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Joshua D. Pilzer, Listening to Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombs: Prospects for the International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings (November 13-15, 2026)

Since 2010 I have been listening to first and second-generation Korean victims of the atomic bomb and documenting their expressive lives. In November 2026 many of the victims whom I work with will host an International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings, for the purposes of “examin(ing) the legal responsibility of the United States government for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. People’s tribunals, which originate in the 1960s, 1. are important interventions in the global practice of law: they attempt to make human beings, not state or corporate actors, the central focus and the executive authority of law. With the prospect of the International People’s Tribunal on the atomic bombings in view, in this essay I offer some suggestions about how to listen, how to hear as fully as possible the people who are and must remain the central focus and concern of the People’s Tribunal.

In March of 2026, I took part in an Association for Asian Studies conference panel on “People Power: Grassroots Legal Campaigns against Intra- and Inter-state Violence in the Aftermath of WWII and the Cold War,” organized by Lin Li of Kenyon College. The panel concerned two current grassroots legal efforts. The first of these is the current lawsuit in which South Korean women accuse the US military of illegal abuse, confinement, and medical treatment in the sex work network surrounding American military bases in South Korea. The second legal movement we were to discuss was the International People’s Tribunal on the US Atomic Bombings. I prepared my remarks by speaking with one of my key interlocutors, Han Jeongsun, by telephone. Han Jeongsun is one of the main plaintiffs in the People’s Tribunal, a second-generation victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and head of the Korean Society for Second Generation Atomic Bomb Survivors. I asked her about her reasons for participating in the People’s Tribunal. 

“The most important reason is to let people know that we, as victims, exist,” she told me. When the atomic bombs fell on Japan in 1945 there were about 70,000 Koreans in Hiroshima and 30,000 in Nagasaki. Koreans had been recruited from underdeveloped parts of Japanese colonial Korea to do many of the most dangerous jobs involved in the construction of the Japanese empire and its military industrial complex; and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans had largely been brought to Japan for munitions labor. About half of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans died in the bombings; the rest and their descendants have lived out their lives with injury, illness, and developmental disabilities arising from the experience of the bombing and the legacy of radiation exposure. 

It is convenient for the US to ignore the existence of the Korean victims of the atomic bombs, because they are unquestionably innocent victims who cannot be cast as aggressors. It is convenient for Japan to hush up Korean victims, as it helps consolidate the Japanese monopoly on nuclear victimization, part of the post-war sleight-of-hand by which Japan transformed itself from an aggressor nation to a victimized people (see Yoneyama 1999). Even in South Korea, where the atomic bomb has been enshrined in history as an agent of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism, historical consciousness has been reluctant to acknowledge its Korean victims. All of these forces of forgetting are why Han Jeongsun insisted first and foremost that the US and the international community recognize victims’ existence.

She told me of her hopes that the People’s Tribunal will make that possible. “When we said we were going to the US…there’s an expression you probably know. People told us that it will be like ‘hitting a boulder with an egg.’” They told her it would be useless. “But,” she went on, “I don’t think of it that way. Thinking of the victims, especially the second-generation radiation sufferers, and how they have to leave the world in this terrible pain, it’s awful. That feeling of being ill-used… What we’ve got is not a chicken egg, it’s a quail’s egg. It’s so much smaller. We throw it to express these awful feelings, although it likely won’t break the stone. But we want to leave behind even a trace. And in this way victims might be able to relieve their hearts of their burdens just a little. And we want to ask people to understand the depth of these horrible feelings. We want to shout to demand such understanding. We want people to see our will to strike the stone with our pain. And in this way we want to communicate to Americans that even now there are people suffering as the result of the use of nuclear weapons.” 

The atomic bomb, in the global imagination, conjures up images of mushroom clouds and horrible injury and destruction. If you have looked into the matter, you may have read something about it, perhaps starting with John Hersey’s astounding Hiroshima. The global imagination about the atomic bombs is largely silent, which means it is devoid of living people. It has been framed as a historical event, not the living legacy that it is, which continues to harm countless people. One way of acknowledging these people is to listen—to actually listen—to victims. The International People’s Tribunal, a remarkable product of the community of Korean bomb victims’ grassroots activism, is the best opportunity for the international community to do so yet.

In my monograph Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of ‘Korea’s Hiroshima’ (2022), readers encounter and listen to several victims at length, hearing their voices on the book’s website. Theirs are practically inconceivable stories of suffering and endurance, as double victims of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Koreans and the indiscriminate atomic bombing of Asian civilians by the United States. For all their injury and fragility, their voices have a strength that is powerful beyond the words that human voices are often reduced to, in scholarship, in thought, and in legal proceedings. 

Han Jeongsun is a second-generation victim of the bomb because her parents were in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Her mother was pregnant with her older brother, who died soon after they relocated to Korea at the end of the war. All of her siblings have suffered from the intergenerational transfer of illness and disability that is the legacy of the atomic bombing and its radiation. Her youngest sibling lost all of his teeth as a child. Han Jeongsun herself suffers from avascular necrosis, a degenerative bone disease that has required her to have twelve surgeries for knee replacement. Her son suffers from cerebral palsy and, as she puts it, “lives lying down.” 

There is much to be learned from listening to Han Jeongsun’s voice, and her often spoken, sometimes sung narration of her experiences. In my book, I investigate the remarkable ways that she draws on popular cultural resources in her effort of survival and in her activist speech—in official statements, testimonies, and casual talk. Through sung and spoken quotation she weaves songs into tapestry-like narratives of the experiences of second-generation victims of the atomic bomb. In so doing, she connects the experiences of profoundly marginalized and forgotten Korean atomic bomb victims with core metaphors of mainstream popular culture, making profoundly compelling claims to social membership and a plea for recognition. 

Han Jeongsun does this work of connection utilizing myriad songs of struggle from the 20th century genre of Korean ballads known as teuroteu, an abbreviated Koreanization of ‘foxtrot.’ ‘Trot’ originates in the Japanese colonial period and is perhaps the genre that most painfully and ambivalently expresses the sorrows of Korean modernity. She borrows the many references to walking as a metaphor for struggle found in Korean popular song in order to relate this core metaphor to her literal experiences of difficulty walking. Yu Jina’s 2009 “Gochu” (Hot Pepper), with its references to the seemingly endless chains of mountain passes that dot the Korean landscape, Shin Yu’s 2008 “Jam janeun gongju” (Sleeping Princess), which invokes the ‘world road’ (sesang-gil) one walks in life, and “Queen of Elegy” Yi Mi-ja’s 1968 “Yeojaui ilsaeng” (Woman’s Life), which refers to the “weary life-road” (godalpeun insaeng-gil), are just some of the references to walking that make appearances in her narratives. Han Jeongsun may sing a verse, or quote a text for support, or slip in a phrase from a song text so subtly that only people deeply familiar with the ‘trot’ genre would even know it was there. 

Han Jeongsun’s knack for making these connections and for encapsulating experience in speech are just two aspects of her eloquence, which has assured her central place in the movement. Her narration of the second-generation experience has had subtle and enduring effects on the activism and media coverage surrounding Korean first and second-generation bomb victims. Her poetry of walking as struggle, for instance, surfaces across the activist discourse of the second-generation movement (Pilzer 2022: 170). And all of this eloquent activism has culminated in her central role in the upcoming International People’s Tribunal.  

