to do women's oral histories. Specifically, I wanted to interview the women in my family, and I started with my grandma. She was a farmer for many generations, going into the Cultural Revolution. Out of a necessity from poverty—both her parents died when she was very young—she had to move into the city through marriage. I was really interested in investigating that kind of migration during the Cultural Revolution, from rural to urban. But I quickly found that it's very rare to find a woman who had that exact position during the Cultural Revolution. I had to pivot; I had to find primary sources that made sense, that were more accessible.

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I turned to sent-down youth, because both my paternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather were sent-down youths, and that's how they met. I started looking one node removed from my direct family. All the interviews I did were very different. One of my advisors, Dr. Simon Partner, is a micro-historian who is a big fan of focusing on just one life story, an ordinary life story, to figure out broader meanings. Over the course of working with my primary sources, I was more drawn to that methodology.

The whole intervening against the statist kind of trend in historiography came later, when I started reading secondary sources, trying to position where my oral history sat. I realized that what they were analyzing—the oral histories they extracted for prominent historiography—were very different than what I was interested in analyzing my oral histories for, which is primarily a focus on their bodily experiences and their subjective understanding of how the Cultural Revolution and being sent down in Yunnan changed their lives, both biologically and psychologically, and how they remember that.

APSI: The process of getting that story over time—this must have been multiple interviews—how did you find the story evolving as you worked with Ms. Wei?

KL: The first time I interviewed her was in March, a year before the second interview. Primarily, I was interested in investigating what made being sent down a gendered experience, and in what being sent down was like for her. The emotional, the physiological, the daily, the morning to night—what did it feel like for her?

Towards the end of our second interview, she told me that people don't ask her about her experience; they don't listen deeply. I've heard from other oral historians that it is a common experience for subjects to feel a sense of liberation in just talking about the experience wholly. I felt very honored to have such direct and intimate insight into her life, into everything she experienced, and I think the way she told the story was also revealing. I listened to the recording many, many times; each time, I had a new insight, or a new focus, because it was such a rich life story. After working with it for a year, I decided that I wanted to make my whole project just about her. I knew I wanted another interview asking more questions about the subjective—the missing pieces, such as what was life before the sent-down movement like, and what was life after the sent-down movement like?

In a lot of historiography, there is a missing contextualization. Everyone doesn't start in the same place because of where they were beforehand, and everyone doesn't end up in the same place. Even when they're telling the rustication story, it's been layered with every decade's new political rhetoric that influence how they tell the story and what the meaning of the story is to their life. I wanted to do a more elongated understanding into the before and the after.

So that was what my second interview mostly focused on. I think the second interview uncovered a very major piece of information about her family before going into Yunnan as a rusticated youth: her mother's suicide, her paternal grandmother's relationship with her mother, the absence of her father in her life, and why he was absent. And the treatment of her by her peers and her teachers—I think all of those influenced why I think she had such a draw to Yunnan. In Chinese culture, a big part of a personal identity is also the identity of belonging.

Being from a collectivist culture, you needed a community to belong to feel a sense of rooted identity, and she was missing that after her mother passed away from suicide after being accused of being a counter-revolutionary. Her teachers, who drew her into the propaganda team, were one of her first sources of warmth. She tells me that that was when she first realized there was still a place in the world for her. I think Yunnan is a place that she started fresh, where her own work and hard-working efforts could earn her a place and earn her recognition as someone who was working for the revolution.

I think all those contextualizing details enriched the story. It was interesting for me because those are major things that happened in her life, but if you ask her about her rustication experience, even if she tells you this was one of her life's treasures and that she was really sad to leave, she wouldn't bring up these other details that are crucial to explaining why it was that way. We're not just looking at the rustication movement, we're looking at the broader Cultural Revolution, and we're looking at the broader cultural imperatives that influenced every individual, and how they understood their position to be in society. The tendency from the statist narrative is to periodize, is to compartmentalize, and to separate the human experiences into political movements that, to me, didn't make sense, and that understanding came from more interviews with Ms. Wei.

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APSI: Your attention and your focus on the whole story allowed you to draw even more meaning out of the part of her story that was your focus. Because you were able to contextualize it in such a profound way, it really told a deeper and bigger story, and showed that human side that is very often missing from the historiography. Since you did conduct the research in two languages—and the rustication movement and Cultural Revolution is sometimes considered a sensitive topic—what did you find to be most challenging about the research process, both linguistically and in terms of sensitivity?

KL: I was pretty worried about sensitivity, but I went in with the attitude of: we're not going to make a statement about the state. We're not going to say if it was right or wrong, or how it could have been better, we're just going to look at how it influenced one person. If you're talking about one person's story, and you're not making those indictments about the state or the broader political movement, it's much easier.

