On Friday, March 13, 2023, I traveled to Boston, Massachusetts to attend my first research conference, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference, after my mentor Dr.E.K. Tan encouraged me to apply for the inaugural AAPI Mentorship Travel Award. During my final spring of toiling away as an undergraduate mired in English literature and creative writing, speaking up in classes, and sourcing endless Ebooks and PDFs for research and my online literary platform Silkworm Reading, embarking on a lone adventure seemed like a wonderful opportunity to apply what I’d learned toward my career goals. Co occuring with the first English PhD seminar I’d been invited to participate in, Traveling People, Traveling Cultures, and a few years after I’d first received study abroad scholarships in my sophomore year to study Jane Austen and fiction writing at the UMass Oxford Summer Seminar, though was unable to attend, I realized I was aching to travel beyond campus life. I wanted to keep seeking out more humanities opportunities and surround myself with a welcoming professional community.

At the conference, there were nearly 400 sessions presenting the latest topics and research in Asian Studies, and over 60 exhibitors in the Exhibit Hall. Prior to my arrival, I received multiple emails and newsletters from the conference, through which I had downloaded the AAS 2023 mobile app where I could select panels and events for my detailed personal schedule. Dr. Benjamin Tausig had also agreed to meet up with me at the conference beforehand since he was presenting at the event. I also learned about the Local Arrangements Committee’s special programming and events, which included the Film Expo, meet and greet events, dance tropes, and free admission to Harvard Art Museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Peabody-Essex Museum. Additionally, I enrolled in the AAS Conference Mentor Program with the workshop “Women in the Academy, Service and Leadership.” For students unable to receive funding, on-site volunteers were compensated with free conference registration, a boon compared with other research conferences.

Leaving from Midtown NYC at 4:15 in the morning by Greyhound, I arrived in Brookline at 8:30 am before dragging my luggage to the Green Line and hopping into a subway train that looked more like a streetcar, compared to the New York City subway. This was only the first of many surprises, as I decided to take my belongings with me for the entire day until checking in at the Newbury Guest House, at the verge of their 11 pm deadline before having to call in advance, which Caterina Reed had helped me book on SBU’s dime. The Travel Grant covered conference registration and a one-night stay in a nearby hotel, so the buses to and from my home were on me.

Traveling alone meant embodying the courage of a stranger within Asian Studies, which I knew little about before this experience. I also needed to playact as an older, experienced professional, while staying safe and aware as a solo female traveler. However, having toured Peru’s cities and Machu Picchu, the Iowa Young Writers Workshop, and kayaked among glaciers with Girls in Icy Fjords alongside other affordable and tuition-free destinations, I knew I had to be both hyper-organized and determined. I wanted to make the most of the university’s faith in me, in order to uncover and share new knowledge with the Stony Brook undergraduate community.

Walking through the affluent neighborhood of Back Bay, with its bewitching rows of 19th century brownstones and college students lined up outside dessert and ramen shops deep into the night, became an exercise in mobility and awe. A fellow attendee who flew in from Berlin struck up a conversation with me on the sidewalk, and I picked up my badge from the Hynes Convention Center. For each panel I wanted to attend, there were forty others occurring simultaneously in the area. This forced split-second decisions on which speaker I most wanted to hear from the top three papers I had filtered out for each twenty-minute interval, from stacked hour-and-a-half panel sessions. Additionally, these events were split between the Hynes Convention Center and the Sheraton Boston Hotel.

While I had bookmarked the paper “The Stuff of Life: Animating Forces in Early Modern China” from the panel “Vernacular Healing: Practical Knowledge and Chinese Medicine, Ca. 1500- 1950,” registration took up time so I attended “Networking Late Jin Poets and Poetry: Interpersonal Communication and Intergenerational Genealogy as Two Approaches by Lili Xia” and “Jinan Travel Log” and Yuan Haowen’s (1190-1257) Cultural Geographical Orientation by Wanmeng Li” instead. Then, I moved back upstairs to the initial Chinese Medicine panel I had listed to catch the following papers. Throughout, I took extensive notes, which addressed topics as niche as the Late Jin Literati Community and the contrasting personalities of two renowned writers, and the process of mapping a celebrated poet’s travel log using ArcGIS StoryMaps. What struck me as unique about the event was the audience members’ skill at asking questions, mentioning their areas of expertise before launching into suggestions for the direction of research the panelists should undertake.