As we concluded our telephone call Han Jeongsun told me that she and Shim Jintae, a first-generation victim of the bombing of Hiroshima and director of the Hapcheon Branch of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, were planning to visit the US a few months later for a speaking tour, in order to spread the word about the tribunal. So in May 2026 I travelled to the UN to hear her and Shim Jintae speak at a side event held during the 11th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The panel was put on by SPARK, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, an activist organization founded in 1994 to fight for a more equable relationship between the US and Korea, and to pursue peace, disarmament, and Korean reunification. 

Shim Jintae spoke first. He told us briefly about his childhood in Hiroshima, before giving a long and reasoned indictment of the US for its failure to acknowledge that the atomic bombings were war crimes. “How can there be victims without aggressors?” he asked. “How, if the US refuses to accept responsibility for the 1945 atomic bombings how do we hold accountable any nation that seeks to use nuclear weapons today?” 

Han Jeongsun presented next, speaking forcefully and clearly, clearly feeling the gravity of the situation. This was not quite the place for her rich cultural embroidery, but for succinct, unequivocal and articulate expression of the situation of Korean second-generation victims, and of her suffering and anger. She read from a text she had written. She described her family’s suffering due to the bomb, and the onset of her avascular necrosis. She described being unable to walk, and how the floor of her apartment was covered in blood as she used her torn hands to move about. She spoke of her activism on behalf of second-generation victims. She voiced her frustration about the refusal of the United States to offer apology or compensation to the victims of the atomic bombings of Japan. She concluded by expressing her hopes for the International People’s Tribunal.    

Han Jeongsun’s speech was filled with the sort of epigrammatic brilliance that has made her so important to the movement. She described how the damage of nuclear radiation passes down mercilessly through the generations. “In mybody, the war rages endlessly,” she said. The translation of this speech on the webpage of the International People’s Tribunal, which records her making the statement at an event in March 2025, omits that last, epigrammatic line,2 perhaps because she added it later. Whatever the reason, there is a richness missing from the written transcript that leads me to suspect that the entextualization of thought and speech here does more than just flatten both into text; its flattening effect extends to the content of expression as well. Han Jeongsun’s speech was originally text, although it was written to be read aloud and listened to. A written transcript of a read speech thus endures two phases of entextualization, such that few traces of the sound and the sounding body remain. And yet the body, as Han Jeongsun has told us, is the locus of victimization.

Listening to victims’ voices allows for hearing that does not erase, in the entextualization of experience, the human bodies that bear the legacy of the bombs. To listen in this way, it is essential to pay attention to what they say and how they say it as if these two aspects of expression were of equal importance. This means that one can listen to half the story without knowing the languages in which victims are speaking. It is also essential to listen beyond official contexts, to encounter the broad range of expressive practices that constitute the expressive ecology of victims as activists and witnesses to experience.

Victims like Han Jeongsun and Shim Jintae imbue their speech with an unimaginable strength. They offer their voices, phrases, statements, and narrative tapestries to listeners, such that they might educate and energize the movement on behalf of justice for the victims and a nuclear-free world. These voices and their messages are things listeners can learn from; but they are also tools we can all use in pursuit of human flourishing. 

Shim Jintae (l), Han Jeongsun and other towers of power, Central Park, New York, May 2026.
Han Jeongsun and Shim Jintae (seated, center) with SPARK members and others at the UN side event, May 2026. Courtesy of SPARK (Solidarity for the Peace and Reunification of Korea).

References Cited:

Hersey, John. 1946. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

International People’s Tribunal on 1945  US Atomic Bombings. 2026. “Leaflet: The International People’s Tribunal to hold the US accountable for dropping A-bombs.” Online document, https://abombtribunal.campaignus.me.

Pilzer, Joshua D. 2022. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima.” New York: Oxford University Press.

Simm, Gabrielle, and Andrew Byrnes. 2013. “International People’s Tribunals in Asia: Political Theatre, Juridical Farce, or Meaningful Intervention?” Asian Journal of International Law 4: 103-24.

Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.


Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music, and an affiliate faculty of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto.

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Erin Huang reviews Arnika Fuhrmann, In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

Fuhrmann, Arnika. In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City. Duke University Press, 2026.

What does it mean to trace and historicize Bangkok as a “Chinese” city?  Written at a time when Chinese Thai connections—rooted in nineteenth-century migration and colonial modernity—are subject to ruinous decay and waves of revival under the dual pressures of capitalist urban development and the geopolitical influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Arnika Fuhrmann’s In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City is a timely and visionary remapping of Chinese Thai history that puts “China,” “Southeast Asia,” and the conventional definitions of “regionalism” in flux.

Based on an original archive—ranging from the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s utilization of Bangkok’s Chinese quarters in In the Mood for Love in Part I, to a tour of Bangkok’s hospitality venues that revive the aesthetics of colonial modernity in Part II, and a deft selection of contemporary Thai literature and films in Part III—Fuhrmann narrates a “dis-appearing” spatial history of Bangkok shaped by Chinese migration to Thailand. Following postcolonial studies scholar Ackbar Abbas’s influential theorization of Hong Kong as a “space of dis-appearance”—by which he means not the literal disappearance of Hong Kong culture at the cusp of the 1997 Handover, but rather a “negative hallucination,” or failing to recognize what is already there—Fuhrmann extends the inquiries into cultural identities under the conditions of (old and new) colonialism and imperialism in Hong Kong to Bangkok and Southeast Asia.

Retracing a modern transnationalism and urban cosmopolitanism that connected East Asia and Southeast Asia through port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, the book challenges the conventional method of area studies that divides cultures along the borderlines of modern nation-states. By asking what kinds of histories would be revealed if one followed the transregional network of (semi-)colonial port cities, one of the answers the book provides is the emergence of a “transregional personhood”—often gendered as “female”—that not only brings to light the process of female commodification and fetishization, but also the irreducible excesses of “transregional femininity” as a site for embodying a transnational and potentially oppositional plurality across borders.

Historicizing and theorizing the hypervisibility of “transregional femininity” as it appears in films, hospitality venues, and the transformation of Bangkok through urban development and financial capital, In the Mood for Texture is an unconventional gender history focused on “transregional Chinese femininity” as the interplay between reality and fantasy. Tracking the palimpsestic evolution of the “Modern Girl” from 1930s Shanghai, the fashion show of women’s cheongsam in Wong Kar-wai’s depiction of 1960s Hong Kong in In the Mood for Love, and the revival of early twentieth-century aesthetics of “colonial modernity” in Bangkok’s contemporary hospitality venues, the book argues that “femininity” can no longer be understood solely as a site of “recoding”—a concept introduced by historian Tani Barlow to describe the process of redefining “femininity” according to the demands of the superstructure. Rather, “femininity” needs also to be read for its multilayered excesses that are equipped with the potential to disrupt dominant assumptions about ethnicity and gender.

In Fuhrmann’s gender history, the socio-cultural fantasies of a “Chinese femininity” in “Southeast Asia”— “ornamentalized” according to the aesthetics and fashions of (semi-)colonial Asian port cities—complicate and extend the conventional approach to “orientalism” (premised on the power relations between the East and the West) and “self-orientalism” (that Rey Chow provocatively theorizes as the East’s return of the West’s gaze). Often mediated through gendered and racialized bodies, orientalism has created an array of representations of what race studies scholar Anne Cheng describes as “Asiatic femininity,” or “yellow femininity.” Parsing orientalism as the West’s feminizing invention of the “Orient” as ornaments, porcelain, and silk—in other words, thing-like objects—Cheng theorizes “yellow femininity” as synthetic personhood in a long genealogy of “not-yet or no-longer subjecthood” that is entangled in the history of thingness and objectification. Whereas Cheng’s Ornamentalism contends with power relations between the East and the West, In the Mood for Texture shifts focus to inter-Asia relations and the power dynamics between Southeast Asia and the newly expansionist PRC.

