About
It’s so hard to write anything about myself in a self-reflective occasion like this. Do I lay out what I’m wanting to do right now? Or sketch out my whole trajectory? Even me seldom consider myself as a solid entity when letting my association and reasoning go wild. I’m interested in all possible ways of life, but meanwhile too self-aware that I’m only a random viewpoint that doesn’t even remotely count as “tenable” enough to reveal part of reality in this world. I came across things, people, places, books, films, and I feel for them, in whatever sense. I mostly rely on words to archive limited remnant of these countless encounters and interdependence, only because other media are too expensive and difficult for me myself to handle. This website was meant to be built as my personal archive as described above.
I’m doing a Phd in middle-period Chinese religions at Harvard right now, and I consider it a serious and meaningful vocation. I secretly see myself as playing socio-anthropology with historical evidence from a remote past, but the dauting basket of skills fundamental to make any tiny argumentative move in this field – philology, codicology, historical contextualizatoin, and sophistication to get along with political institutions that dominate the primary sources and academic institutions that condition the order of discourses – requires me to appear pedantically meticulous, reserved and boring all the time. But that’s not my true self. I’m trying to make every effort to walk around those artificial barriers imposed by power relation and pursue my own goal that set me out on all these, that is, to recover historical form-of-life more or less obscure in the existing narratives of East Asian history, East Asia, and the whole domain of human experiences, and, by engaging it with a modern diaspora self, reflected critically on those unnoticed prejudices in our current human condition.
Legally speaking I’m not an immigrant, but I started to identify as a diaspora self in the sense of homelessness and displacement, though it’s more of a recent thing. I grew up in a small city at southeast coast China, Wenzhou. It’s famous for businessman, migrant worker, and illegal immigration since China’s Reform and Opening-up in the 1980s. That’s also the era when my grandpa started his business and accumulated decent amount of wealth for later generations including me. However, supporting this global image in the backstage is the invincible network of localism, clannism, and sexism, probably the same as everywhere else in China. Me as a girl and a single child who interested in humanities with grades good enough to enter first tier law or business school, looks nothing but stupid and naïve, not to mention that I’ve never revealed my queerness to my family. Loneliness and eagerness for breaking free was the theme of my high school days. Adding to this was constitutional amendment in 2018. Still, it may sound pretty naïve, but I decided that I won’t write anything related to modern history where all sources of power are ruling.
One year afterwards, I went to Peking University for my college but only grew more ambivalent to the capital city. I joined a group of cool kids doing interviews and writing non-fiction stories across Beijing and China. Few of my pieces involved subcultures in Beijing from 1970s to 2010s, vintage, punk music, apartment art, and so on. It was the first time in my life that I felt belonging to a community and driven by an anonymous inner passion to track those equally unsettled inside other human being in interviews and archives. Yet COVID very soon shut down everything, including our insignificant school media derided as Playing House for inexperienced students but potentially jeopardizing social stability. Our official account was stifled bit by bit via censorship, its last article posted on June 1st, 2021. I may frame religious history as a shelter from real world ever since, but what I was really doing was to do everything I’m not allowed to do in real world in history. As a way to speak up for the suppressed, I write stories for the obscurity. Very cynic.
I live there, I care about the place, whether Wenzhou or Beijing, but I find no way that I could keep doing that without paying any concern for self-denial or camouflage. This was the homelessness and displacement I’m talking about. Me moving to US to pursue my PhD in 2025 is just another move that compound this state of mind to a degree where my self-reflection is obliged to operate actively so as to drag whatever new into the realm of comprehension. In many senses, my first encounter with religious ascetics in texts is probably engineered by my own wandering-into-wilderness, whether it’s queerness, rebellious nature, or anything that comes alongside. I regret the thorns, but I haven’t yet learned to say any of this without them.
That’s everything I could think of for now.
Kay
2026-04-12
Contact me: kaychen@g.harvard.edu