Afterwards, I wove my way through the conference center, learning from papers on every subject. One of my favorite presentations was about a modern recipe recreation of the Qianlong Emperor (1735-1796) imperial banquet at the Bishushanzhuang (Mountain Villa for Escaping the Heat), which incorporated Manchu and Han cuisine to express a new Manchu identity as well as the emperor’s territorial and cultural control. Then, I popped into rooms to learn about American writer Eileen Chang, images of foreign people in Chinese and Taiwanese elementary school textbooks, and discoveries in natural language processing (NLP) in the panel “Mediated Passions: Affective Technologies in China and Taiwan.” Word embeddings represent the meanings of words as time-specific, multidimensional vectors, such as the heart (xīn 心) in early modern and modern Chinese literature.

During the 12:20-2 pm break I traversed downstairs into the beautiful Exhibition Hall, which housed a dazzling array of booths advertising academic presses as well as discounted books. I managed to spot some Stony Brook professors’ books on display as well as partake in cheese and fruit boards paired with wine, and build a personalized tea blend to take home. After our discussion, I would pick up a book for myself at the Columbia University Press booth, The Transcendental and the Mundane by Cho-yun Hsu and translated by David Ownby. All hardcover display copies were $10 each and I treasured this find for its accessible insight into Chinese spiritual culture, as if I were buying an intractable fragment of a forgotten heritage. Tomorrow afternoon at 3 pm, I would meet up with Dr. Tausig, associate professor of Ethnomusicology at the Hall to discuss my research interests and how I was enjoying Stony Brook. He had already answered some of my questions by email about whether attendees personally select the panels they wish to attend (yes), ways undergraduates can network and connect with attendees and presenters (there are ample chances at receptions, welcome events, and informal gatherings, even ones for graduate students, with most people happy to meet you especially if you approach speakers after talks), and if we would travel together (attendees arrange their own travel, typically by Amtrak or bus, but can go with other students or professors if their schedules coincide). We went into depth about how we developed our paths to graduate school and academic interests in fields outside of our heritages, such as my own in English literature and his in music, sound, and political protest in Thailand, and after the conference I shared with him paper drafts by email.

After attending the panel “Writing on the Body, Writing With the Body” as well as the paper “Morals and Expressions in Biographies of Samurai Women by Motoi Katsumata” at Meisei University, I met up with Dr. Tan, associate professor of English and Chair of Asian and Asian American Studies at his presentation, “A-Mei and Bob Marley Share a Joint: Reggae Fusion in Taiwanese Indigenous Popular Music.” We chatted about future opportunities for study abroad and graduate school for which he would be happy to write a recommendation. Honing in on a singular moment or symbol for audience engagement is a research technique that will stay with me, as well as being creative with slideshow presentations and doing close readings of lyrics.

Then, to round off the evening, I attended the Presidential Address, “Partition Violence and National Unity: Pakistan’s Cinema from the 1960s” by Kamran Asdar Ali, professor of anthropology, Middle East Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. He spoke about the importance of understanding the violent trauma of the Partition of India, particularly on family separation and sex trafficking, through women’s representation in popular Pakistan media. Screenwriters, filmmakers, and political leaders have addressed the topic of Partition, and excerpts from their work were shared with the audience. The questions of patriarchy and women who refused rehabilitation from both sides of the border, as well as individuals never heard from again, continue to plague Partition’s aftermath. “Films help us remember what we have chosen to forget,” Ali said, and added that he hoped to bring women to the center of history-making.

After all the panels were finished, several receptions opened and served elaborate hors d’oeuvres and tarts, tempura shrimp and large vegetable dipping platters, alongside drinks and desserts. Short rib, a waiter announced as she approached clusters of guests. I took one. A floury package the size of two thumbs pressed together opened between my teeth to reveal luscious umami, fall-apart meat. At the Boston Sheraton Hotel, I milled between establishments and raffles set up by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Korea Foundation, the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies, and the Yale University Asian Studies Councils. Finally, I took a hike to my hotel amid sidewalks crowded with student nightlife and, admiring the room’s serenity and view onto Newbury St, streetlights illuminating its historical facade, awaited the second day of my stay.

On Saturday as the sun stretched its wings above the horizon, I subsisted on leftovers from Wendy’s and rushed to catch the morning panels. Beginning with the paper “Dairying Dependence: Dairy Industrialization and Ecological Change during the Postwar Philippine Republic by Nicolo Paolo P. Ludovice” at the University of Hong Kong, I shifted gears from the Philippines to Japan and South Korea at the panel “Unpacking the “Exam Hell”: Meaning, Experience, and Consequence of High-Stakes Exams in East Asia.” The panelists challenged each other to think more deeply about the meaning of education, and gender differences in desire for paths and pursuits.