The book boldly theorizes a “trans-Asia,” or “trans-regional” Asian femininity that has become a site of contest between neoliberal capitalism and its dissents. As Fuhrmann argues, the revival of a transregional Chinese femininity in Thailand can be mapped along a spectrum of visibility bracketed by neoliberal commodification and consumer desires on the one hand, and an experimental platform of social plurality on the other. Through the transcendent and transgressive positionality of social plurality—creating a transregional personhood that “detemporalizes and deterritorializes identity” (157)—Fuhrmann expands the focus on femininity to unpack a range of trans-Asia socio-cultural phenomena that otherwise are not legible in a nation-centered framework.

To contextualize the emergence of trans-Asia imaginaries, the book begins with post-Handover Hong Kong cinema and Wong Kar-wai’s frenzied film In the Mood for Love (2000), where Hong Kong is connected to parts of Southeast Asia—Thailand, Cambodia, and Singapore—through the ruins of (semi-)colonialism and imperialism, or what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial debris.” Central to the book’s argument is the complexity of the “nostalgia” for colonial modernity that reanimates Southeast and East Asia as an integrated cultural and trading network. This nostalgia cannot be simply dismissed as neoliberal commodification. Rather, the book interprets the desire for alternative temporalities and a different spatial configuration for understanding Southeast Asia as a region as the result of an accumulation of discontents toward notions of “Chineseness” that become homogenized under the PRC’s national policies.

Methodologically, rather than combing through population statistics, Fuhrmann’s book centrally highlights “texture”—architecture, design, and women’s fashion—as the primary lens of sensing, feeling, and preserving history. Citing Eve Sedgwick, Fuhrmann highlights the haptic quality of texture—through which touch is performed visually, acoustically, or by other multi-sensorial extensions—as a channel of intersubjective communication and perception. Implicit in her methodology is the importance of the histories and memories that things, objects, and the built environments hold, for which the human subject only plays the agent of activation. The focus on “texture” and “touch” also experiments with assembling racial histories through the (re)built environments—e.g., Bangkok’s 1880s Customs House, Chinatown, and Lhong 1919—by asking how space produced lived histories, habitats, and gendered and racialized embodiments and relationalities that are important primary materials in compiling the history of racial formation. At a moment when Bangkok becomes a literal “city of disappearance” due to the speed of urban expansion, In the Mood for Texture is on the one hand a crucial archive that preserves the city’s Chinese pasts, and on the other hand, it is an “archaeology of the future,” as each chapter skillfully unpacks the desires and wishes for a Chinese Thai futurity that transcends the ethos of both the PRC and populist-authoritarian or military-led Thailand.

Chapter one, “City Connectivities,” locates the “mood for textures” by reconfiguring the link between Shanghai and Hong Kong; in tracing the aesthetics of colonial modernities in Bangkok, the chapter engages a close examination of the convergence of the three cities’ in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Chapter 2 excavates Wong’s quest for the “textures” of a trans-Asia modernity in Southeast Asia through the film’s iconic displays of women’s cheongsams (qipao), cosmopolitan interiors, and an urban environment shaped by international trade. Here, Fuhrmann expands her research to Bangkok’s hospitality venues (hotels, bars, coffee shops) to tease out the far-reaching influence of the “Wong aesthetics” beyond this single film. Such remapping not only preserves the dis-appearing Chinese Thai histories in the city, as seen in the ruination and revival of historical sites such as the Customs House. More importantly, Fuhrmann illustrates—through interviews, textual analyses, and fieldwork—the limitations of reading In the Mood for Love and its atmospheric and architectural influence as the commodification of nostalgia. Rather, Wong’s film can be read as one iteration of an emergent sentiment for transregional connections that go beyond modern nationalism. Fuhrmann writes, “Viewing In the Mood for Love…. generates an understanding of Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other former treaty port cities as in principle united not only as Chinese locations but also as territories whose inhabitants still desire a different regional imaginary than one that succumbs to contemporary realpolitik” (68).

Whereas Part I explores the circulation and revival of the aesthetics of colonial modernities across three “Chinese” cities, Part II contours the history of Bangkok as a Chinese city. Illustrating the changing perception of the “Chinese”—from a migrant population of laborers that endured anti-Chinese policies to a newly desirable ethnic identity—Fuhrmann draws out dialect cultures and neighborhood projects meant to distinguish and preserve the remnants of Chinese Thai migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zeroing in on Bangkok’s vanishing Chinatown, Chapter 3 touches on key sites of architecture, such as the Chinatown Gate, the Yaowarat Heritage Center, and the Berlin Museum, that play prominent roles in mediating Chinese history in Thailand. Cautioning against the conflation of Chinese Thai history and the PRC’s narrative of modern history, the chapter visits Chinese heritage sites such as Lhong 1919 that invoke the early twentieth-century treaty port culture to tease out the complex sensory landscape of revival, from commodification to cultural preservation.

Shifting focus to a transgenerational memory that contests the official Thai narratives of Chinese migration (mediated through the Yaowarat Heritage Center), Chapter 4 centers on the 2019 film Happy Old Year, or How to Dump(directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit). By pairing the film with historical sites in the city that are part of an urban revival movement, including the FooJohn Building, As Is Café, and Mother Roaster, Fuhrmann teases out a family’s nuanced struggles with managing the spatial memories of being Chinese in Bangkok. In the film, the protagonist Jean—a Sweden-trained architect undertaking a renovation project on her family’s cluttered music school—finds her minimalist style coming into conflict with the family house’s transgenerational histories and Bangkok’s Chinese pasts. Pairing two nearly forgotten race riots with revived hospitality sites near the riot scenes—the 1945 Yaowarat and 1974 Phlapphla Chai incidents—the chapter recalls the city’s anti-Chinese tenor and the politics of remembering and forgetting through the film’s theme of generational memories.

Extending the politics of remembering and reviving Bangkok’s Chinese history, Part III is comprised of two chapters that rethink “region” from the vantage point of “Southeast Asia.” Featuring the work of the Thai novelist Veeraporn Nitiprapha, such as Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (originally published in Thai in 2016), Chapter 5 is a soft rebuttal of the framework of “Chinese diaspora” that conventionally centers China as the primary site of origin and belonging. In the novelist’s chronicle of a Chinese Thai family history spanning three generations who experienced China’s Cultural Revolution transnationally, “China” is far from a space of homecoming. Through the novel’s focus on transregional displacement, Southeast Asia serves as a vantage point for narrating the “decentering” of China.

Ending the book with the 2017 heist thriller film Bad Genius (directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya), Chapter 6 expands the critique of “Chinese diaspora” with ruminations on the applicability of the “Sinophone”—the study of Sinitic languages and cultures around the world—as a framework for Chinese Thai histories of Southeast Asia. Through the film’s main female protagonist Lynn, a high school student with an implied Chinese heritage who orchestrates a multinational cheating operation, Fuhrmann highlights the limitations of the Sinophone, as the chapter thinks through a “Chineseness without (much) Chinese language.” In comparison to the textual readings in Part I and the architectural readings in Part II, Part III’s selection of contemporary Thai literature and film homes in on the articulations of Chinese Thai perspectives that challenge “nation” and “language” as the primary sites of identity formation.

