What’s in a name?

For this #AcWriMoment, turn your attention to a name you’ve chosen for your body of work or a piece of it. In your journal, in your imagination, or in conversation with a friend, reflect on these questions:

What meanings does the name hold for you? How has the name guided your writing process, or how could it guide your process? Might another name be waiting to be chosen by you? Guided by a name you have chosen, what is one small step you can take in your work today?

I did not expect to cry on Day 2 of #AcWriMoments. As the blogger described the angst over choosing a name for her child, she realized that the name will be what the child makes of it, not the other way around. ‘Anything we create — humans, scholarship, works of art — merely moves through us on its way into the world.’ Reading these words released the pressure I have been putting on myself to shape my research and interests to fit neatly and succinctly into the academic mold.

When I think about names and my body of work, the acronym ‘NAJUA’ comes to mind. Yes, now I use that rendering instead of ‘NAUA.’ According to a reviewer of a recent article, the ‘J’ in ‘anti-Japanese’ should be capitalized. I always liked ‘NAUA’ better—it felt more concise and symmetrical—plus, neither of my supervisors ever seemed to mind. But now I can’t get the critique out of my mind, and I can’t justify the missing ‘J’ for any real reason, grammatical or theoretical. Still, it felt like a betrayal (however irrational the thought) of the army? my thesis? to change it.

The name I chose for this website! So obscure, so anachronistic. When I came up with it, I desperately wanted to clothe myself in all things Dongbei—another name that means different things to different people. I imagined branching out from 1940s Dongbei research but staying in the vicinity. Now that I’ve been away from China for nearly a decade, I find it harder and harder to get back to that state of mind. I miss Dongbei, as one always misses a home, but there’s so much about the place I don’t know. It would take more than a lifetime to be an expert. Wait, expert?? There’s that standard again.

Other, more personal feelings cloud what clarity I seek. Abandonment. The complex of it, the experience…the fear of it, the shame. It lives with me. Admitting it here is like walking through mud barefoot. But I can see a psychological parallel with my research on Manchuria. Should I stay loyal to it if it is fast slipping through my fingers? If I let it go, what will take its place? Who am I without a name?

SACRED ambitions

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve updated the website and written a blog post. I am restarting now with help, thanks to an initiative begun by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword, which they have called #AcWriMoments. It is 30 days worth of prompts about one’s academic writing and thinking. (Technically, this initiative fell in line with #NaNoWriMo and #AcWriMo last November, but I purposely only drafted my prompts to work on later; hence, my publishing them now). Since I’ve been facing a crisis of purpose lately with regard to writing and academia, I thought it might be good for me to take a moment (!) to reflect.

Honestly, I didn’t fully grasp the prompt on Day 1. Rereading it now a few months later, I understand better the aim: finding the will to carry on by finding inspiration, even guidance, in moments great or small. They distilled their idea into the acronym SACRED:

• Strategic moments

• Artisanal moments

• Creative moments

• Reflective moments

• Embodied moments

• Delicious moments

It’s not often that academic writing is treated as something ‘creative,’ ‘artisanal,’ or ‘delicious,’ let alone SACRED. Yet now that I think about it, I became attracted to academic texts partly because of the lofty, refined style. I love it when a scholar manages to express an argument eloquently and rationally. To be able to take pride in writing like that has been one of my longest-standing dreams. And if I’m really honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it. Maybe I don’t even want to anymore. I don’t know whether it’s burn-out speaking, the pressure of academia, or the fallout from the pandemic, but writing feels more and more like a luxury.

I can see that SACRED is meant to be a tool I can fall back on when ambitions begin to fade and the mundane starts to clutter the mind. A part of me is thanking myself for participating in #AcWriMoments all those months ago for what it’s giving me today: a moment to reflect and embody my hopes for the future. Especially now that I have decided to leave Malta (a topic for another post), and am facing a move back to my home country as well as unemployment, this question of what writing means to me is always somewhere on my mind. I’m glad to be publishing this post. That’s a decent step forward, right?

The Beginnings of an Academic Career

Today I met with one of my students face-to-face for the first time this semester.

Let me unpack that sentence.

I might start with the word "students." I have students—actual university-attending, Chinese majoring, real-life pupils. I have students because, while in Taiwan over the summer, I was offered a job as a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Malta. I moved to Malta in September and took up my post in October. This semester, I am teaching two courses: 1) Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature, and 2) Reading and Translating Chinese. Between these two classes I have five students. One young woman is in both classes; in fact, she is the only student in her year and, as such, is the only one taking the third-year course, Reading and Translating Chinese. She is also the one I met with today.

Why do I mention meeting said student face-to-face? Because it is 2020, the year of the Coronavirus pandemic. I may have moved to Malta to teach synchronously, but for now, we are keeping our distance and teaching online. I do not mind distance learning. It offers some unique opportunities for students to engage in tasks at their own pace. As an instructor, I find it slightly more challenging than I had expected in terms of preparation and technical savvy, but there was bound to be a learning curve for my first semester as a proper lecturer no matter what. All in all, I think my students and I are handling things pretty well. That said, I know that they miss meeting in person because three of the five have requested face-to-face appointments for our mid-semester individual check-in.

One downside to online teaching is that I do not have as many chances to see my colleagues as I might have had if we were all on campus most days. This is the biggest difference between this international move compared to others I have made. In the past, I was always a student, and, as such, I was part of a cohort of peers whenever I started at a new university. Even though I have joined a lively (and young) faculty—all but one of us is under 40 years old—I am more keenly aware of being on my own with respect to making friends and networking. I think this isolation has contributed to a slightly bigger sense of imposter syndrome compared to when I was doing my doctorate. (Don't worry, it's not an extreme case!) I am dealing with the issue by reaching out to colleagues to meet for various reasons, whether to grab a drink or to do some sight-seeing together. I have also made sure to attend our departmental seminars. I have enjoyed getting to know everyone and look forward to when we can see each other more frequently.

Considering that I received my PhD in May of this year, I truly feel lucky, blessed even, to be given the opportunity to take up the role of lecturer at this stage of my career. I am aware of how competitive the academic job market is these days, especially in Western countries. The pandemic made planning for the future even more fraught with uncertainty. I went from New Zealand to Taiwan on a prayer. I had applied for the post in Malta right before leaving. A few months later, I was told that there would be no interviews because of the virus. I had made up my mind at that point to find a teaching job in Taiwan. I even interviewed with a private Buddhist high school to be their social studies teacher and was about to sign the contract over the Dragon Boat Festival when I received an email inviting me to interview with Malta. I still cannot believe how things turned out in just a matter of a months!

Tomorrow I have my second face-to-face meeting with a student. I wonder what she wants to write for her final paper...