Next, I attended the AAS Conference Mentor Program workshop “Women in the Academy, Service and Leadership,” which provided a window into the future of the academic careerist. I learned that academic families might be split between different cities, and that one should never turn down a job before one gets it. Students should shift our mindsets from scarcity to abundance, though sometimes the sciences have a better chance of placing people due to medical centers hiring docs and post-docs. Our presenter shared tips for getting a better salary and leveraging a spousal appointment, as well as on staging and sequencing service to choose the opportunities that mean the most to you. Generally, assistant professors will be asked to do university-wide service, and women of color get tasked with additional labor. Inviting speakers and network-building is important for women, who really succeed with partners, whether co-teachers or students. She asked, How visible are you in your field nationally and internationally? Either you are known through your networks or known through your publications. She discussed how she has her students go to the library and download any sources she assigns directly from the journal, so that the publication gets the credit and the students understand the value of the subscription.

During the lunch break, it was time for an excursion to the Harvard Art Museums! I checked out of my hotel at 11 am and rode the MBTA 1 bus to Cambridge, where I would peruse the Asian and Western art along with the curated galleries for Harvard art courses. Making a pass through Harvard Yard, I dodged a gaggle of over a hundred East Asian tourists and hauled my luggage up the museum steps. As advertised, I had open access to the space upon flashing my conference badge, and a desk assistant helped me stash my backpack and suitcase in a closet while I wound unencumbered through three floors of galleries. I was trying to figure out the difference between exhibitions and collections, but mostly nurtured my inner aesthete with ancient relics, modern paintings, and the extent to which Harvard seemed to embellish its object labels around timely and exciting themes in order to attract freshmen into studying the humanities. Then, I picked up some greeting cards from the gift shop of my favorite works of art.

Returning to Boston just in time to catch another favorite panel, “Playing for the Planet”: Exploring Daoist Environmentalism and Shentai Wenming (Ecological Civilization) through the Greening of China’s Online Games,” I watched a panelist tell a crowded room in the Sheraton Hotel about how corporations encourage gamemakers to use games to promote sustainability and climate awareness. Digital media is used to modify human behavior, with China as a particular hotbed of opportunity. “A green public sphere may also empower civil society to hold corporations to account,” is a quote that stuck with me long after the session. In video games such as Honour of Kings (TMI Studio), Carbon Island (Tencent), and LifeAfter (NetEase), players battle a dark force and zombies as a metaphor for climate change, develop their own economies, and are educated by scientists about environmental change, carbon neutrality, and deforestation. Each game changes reality as Playing for the Planet Alliance commits to inserting green nuggets into games, where points earned and trees planted are combined into donations to a charitable organization and real trees that gamemakers plant, especially in the Gobi desert where the wilderness is retreating. These video games also include elements of Daoism such as wu wei and the parable of the useless tree, philosophies that promote greater connectivity and rejuvenation of both the human and natural worlds while preventing further harm. “The useless tree is so gnarled it’s useless for humans, but because humans cannot cut it down for their own ends, it is allowed to flourish and become what it is.”

My next destination was the panel “Policymaking in Singapore: Roots, Shifts, and Tensions,” which was the very first time I was in a room full of other people with Singaporean origins. I had anticipated my experience to feel like a homecoming of sorts, which was true, yet enjoying the presentation did not mean feeling capable of connecting with panelists in person, as an undergraduate attendee without the responsibility of presenting or a professional reputation. Next time, I wanted to create and bring along some business cards. Throughout the talk, I learned that acceptance of social services was an issue in Singapore, as data is impacted by the reluctance of citizens to disclose their status due to social and self-perceptions. The belief in exceptionalism by the population was also described as a reaction to other cultures. An Indian man in the audience stood up and told us, referring to Singapore’s emphasis on racial harmony, “The worst thing for a population is to feel disregarded – Chinese have problems, such as saying, your Mandarin isn’t good. How do you build a passion around just being boring and balanced? How do you balance in a way citizens enjoy and are passionate about?”

Later, I would attend “Performing a Singaporean Chineseness: The Impact of Sound and Language on Identity Formation” for a more artistic and less political perspective on my birth country. Music draws the boundaries of identity, and globalization and nationalization processes leads to hybridizations between cultural identities, such as Chinese identity which can be seen as a combination of partial identities. The plays Mama Looking For Her Cat by Kuo Pao Kun and GRC (Geng Rebut Cabinet) by Teater Ekamatra provide multilingual representation and thought-provoking resistance against the Chinese ethnic majority.