Shaped by feminist historian Tani Barlow’s framework of colonial modernity and the history of “femininity” as a site of social inscription, In the Mood for Texture is at heart a gender history of the feminine mediation of Chineseness in Thailand. Although “femininity” figures prominently as the cultural site where concepts of “Chineseness,” “transnationality,” “plurality,” and “difference” are negotiated and mediated—producing a “trans-Asianness” that pushes back against China-centrism and Southeast Asian nationalism—the book could draw from a more nuanced understanding of the “Sinophone” by recalling the wider range of methodologies of Sinophone studies, such as “minor transnationalism,” “against diaspora,” “transculturation,” and the “creolization of theory.” Emphasizing relational, reciprocal, and intersectional approaches to the historical realities of imperialism and colonialism that de-center the conventional focus on Euro-American empires, Sinophone studies has produced a range of analytical lenses based on the historical and regional specificities of Asia. Put another way, there are more synergies between the book’s careful parsing of a transregional inter-Asia perspective and the Sinophone framework that are better shown than acknowledged.

One example relates to recent interests in Sinophone studies to address the limitation of defining the Sinophone solely through (Sinitic) languages. By locating “Sinophone articulations” in a wide range of disciplines, media, and technologies of expression, new research in Sinophone studies has shown the histories of differences that pluralize “Chineseness” through visual culture, oral history, ethnomusicology, performance, and affect studies. As Fuhrmann’s book provocatively illustrates—through the dis-appearing Chinese quarters of Bangkok and their preservation and revival—the “lived environments,” including architecture, urban rhythm, and infrastructure (such as ports), play a central role in inscribing, creating, and transmitting (old and new) spatial memories and histories across multiple generations. Through Fuhrmann’s elegant reading of contemporary Thai film and literature, Part III congeals the articulation of “transregional Chineseness without China” and a plural personhood not reducible to one location, language, or nationality. The transregional personhood is the result of a long genealogy of transgenerational spatial histories—namely, the haptic memories of transregional Chineseness embedded in the city’s immersive textures. For these reasons, the book offers an important method for illustrating racial history outside a linguistic framework and could be brought into closer dialogue with transmedia Sinophone studies. 

In the Mood for Texture pioneers an experiential “psychogeography” of Bangkok—the power of urban environments and geographical locations to shape human behaviors and social norms—as a method of retracing modern regional racial formations. The book opens a new pathway for the study of race in Asia by de-emphasizing dialects, linguistic policies, statistics, education and class, and other conventional means of understanding the history of migration and race. The multiple iterations of “trans-” (transregional and transgenerational) in Chinese Thai history have left behind concrete materialities in the city, requiring different sensing capacities to decode Bangkok as a Chinese city. Thinking through design practices in hospitality venues as well as in film and literature, the book is a nuanced study of howBangkok as a transregional and transgenerational Chinese city is imagined, revived, and lived. As “Chineseness” is incrementally made into a homogenous category under new national policies of the PRC in recent decades, the book attests to a unique iteration of “minor transnationalism”—formed through port cities and the cultures of colonial modernity in Southeast Asia—where the dream for a different Asian cosmopolitanism unfolds.  

References

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Barlow, Tani E. “Femininity.” The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, edited by Akira Iriye and Pierre-yves Saunier, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 388-92.

Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1995.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. The Creolization of Theory. Duke University Press, 2011.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. Minor Transnationalism. Duke University Press, 2005.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003.

Shih, Shu-mei. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, Brill, 2010, pp. 29-48.

Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. University of California Press, 2007.

Stoler, Ann Laura, editor. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Duke University Press, 2013.

 

Erin Y. Huang is Associate Professor of Inter-Asia, Sinophone, and gender and sexuality studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. Her current book project, Ocean Worlds: Transpacific Worldmaking Across Sensorial Oceans, is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025-2030), and focuses on American, Chinese, and Taiwanese military and surveillance visual and literary cultures in the Arctic Ocean, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea.

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Shiqi Lin, To Fail, to Struggle, to Live the Impossible: Remembering Ackbar Abbas

I received my PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine under the guidance of Ackbar Abbas. When I was encouraged to write a personal reflection in memory of Ackbar, my initial reaction was reluctance. To me, it was an impossible task. Not because I wasn’t close to Ackbar, but quite the reverse. I had taken many seminars with him, TA’ed for him, typed for him, and spent numerous hours in conversation with him. I was also fortunate to see him every year—in Irvine and Beijing—from the year of my admission to grad school until January 2026. However, to respond to the boundless spirit of his mind and to unpack the deep bond of our mentoring relationship in words simply felt like: how might it even be possible to draw the universe in a painting or seize the stars from afar? 

And yet, I became convinced after further prodding that even my struggle to write the impossible would itself be meaningful to reflect on Ackbar’s teaching and thinking. This is a theorist who, in the past several years, was thinking extensively about failure and refusal in company with Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. Compelled by contemporary cultural conditions in Hong Kong and the world, as well as his own inability to return from Irvine to Beijing and re-unite with his wife Liu Sola during COVID-19, failure and refusal appeared as regular motifs in his class lectures, emails, chats, and in his last pieces of writing. To him, thinking itself is an act of struggle against the possibility of its own failure; it makes turns and refuses to give in to the realities of life. This endeavor was similar to another topic we often discussed extensively—the workings of documentary film: when the documentary hits a representational impasse, the solution is not to turn away but to take on documentation more forcefully so as to struggle with limits and engage with the impossible.

In practice, Ackbar’s teaching about failure happened several times during my time in grad school, when he’d respond to my writer’s block very kindly by saying, “It’s fine. You don’t need to give me thirty pages. Just bring a few paragraphs. I am here to think with you.” I am here to think with you… That is to say, I am here to share your struggle… You can fail, but you are not alone.

In the spirit of immense intellectual companionship, trust, and generosity instilled by this act of thinking-with, I write with personal memories that have been replaying in my mind in the past several months. In the course of following heartbreaking updates about Ackbar’s health conditions through Gabriele Schwab, my other mentor, and constantly feeling the ache of not being able to see him in Beijing this past summer, I know that thinking-with is the least I can do, but it is also the most possible so as to carry on with Ackbar’s cheerful and indefatigable spirit.

An Uncanny Journey

Studying with Ackbar had a mind-boggling start: I learned that he, a sophisticated theorist of new media and digital technology, didn’t know how to type. Even more dramatically, I once received a nickname, “ship”—yes, in lowercase—thanks to the autocorrect function of his email. This is the same advisor who had cut and pasted an image of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History on the cover of a notebook, as if he himself were living like the Angel fiercely resisting the storm of technological progress via his thinking and handwriting. When I discovered this Angel on his notebook, I came to the realization: “Okay, my advisor is a living ‘anachronism’ and ‘Baroque allegory’ analyzed by himself.” Since then, I observed again and again how it was a live contradiction, a quiet life, and the critical distance that he had intentionally curated between himself and the external world that allowed him to produce some of the sharpest and most interesting critiques of technology and cultural politics. It was amusing, as well as enlightening, that he was already talking about the eccentric thinker Byung-Chul Han as a crazy philosopher (as if he himself were not crazy enough!) as early as 2018; he was already quoting Han’s critique of social media as a “shitstorm” at a time when pre-pandemic digital discourse was largely utopian and forward-looking.