That was part of how both Ms. Wei and I felt comfortable. She knew that I was going to use this information not to make that indictment. That attitude prepared me to hold all the contradiction in Ms. Wei's story. I conducted her story first, before I actually read historiography, because I wanted to work with just the primary material. Dr. Barnes's advice was, “don't read anything yet, just have a basic understanding, go in and see what her story is really telling you, and then see what the broader movement is about.” Apart from the sensitivity topic, the hardest part for me was making sense of emic vocabulary.

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A big theme that emerged from the very first interview, from very early on, was this idea of mingyun, which means fate. It's not fatalism, because fatalism in English has this implication of passiveness, of almost pessimism or association with determinism. But it's so much more than that. It's a relational term. There's this folklore in China that there's this old man who draws red strings between each person, and that's how people meet. And that's what we mean when we call it “yuanfen.”

Yuanfen is a term under mingyun, and how do you explain that in English without explaining all the folklore and all the understanding of reincarnation, of spiritualism, of Taoism? At first, I thought she had made this counter-private epistemology of battling the “ren ding shengtian”—the “man conquers nature” narrative. But then the more I researched, the more I realized, this is just the Taoist undertone that has subsisted through centuries of Chinese culture that was not invented by Ms. Wei, but revitalized to fit what was going on in her life.

You see this in little parts, like when they predict each other's fates. In Chinese, it's called “suanming,” and it's seen as superstitious during that era, because we believe in objectivity—there is no such thing as fate, and there is no such thing as palm reading. But during then, they would do that with each other, and you would see the other sent-down youths also believe that. It's hard to condense that into a singular narrative and then to explain, using English, what all of this meant.

A lot of the vocabulary, like, “agency,” I had such a hard time grappling with that word as applied to Ms. Wei's story. I went in saying, “I am going to prove that women had agency,” and then very quickly realized that was such a complicated but also useless thing to do for this thesis. When you're being juxtaposed against what in English is called agency versus maybe determinism or fatalism, but in Chinese, it's the mixture of both, translating that was very difficult.

When we are talking about an embodied revolution where there's supposed to be liberation, is it the state that's supposed to have agency, or is it the individual? Agency is also a very Western term; it's created in a very individualized and autonomized culture. It was as much a conceptual difficulty as it was a translation difficulty.

APSI: That had to have been challenging, as a young person raised in both modern-day Chinese culture and modern-day U.S. culture, and then interacting with someone whose fundamental experiences are in a very different time in Chinese history. When you were comparing the different literature on the rustication movement, was there anything that struck you about works that were written by native Chinese versus scholars of China from other countries? Was there anything that you noticed in terms of relevance or applicability in some of the approaches that scholars have taken?

KL: I would define “native Chinese scholars” for this question to be those who were born and raised in China, or who are still working in the Chinese language, and then “Chinese scholars overseas”—they might be Chinese themselves, but they are writing in the English language for an English audience. Native Chinese scholars are very influenced by the political climate of when they are writing.

Some of the earlier works are trying hard to create understandings of facts, and English scholarship also has a bit of a similar trend. It really starts with Thomas Bernstein's work, which tried to periodize and factualize, and then you had Michel Bonnin's The Lost Generation, which was written originally in French, and it was kind of like an encyclopedia of the sent-down youth generation. Then both strands kind of evolve to have more theory, more questions of why things happen a certain way, and you see both strands have this obsession with memory, with how people remember, but nothing in the memory strands really dive into gender. It's more about politics.

The Chinese scholarship I've had access to is influenced by what made it to American Libraries. I do think my understanding is limited by what Chinese scholarship makes it out of China. I also think American scholarship is more clearly divided into what discipline it's looking at it from—like if it's looking at it from history, if it's looking at it from anthropology, if it's looking at it from sociology. But for Chinese scholarship, it's, to me, a little less strictly divided discipline-wise. They just serve different purposes.

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APSI: What are you hoping that readers of your thesis and scholars of China should learn or understand about the rustication movement?

KL: That is a very complex question. I want readers to know the rustication movement in Yunnan, more specifically, comes down to a story of the body. I hope to justify to readers why it's important to look at gender and to look at an embodied history, not because it adds another side, but because examining gender as an axis, or embodiment as an axis, can fundamentally uncover different truths and broader truths than just a top-down or a political or an economic view.

Looking at bodies and genders as an inevitable element of that question shows us where the state's efforts were ultimately limited. It allows us to complicate the story that the rustication movement was a complete failure. In some historiography, they say that gender was subordinate to class, and so the Communist Party kept going back on their promises of gender to realize their claims. I think it's more complicated. It's not an either-or. It's not neatly separated; it's all intertwined.