Next up was the panel “Teaching Archives and South Asian History through Storytelling: Faculty, Postgraduate and Undergraduate Perspectives,” where researching India’s Partition and colonialism in the archive led to the discovery of a new storytelling technique. Archives favor single-authored, written texts over collective, oral knowledge, a colonial ideology that is re-validated through academic and legal norms. The speaker projected a series of quotes, including “The Partition is not necessarily something that Pakistanis like to remember, let alone evoke through poetry…you rely on the poem’s failure to deliver the magnitude of loss” from Momina Mela. Poetry fills and emphasizes archival silence, prioritizes emotional and community knowledge, and plays with time and space. The paper “Seed Stories in the Classroom: Pitched into the Digital Archive by Christine S. Wiesenthal” at University of Alberta documented a diverse student population with growing numbers of Indigenous Cree, Inuit, and first-generation Chinese and Somali learning communities, who bring a wealth of diversity against the marginalization of the invisible white habitus and curriculum. Her class visited collections in order to recenter the role of research in creative production. Their sources were called seed material, and students posted notes to an online class forum and were broken into groups for discussion of questions such as “What makes for a complex real-life character? What are the various stories beneath the surface story of a primary material? What literary form, genre, or patterns of organization might be appropriate to retell this story and why? What is required to use this source responsibly, sensitively, and accurately? And what should creative nonfiction writers do with those intractable silences and gaps in the record?” Her students encountered less polished materials rarely encountered in undergraduate classrooms, and formed a creative village that provided them with writing and material for future work.

A return to my poetry passion was at hand, for the paper “Palace As the “Handsome Southland”: Place-Making in Lady Blossom’s Court Poetry by Yiwen Zheng” at Indiana University-Bloomington. She discussed how the poems incorporate the land and used palace women as literary tropes during a complicated era of empirical disintegration. Recent research on space in poetry regards it as a meaningful construct, which reflects on political and personal space. The underrated ambitions of female Chinese poets in medieval times became an intervention into literary topoi and sometimes reinvented them. Afterwards, I left the Hynes Convention Center back to the Sheraton Hotel for the standout panels “For the Gays? Intersections between the Boys Love (BL) Genre and LGBTQ Issues in East and Southeast Asia” and “Frameworks of Fandom: New Lenses for Analysis of East Asian Fandom and Engagement.” The presentation “My Coupling Is Real: Digital Temporality and the Cultural Politics of Fan “Munching” by Chenshu Zhou” at the University of Pennsylvania entertained the audience with fanmade video edits of fictional characters and real-life celebrities. She introduced the concept of “munching” as manipulations of digital imagery that prolong affective moments containing evidence of love, offering escape for neoliberal subjects living under the real life pressures of success and heteronormativity. Coupling, or CP in the Chinese entertainment industry, is given cultural and political significance as a fan activity that disrupts relentless competition and meritocracy.

The final panel of the night for me was “Body, Space, and Infrastructure of Sino-Futurism: Techno Cultural Production in PRC,” discussing colonialism, masculinity and femininity, and Chinese space exploration. Scenes of workers and laborers forced to go on a process of endless migration, alongside the pleasure and nostalgia of large buildings and an AI center, demonstrate China’s journey of seeking acceptance on a global stage, driven by a traumatic history. In order to survive and escape from the Earth, the audience was shown visions of the people’s mastery of science and technology, their collective effort to build a big structure to benefit the masses, and the end of history, without workers or gender and racial struggles. The exploitation of the womb and motherhood was also discussed through the lens of new-wave science fiction and anatomical realism. Some striking quotes were, “You want to be free as a woman but at the price of another woman’s unfreedom,” and “the metabolic metastization of motherhood is very moving.”

After pilfering a few more snacks from the nightly receptions, it was time for me to leave the “Shining City Upon a Hill.” I rode the Green Line to the edge of Boston Common and walked to Boston South Station past shopping centers, fast food locales, and vibrant Chinatown murals shrouded by shadow. Then, at 8:30 pm, I boarded the Flixbus for New York, where I descended into the subways back to Queens at 1 am.

My experience at the Association for Asian Studies Conference was incredibly fulfilling in both the intellectual and communitarian sense, and inspired me to register for the American Literature Association (ALA) Conference on May 25th to speak as a panelist for the first time. I will be presenting my research paper in progress, “Science Fiction During the Cold War: Creative Writing Styles’ Impact on Portrayals of East Asians” alongside established scholars, and exchanging new ideas while receiving feedback. Returning to explore Boston as a city that has grown close to my heart, a port by the sea that attracts supportive professionals from all around the world, is an occasion that I absolutely look forward to. I would recommend anyone interested in the AAPI Mentorship Network Program to apply for the Travel Grant, because exploration never ends when you’re a curious, wandering student passionate about a new topic and scouring the world for people just like you.