In the Winter 2020 quarter when I was TA’ing for him in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak, “how would my advisor use Zoom and get groceries” was a question that unnerved me just as much as the question of “where could I still find masks and Clorox wipes.”

During the pandemic years when he was stranded in Irvine, we had quite a number of marathon meetings that often lasted an entire morning or afternoon to discuss my writing drafts word by word, line by line. In spite of the anxious and violent time, the shared space of sincere and dedicated thinking offered me an invaluable source of calm and focus. Regardless of who he was speaking to and what topic was at hand, he upheld the same standard for every piece of writing: thinking had to reach its highest level of precision. Often, my inquiry about one word in my writing would turn into a thirty-minute discussion, with me asking him to re-iterate an idea three times or us debating big questions, such as whether “postcolonialism” or “neoliberalism” is (still/ever) an adequate framework to theorize contemporary China and East Asia. During those meetings, I brought mooncakes and dim sum, and he, in turn, offered his carrot juice, coconut water, a variety of teas, his favorite black sesame candies, along with his childhood stories of Hong Kong snacks. These sessions form some of my most cherished memories of the pandemic.

In 2023, I graduated from Irvine. This was around the same time that he finally achieved his dream of reuniting with Sola in Beijing.

As my parents also live in Beijing, I became one of the handful of lucky ones who maintained close contact with Ackbar and continued to see him every year after his retirement. It had already become my routine practice to see Ackbar during my every family visit back to Beijing. He is part of my family. Each trip to Ackbar and Sola’s lovely siheyuan residence from my parents’ place was a three-hour journey from the southwest of the city to the northeast end, switching between bus, subway, and Didi, until it became muscle memory to tell where I was in the journey.

I now have to grapple with the question of what it means that neither Beijing nor Irvine will be the same the next time I go back.

“I am a Hong Kong boy!”

One of my favorite memories about Ackbar dates from 2022 in Irvine, when a new friend, a visiting scholar and seasoned local from Hong Kong, asked to see him. At the university Peet’s Coffee where we met, Ackbar wore a baseball cap and responded to the friend’s query about his Hong Kong roots. He chatted about the local shops and schools in Kennedy Town from his childhood, some of which even pre-dated the friend’s knowledge, and he smiled gleefully: “I am always a Hong Kong boy!” It made me wonder: for those who have revered him as an academic tsar in conferences and lecture halls, could they ever have imagined this carefree boyish person behind the theorist?

Although I never crossed paths with Ackbar in Hong Kong, I was familiar with his legendary status and continuing enormous impact in the city. (According to him, even the flamboyant singer and actor Leslie Cheung, his ex-brother-in-law, looked up to him as a childhood hero.) In our conversations in Irvine and Beijing, Hong Kong came up regularly—usually prompted by my strong curiosity to ask him to share more—as a window into his fascinating past; as a node of urban interconnection; as a point of reference for theorizing contemporary global cultural situations; and as a paradigm of doing critical theory and cultural studies. Directly or indirectly, these conversations have sparked my long-term interest in thinking through Hong Kong.

Internationally recognized for his seminal book, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997), Ackbar is known for anatomizing the cultural politics of the layered city at its moment of handover from Britain to the PRC. However, for Ackbar, the relevance of Hong Kong went far beyond its actual geography and the 1997 moment. I always appreciated the times when he talked about his grandparents from Malaysia, India, and Cambodia (Cambodian Chinese), as well as his father’s wartime experience as a displaced refugee. As a living allegory of the making of modern Asia, his family story stands as a symbol to me for why Hong Kong is and will always remain a unique place for thinking about the world and cultural theorization: not because it’s an Asian or global financial center, not because of its interstitial status between British colonialism and PRC rule, but because it has always been a node of intercultural crossings, a murky grey zone, and a critical switch point that preserves its ambiguity and shelters people from all walks of life for making and re-making habitats in regenerative ways. In Ackbar’s words, Hong Kong is special not because it tells of local identity that should be essentialized, but because it manifests a larger cultural situation of dis-location—dis-location as both a global symptom of sociopolitical change and a strategy to rewrite the global contemporary.

In Ackbar’s teaching and writing after Hong Kong, this attentiveness to dis-location remained deep in his thinking and served as a capacious method when his analysis expanded into new cinema, digital media, urbanization, and a paradigm of globalization that runs on the logic of the fake in China, Africa, and the Global South. From Hong Kong to post-socialist China and, inevitably, to the post-2016 United States whose technopolitical changes have baffled and mattered to the world in a myriad of ways, Ackbar’s insights on not just contemporary social changes, but the changing nature of these changes in a shifting structure of global political economy, have proved time and again prophetic: it is not change that has changed, but the frames and coordinates through which change takes place that have changed.

I was very lucky to work with Ackbar at a time when the geographical focus of my doctoral research—contemporary China—aligned with much of his work and concern of the last two decades. The theoretical problematics of a fast-changing China organically chimed with many symptoms of Hong Kong that he had scrutinized, and he repeatedly encouraged me to see that understanding contemporary China and its mutating, intertwining relationship with the U.S. is indispensable to understanding the present and future of the world. With an emphasis on dis-location rather than exceptionalizing a space, what made his teaching particularly instructive for me is not his reading of an area, but the theoretical questions his work opened up for de-familiarizing our analytical lens of every place. It helps in building new strategies to articulate global social changes associated with translatable questions such as speed, scale, agency, mediality, and the political force of critical inquiry. For many of the students at Irvine, whose topics ran the gamut from Armenia to the Philippines, from literature and cinema to popular culture, he engaged with all our work with a sense of radical receptivity. What we learned from him was not a particular theory or a set focus on a geography, but a stance from which to think, a mode of problematizing the familiar, a way of navigating the world around us.

Living the Unknown

In my last several conversations with Ackbar, I frequently brought up a set of metaphysical questions, secretly praying that the master—in his remote study in Beijing surrounded by his favorites Benjamin, Kafka, Pessoa, Burroughs, Deleuze, etc.—would have the magic power to enlighten me and the world with decades of accumulated wisdom and life experience: “Ackbar, where do you think the world is going? What can my generation do about the collapsing systems everywhere? How do we persist?”

Sometimes he responded with two remarks on the unprecedented challenges faced by universities and the world’s two biggest economies, China and the U.S. Sometimes he recounted how the present time was nothing like earlier days. But more often, he just smiled like a Buddha, “It’s a question for your generation to figure out.”

This was the same kind of smile I got when I told him in the same conversations that my recent research interests had moved to the political histories of dance music, while showing him some flashy and bombastic Instagram reels of mass raves under bridges and inside tunnels. Partly to entertain him, and partly to sneak in questions seriously occupying my mind, I would ask, “Ackbar, what do you make of the hyper-mediality of this? What kind of political space is coming out of this?” Over the years, having patiently and supportively witnessed me explore my interests from documentary to digital media, from science fiction to popular music, sometimes luckily seeing some light through and some other times stumbling and hitting dead ends, he didn’t question my sanity. He just smiled and hinted, “This is interesting, and you have to figure it out yourself.”

This is interesting, and you have to figure it out yourself. Your generation has its own tasks to tackle—and you can’t hide. In these moments, even if Ackbar claimed that the challenges of the present day are exceptional, I found a strange parallel between the time we’re living now and another unprecedented moment—the time that gave rise to his theorization of Hong Kong in the 1990s. In fact, I was often haunted by the opening passage he wrote in the first essay of the first issue of the positions journal in 1993, on the poetry of the Hong Kong writer Leung Ping-kwan: “Living in interesting times, as the old Chinese adage tells us, is a dubious advantage. Interesting times are periods of violent transition and uncertainty” (Abbas 1993: 1). As someone who had navigated his own “interesting times,” he didn’t directly answer my queries, but I think the way he responded to his times with the critical distance to think, to critique, and to generate vocabulary on the sharp edge has already pointed in a direction.