You can say that women and men have gender equality, and you see that actualized on the ground. They are provided the same amount of food, but what you don't see is, under extreme poverty, both men and women go out and look for more food because their caloric intake simply isn't enough to sustain their labor. For men, who might have access to technical skills, like digging up yams, a woman in this one oral history was left with no choice but to create personal connections with men, or to dig up their own and get poisoned because they didn't have the technical skills to realize which ones were yams. If you look at it from a broad side, women suffered more than men in that case.

But did it come from a state failure to sustain equality? No, it came from a more complicated story of neither class nor gender alone being enough to create the solution that the state wanted and the people wanted on the ground. In the end, I didn't really have a conclusion I want to make about the rustication movement. It was more a justification for why there is a need for grassroots history. There is a need for whole studies dedicated to just understanding ordinary lives, and just understanding bodies, to actually understand the more top-down political investigations that other scholars might be interested in.

One thing I want readers to take away is that, if we're talking about bodies, time runs out. These bodies are going to fall ill. They are going to fall into the periphery of where scholars are going to be able to reach. Eventually, they will pass away, and there is only so much we can understand about bodies from documented evidence. We're not going to be able to get the subjective experiences, we're not going to get the interpretive lens of what did your embodied experiences do for you, and what did it motivate you to do, and how did it change the way you think?

Initially, I was just going to do a thematic exploration of the rustication movement—of this is what sleep was like, this is what nutrition was like, this is what labor was like. But the more I investigated into it, the more I realized the bodily experiences themselves influenced how they thought, how they worked, why they worked. One woman says, if the body is the capital of the revolution, then what happens when that capital fails you? Are you a counter-revolutionary? Are you useless? Are you going to still be able to live? Her understanding is: what do I need to do to survive? Because the revolution is built on my survival.

She starts doing the opposite of what Wei does, which is put everything into building her revolutionary credit. These women take different stances, but in the end, it's Wei's bodily experiences that falsify the revolutionary ideology of man who conquers nature. There's nuggets of gold in the way that these women talk about their experiences. It shocks you.

So much of why I think this thesis is compelling is due to how these women are telling their stories. I don't think you would get this telling of the story if you weren't doing a grassroots investigation, if you weren't asking for a subjective experience based on bodily experiences. I fear, to that end, that our time is running out. That is what I want to have readers take away from my thesis—the need to do it now, while we still have the opportunity.

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APSI: In your thesis, you mentioned, women are now being called on, and they're responding to this call enthusiastically and eagerly, but the call is to do the heavy labor, the farm work that men had traditionally been tasked with doing, Women were still tasked with the childbearing, the child-rearing, and yet that wasn't valued by the state in the same way, at least at that time.

KL: I had a hard time, going back to vocabulary and emic translations: Iron Girls vs. Iron Women. Almost all literature translates it as “Iron Girls.” If you search “Iron Women,” you're not going to come across any major works. At the advice of my advisor, Dr. Nicole Barnes, I decided to translate it as “women,” because “guniang” is not so much “girl” as it is an endearing term that's about a female person.

At the same time, I put the caution in there. Even though I'm translating it as Iron Women because it's talking about the kind of power they were attributed with, it's still very much talking about young, unmarried women. It's talking about women who aren't starting families, and who aren't going to start families, and who are kind of masculinized, in a way.

A lot of feminist literature, for example, Yan and Yang's Annihilation of Femininity, is talking about gender equality and gender inequality, but it's basing that off the feminism versus masculinity debate, which I think for China, historically, has looked very different. I think that's another element of domestic labor. They tried, like in Soviet Russia, to take away the cooking element of Chinese women by creating communal canteens, but who ends up doing the work there? It's very idealistic in a way, but I think there's a broader conversation on masculinity and femininity. My thesis doesn't dive into it, but I think it's an interesting conversation to have.

APSI: This sparks more questions, which is the hallmark of a great thesis. Are you hoping to do any additional work in this area?

KL: I hope so. I don't think I will ever give up on opportunities that will allow me to further dive into academia. My interest in law, subject-wise, is different; values-wise, it's very similar. I've done a lot of legal work and research in marginalized communities, and how the state reaches into their lives. How does the state govern their lives, and how does it affect their bodies? My job, is complex mass litigation, so it's about class certification, it's about ordinary people and how to raise lawsuits on their behalf, and my values have always stayed the same in that regard.

It's looking at what opportunities open up in my future that allow me to continue advocating for ordinary people by listening to their stories, to have it be more complex than a binary. I want to pursue work that allows me to better understand how we make it better for people without being so quick to assign blame, or to oversimplify, or to make monoliths out of entities in an intellectual atmosphere where structures have such a powerful role in our thinking and understanding. I want to combat that with ordinary, complex, life stories.

^{note: Poster image from the Chinese women's health and family planning posters 1950s-1978 Digital Collection, Duke University Libraries}