When I think back to his Buddha-esque smiles, it feels as if I were receiving the message, just keep venturing and stumble. Fail, fail better, learn something from your failures, and keep failing. You don’t have to be scared of the unknown. You may have to fail—and that’s how you persist. To fail is to persist. Just as he wrote in one iteration of “failure as resistance”:

We find here not a failure of resistance, but rather failure as resistance; a politics of failure that is not the same as a failed politics and that has its own kind of heroism quite different from other kinds of heroism. […] In the volatile spaces of today, our motto may have to be: Dare to fail. Failure, we might say, is the moral heroism of our time, in social life as well as in our art. It is what allows us to continue under conditions of impossibility. To act, not because we have hope, but because we refuse to give in to despair.

Mission Accepted

After Ackbar’s passing, a few of us—friends, students, and former colleagues who have benefited immeasurably from his thinking and spirit—have been talking about how to properly remember and carry on his legacy in comparative literature and critical theory. To imagine an event and a material form of our remembrance, just like my struggle to piece together my thoughts and memories for this essay, feels impossible, because we all know that Ackbar hates cliché, hates both sentimentalism and formalism, and hates it when theory is deified rather than subverted. On a conceptual level, he is also giving us headaches such as “how can you embody ‘poor theory’ through an art performance” or “how can you really explain his mysterious cosmological thinking of the ‘quantum image’—the topic of the last grad seminar he offered at Irvine.” However, no matter what format we will eventually come up with, there is one thing I am sure of: we will take on the task of the impossible. As Ackbar taught us, theory cannot be reproduced as clichés, but must be meaningfully and playfully lived, performed, smashed, and re-invented at its edge. As such, I know that the spirit of Ackbar will stay longwith us, closely and profoundly, in the way we think, write, live, and grieve. We will miss you, Ackbar.

“To Shiqi – Now the work begins! ‘Be multiple, like the universe.’—Pessoa” A Christmast gift from Ackbar in my last year of grad school, which also turned out to be a graduation gift—a notebook from his personal collection. Among his acquaintances, Ackbar is known as an avid collector of fountain pens, pipes, (fake) watches, and notebooks. According to my mentor Gaby Schwab, before Ackbar passed away, he had prepared a gift notebook for each student he was still working with.
Ackbar in Beijing, June 2025

Acknowledgement

This article is written for both positions politics and Department of Comparative Literature, UC Irvine. I thank Rebecca Karl and Adriana Johnson for kindly nudging me to process my memory of Ackbar through this personal reflection. I thank Gabriele Schwab for sharing the grief and encouraging me to write for Ackbar. I thank friends who have been processing memories with me in the past several weeks.

 

Shiqi Lin received her PhD from UC Irvine in 2023; after a post-doc at Cornell, she is now Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Rochester. She is working on a book entitled Documentation as Transmedial Relay.

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Lucas Tse reviews Liu Jieyu, Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

Liu Jieyu, Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025).

Progress matters. It is hard to look at a family, our own or anyone else’s, without a story of progress underneath it—the freedom to choose, to love, to build a household of one’s own making rather than be swallowed by one. Those freedoms are real. But progress rarely runs in line with our desires.

In a Tianjin factory in 1962, an apprentice made the first move. Grandma Chen was studying Mao Zedong’s thought when she noticed a workmate she liked and asked one of his friends whether he already had a girlfriend. He wrote her a poem in reply. When her family set up a matchmaking meeting with a tall military officer, she declined and stayed with the poet. Then the Party secretary told her that her chosen man’s family was a problem. His father was a small business owner, and if she wanted the Party she would have to give him up. She chose the man and gave up the Party. Sixty years later, asked whether she would pick him again in her next life, she did not hesitate: “Yes, he’d still be the one.” She still dreamed about him, she said, “especially the years when we were courting and when we just got married.”

Grandma Chen’s daughter married a man who won her by lying. He swore his father ran the railway bureau and could place her brother in a good job. She would not choose him again; she and her husband make do. Grandma Chen’s grandson married in 2016, after a string of girlfriends—at least ten, according to him. He chose his wife because they came from “matching households” (mengdanghudui). He did not expect love to survive the marriage. He told the researcher that he had never once seen couples in their fifties still in love. The grandmother raised under Mao is the romantic; the grandson raised in the market is the sceptic. Whatever progress did to this family, it did not move in a straight line.

The method of Liu Jieyu’s Embedded Generations lets it catch this reversal and others. The unit of Liu’s fieldwork was the family, not the individual. She gathered some 260 life-history interviews from grandparents, parents, and children in the same eighty households. Sitting with three generations at once, she could set a grandmother’s account of her own courtship against her grandson’s account of his, and watch what actually passed between them. 

The book sees China from inside the living room. Its generational sequence design shows reversals that a cross-sectional survey cannot: a non-linear picture of how people court, marry, raise children, and bury their parents in the largest society on earth. Choice does not track progress. Her governing insight is quiet: choice is not the opposite of obligation but the form obligation takes as it passes down the generations.

Take Grandma Mu in Xi’an, who made choices at every turn. Born in 1942 to a Nationalist officer and a concubine eighteen years his junior, she joined the Communist Youth League at fourteen. She trained as a doctor. When she fell for a young soldier, her father’s Kuomintang past threatened his prospects in the army, so she ended the relationship to protect his career. She settled instead for a police clerk with a slight hunchback, partly to head off a match her mother was pushing. During the Cultural Revolution her husband arranged for her to be sent to his home village to nurse his widowed father, and she spent a decade there in hardship while he stayed in the city and climbed the ranks. She nursed him too, for fourteen years, until he died in 2013. Asked whether she would choose him again, she did not reach for warmth: “I think being single is the best option. All the hardships stem from marriage and family. If neither existed, there would be no suffering.” Grandma Mu was never powerless, but the exercise of her will took place in boxes, including those built by previous generations. 

Chapter 3 addresses narratives of sexual liberation. One of Liu’s younger interviewees says flatly that anyone who waits until the wedding night “must have something wrong with them.” Underneath that surface the old order holds. This chapter, built partly from an unplanned focus group of 1990s-born sales workers in Xi’an, captures a double bind: men prize a woman’s virginity and also read a woman’s willingness to have sex as proof of love. Liu traces possible responses to this bind by placing two women next to each other. Ms. Kong, an only child from a professional Xi’an family, held off through her first two relationships and gave in to her third boyfriend at twenty-four; she found the experience “a form of torture, particularly for my mind.” She feared pregnancy despite the condom, and behind that lay something colder: “what if the parents of that future ‘someone else’ took issue with the fact that I wasn’t a virgin?” 

Miss Lu, born the same year into a Shandong farming village, went the other way. She lost her virginity at twenty-two after a Christmas party and remembered it warmly, as “a pleasant sensation, leaving me desiring more,” and then found her way to Guangzhou, a circle of feminist friends, and a series of foreign lovers her mother could not talk her out of. The woman from the city is trapped and the woman from the country is free, which is the reverse of the map the reader brought in. 

Harder evidence concerns the men. Pressed in interviews, a significant minority—around a third—described their first time with a girlfriend as something close to force. One put it without embarrassment. “Although my girlfriend said no, her body said yes.” The same men were breezy about their own virginity; one told Liu it was “trivial for men. It doesn’t matter.” This asymmetry shows the book’s claim that intimacy reproduces rather than dissolves inequality. New marital and sexual scripts bring old hierarchies back to life. Nor does the pattern stop at the bedroom door of the unmarried. Inside long marriages, a wife explains that “my mind has taught my body to be passive,” and a husband describes waking his wife in the night until she gets up, goes to the bathroom “to wake herself up, and then cooperate.”

Not every marriage runs this way. One granddaughter speaks with real pride of a husband who both earns and cooks, who shares the childcare, and whom she would marry again without hesitation. Sometimes the equal, companionate marriage the modern story promises does arrive. But consider the story’s deepest promise, a love that answers to nothing but itself, which turns up in this book in the unlikeliest place. It survives in the affair. Ms. Tian, married at twenty-three into a violent household in Shandong, cannot leave: divorce might drive her migrant husband to harm her children or her parents, and she needs the twenty thousand yuan a year he brings in. So she conducts a hidden romance with a married party official, the one relationship she chose freely and the one cleared of any family obligation. “Whatever I can’t get from my husband,” she says, “I can get from him.” They have promised to live together when they are eighty. The freest love in the book is the one that had to hide—from regimes of intimacy that have decided in advance what love is permitted to be.

Liu’s approach cannot easily reach into the intimate realm. This chapter abandons the multigenerational structure because it is difficult to get all members of one family to speak about sex. The book’s larger claim to trace “the whole gamut of family practices over the entire course of life” within families therefore has a hole at a generative and most intimate point. 

Chapter 4 delivers an insight that is easier to develop within the book’s frame. Almost everyone reads the grandmother raising the grandchild as ancient Confucian custom. Liu’s three-generation structure shows the opposite: “while grandparenthood is traditionally honored in Chinese families, far from being rooted in Chinese culture, grandparenting is quite recent in origin.” The mass shift from grandparenthood (honored status) to grandparenting (childcare as duty) is a product of the last two generations. Kinship has no essence that persists. Grandparenting is a contested and desired good fought over between and within generations. 

Consider Mother Huang. Costed at a live-in nanny’s rate, her unpaid childcare saved her adult children some 300,000 yuan, more than the wealthy paternal grandparents contributed in cash, and it counted for nothing, because care performed inside a family is treated as natural and therefore free. Multiply Mother Huang across the country and you have the care infrastructure the state chose not to build. Mao-era urban grandmothering began because the state put women in full-time jobs then retired them early—fifty or fifty-five, while their daughters were working—which manufactured a cohort of available grandmothers who hadn’t existed in that form before. In the reform-era, the near-absence of public childcare created a void between the end of maternity leave and the start of kindergarten that conscripted grandmothers as unpaid carers. Housing arrangements confirm childcare arrangements—Mother Huang moved into her child’s second bedroom while Father Huang stayed in the family flat fifteen minutes away, so she is physically installed in the site of expectation. 

We’ve encountered the romantic Grandma Chen and her grandson the skeptic; the book shows how the idea of progress as linear change fails in this family, and in Chinese family life more broadly. Liu’s move is to compare across generations rather than across space, which would smuggle back the track of progress that she refuses. She asks us not to read China through tired stories of modernity, especially the one where industrialization pulls the world towards the nuclear, conjugal family. But the book draws heavily on British sociology and she is comfortable exporting this vocabulary to Xi’an work units and Shandong farms. Her interrogation of Western concepts is selective: sustained when it comes to the grand theory, barely when it comes to working analysis. 

This selectiveness has a cost at the very end, when Liu makes a bold claim that lifelong intergenerational interdependence is China’s “most distinctive feature.” Liu’s method handles the myth-busting well: China is not on the Western track, and the track is a myth. But it cannot establish the positive claim. Of the comparators that would test it, some never enter (e.g. Southern Europe), and some appear in the footnotes but never in the argument (e.g. the rest of East Asia). The problem isn’t ignorance of these cases—it’s a division of labour in which the West generates the concepts and the rest only does corroborative work. We never learn what is distinct about China set beside other “off-track” societies, let alone what is “most distinctive.” 

The family is not an autonomous social institution that the state acts on; it is made substantially of state policy. Liu’s chapter on grandparenting is not the only time when “family tradition” turns out to be the result of administrative decisions. Take the expectation that the husband’s family provides the marital home. Liu shows this is not timeless custom but “effectively adapting the patrilocal custom to the twenty-first century”—the same gendered outcome delivered first by the work unit’s allocation of flats to married men, then by the market’s transfer of that cost to the groom’s family. Policy does more than disguise itself as custom; it also produces what it never meant to. The 1950s settlement is the sharp case. Near-universal female employment and early retirement undermined the patrilineal bias of urban families—and, a generation on, manufactured the cohort of retired grandmothers the reform economy would conscript. The same policy modernized the family and, in time, re-traditionalized it. 

What policy can do is reshape the family’s internal structure, or restrict decisions—fewer births, later marriage. What it cannot do is add demand, because addition depends on desire, especially in a state that has spent decades building instruments to subtract rather than instruments to create. In this fundamental sense, the family cannot escape the state’s reach, and neither is its future something that the state can design.

Lucas Tse is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

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Hugh Shapiro reviews Du Chunmei, Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II 

Du Chunmei, Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Prof. Du Chunmei’s Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II is groundbreaking. Imaginatively conceived and meticulously researched, this innovative book analyzes grassroots encounters between American servicemen and Chinese civilians from 1945 to 1949, showing that these everyday interactions shaped postwar modern China as profoundly as diplomatic strategy or battlefield outcomes. Among its richest analytical frameworks is “uneven reciprocity,” which captures how the formal architecture of Sino-American relations proclaimed equality while systematically favoring American interests in practice.

Everyday Occupation moves across an engrossing range of contact zones: the staged theatrics of Japanese surrender ceremonies; the racialized dimensions of sensory encounters; the symbolic arc of the Jeep from liberation trophy to instrument of terror; the complex persona of the “Jeep girl”; the fraught encounters in ambiguously defined territory between American forces and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) guerrillas, alienated Nationalist soldiers, local bandits, and armed civilians; the circulation of American commodities from coffee to penicillin to weapons, and the myriad conflicts these items engendered; all amid the repatriation of Japanese forces, the location of American POWs, and the resurgence of the GMD (Guomindang)–CCP civil war. This postwar drama of American forces in China was transformative, deeply influencing how events would play out between the two countries in the following decades.

This study is also heartbreaking. Tragedy was baked into the very forces set in motion at the end of the apocalypse of World War II. At the official level, US policy was conflicting, confused, and distracted, nominally neutral yet favoring the Nationalists (Guomindang). At the operational level, US ground forces mixed minimally trained raw recruits with battle-hardened veterans of the bloodiest Pacific campaigns, bearing their fatigue, homesickness, and PTSD. China’s suffering in the war is difficult to comprehend, with estimates of war dead ranging from fifteen to twenty million people. At war’s end, Chinese society was not only deeply wounded and heavily militarized, but also, in many areas, impoverished. This set the stage for horrendous encounters between US security forces guarding supply depots stocked with tons of food, fuel, commodities, and weapons, and the Chinese civilians who lived alongside them. Add to this the criminally inadequate linguistic preparation given to US forces in this environment. One tragic example from the book illustrates the point.

GIs guarding American assets in China were taught the Chinese word for “freeze,” something a person in law enforcement or on guard duty might yell at a suspect in the United States, understood as “halt.” In China, however, “freeze” carries none of that meaning. Worse, the word taught (dongge) was not only an inaccurate transliteration, it sounded much closer to dong 動, meaning “to move,” the exact opposite of the intended command. Add to this, genuine dialectal differences between the northern idiom being taught and the many dialects (languages, really) spoken throughout the country. When an American sentry shouted “dongge!” at a person suspected of trespassing or theft, believing he was ordering a halt, the suspect often ran instead, and was sometimes shot to death by the sentry. By 1945, the US Army had many highly skilled linguists fluent in both Chinese and English, yet this training gap persisted among the sentries posted at supply depots and elsewhere. This language-driven disaster captures the weariness and inattention of the American occupation during those troubled years.

Each chapter is methodologically and thematically distinct, bringing fresh material and insights to bear; I treat each in turn.

Chapter 1, “Occupying China: Mission Impossible,” traces the structural contradictions of the American military mission in postwar China, defined from the outset by the impossibility of maintaining neutrality in a civil war while assisting one of its combatants. Its treatment of the Japanese surrender ceremonies is a highlight: read as staged performances of American power addressed to multiple audiences, these ceremonies reveal how the occupation’s political logic worked through ritual and symbol as much as force. The contrast between the elaborate American-led ceremonies in Tianjin and Qingdao and the more restrained Chinese national ceremony in Nanjing suggests a complex sentiment among Chinese leaders, a mix of appreciation and quiet humiliation at their role as supporting players in what was, formally, their victory. 

Like much of this book, the section on American war crimes trials in China is original and important. This largely overlooked episode, in which the US military arrogated to itself the authority to arrest, detain, and try Japanese, German, Taiwanese, Filipino, and even American civilians on China’s soil, without formal authorization from China, is built on meticulous archival research. Reading the jurisdictional disputes as a microcosm of uneven reciprocity is persuasive and opens a productive new understanding of the history of extraterritoriality.

Chapter 2, “Sensory Contact: Life in the Orient,” ambitiously takes the senses (sight, smell, taste, sound, touch) as analytical categories.  The author’s recovery of the texture of everyday life in occupied China is innovative and illuminating. The discussion of smell stands out: American fixation on stench is traced not to a spontaneous reaction to unfamiliar conditions, but to a racialized mode of perception rooted in nineteenth-century discourses of civilizational hierarchy. The observation that American soldiers dwelled on the “atavistic filth” of an inherited memory based on racist tropes, while ignoring the industrial stench they themselves had generated in the Pacific campaigns, is a damning illustration of how even sensory experience is mediated by bigotry.

The sections on food and language are also fascinating. Reading pidgin English as a site of mutual misunderstanding and co-creation, rather than simply a tool of colonial domination, captures the entangled nature of Sino-American interaction. The etymological discussions of “ding hao” and “gung ho” illustrate how cultural contact produces hybrid forms that resist claims of authorship by either side of the encounter.

Chapter 3, “Embodied Vehicles: Jeep and GIs,” treats a single object, the Jeep, as the lens for examining Sino-American friction at the grassroots level. Its central argument traces the Jeep’s symbolic arc from trophy of liberation and object of popular fascination to instrument of terror and, ultimately, emblem of occupation. The concept of the merged “Jeep/GI,” a technologically enhanced, hypermasculine body blurring the boundary between human and machine, is a striking example of the book’s creative originality.

The analysis of the GI–rickshaw puller relationship as structured simultaneously by patronage, fantasy, rivalry, and violence recovers a type of encounter that often transpires out of sight and thus falls off the record. The reconstruction of two cases, drawn from petition letters, court-martial records, and CCP propaganda, shows how working-class victims were absorbed into nationalist narratives, sometimes serving interests other than their own. The epilogue tracing the Jeep’s afterlife, from captured war matériel to the domestically manufactured “Beijing Jeep,” is poetic, evocative to anyone who lived in China during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Chapter 4, “Intimate Relations: Jeep Girls and Gendered Nationalism,” positions sexual politics at the center of Sino-American relations during and after World War II. It recovers the “Jeep girl” debate as a genuine intellectual controversy, one that exceeds its usual framing as nationalist condemnation. Mapping conservative, liberal, leftist, and feminist voices, the author shows the phenomenon prompted sharp disagreement about modernity, Westernization, and women’s self-determination, before the 1946 Peking rape incident collapsed this plurality into a single hypernationalist register.

The chapter argues convincingly that the Peking rape case did not only inflame existing sentiment but restructured what could be said: former defenders of Jeep girls went silent or reversed course, and women’s experiences were absorbed into competing Nationalist and Communist agendas, neither of which treated the case as an issue focused on women. The concluding long view, tracing the Jeep girl trope through the Cultural Revolution into contemporary nationalism, is compelling and thought-provoking.

Chapter 5, “Entangled Goods: American Charms and Harms,” could be expanded into a monograph in itself.  It shifts the analysis to commodities themselves, canned food, coffee, Coca-Cola, DDT, penicillin, tracing how these objects became sites where larger geopolitical contests were experienced by ordinary people. The chapter refuses the binary of ‘American gift versus American harm’ that both 1940s-era writing and later scholarship sometimes impose: a rickshaw puller drinks instant coffee at a streetside stand; a student is stripped of a GI parka by military police; a local canned food company packages its product in American tin. In each case, American things simultaneously create new social spaces, economic dependencies, and grievances, often within the same object and the same body.

Epilogue, “Revisiting the Lost Era,” traces a genealogy of anti-American sentiment as a reusable political technology. Encountering GI misconduct, the CCP curated a repertoire of incidents, images, and victim archetypes reactivated across decades, from the Korean War through the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing. Du’sanalysis of the San Mao series is especially poignant, showing how a beloved fictional character became a vessel for transmitting this emotional script across generations. The epilogue also situates the post-war mission as a template for later American interventions, linking postwar occupation failures to Cold War patterns in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Finally, a word about Prof. Du Chunmei’s research and sources. The scholarship is deep, extensive, exemplary. Chinese-language materials are drawn from archives across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, spanning Republican-era government documents, CCP internal records, municipal administrative files, and local historical literature. Japanese sources appear indirectly, through translated memoirs and war crimes trial documents. The archival work is extensive and meticulous, including municipal archives in Beijing, Chongqing, Nanjing, Qingdao, Shanghai, and Tianjin, alongside Academia Historica in Taipei and the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database in Hong Kong. American archives include the National Archives, the Marine Corps History Division, the Hoover Institution, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, and oral history and manuscript collections at California State University Northridge, Columbia, Harvard, and other institutions. 

The periodical sources are also striking: roughly one hundred titles, both in Chinese and English. Chinese-language publications range from major national newspapers to illustrated weeklies, women’s magazines, children’s periodicals, and specialist trade journals. English titles include American newspapers, popular magazines, African-American press outlets, military unit publications, marine bulletins, submarine dailies, and service newspapers. Other sources include veteran memoirs, official US military handbooks, diplomatic papers, CCP propaganda compilations, statistical reports from China, court-martial records, oral histories, and an extensive interdisciplinary scholarly literature.

Everyday Occupation is a fascinating and important study. This original work will be read with great interest across disciplines.  I recommend it both to specialists and to serious readers of history, all of whom will be richly rewarded. 

 

Hugh Shapiro is associate professor of East Asian history at the University of Nevada, Reno. He works on the history of disease in comparative context.