Born and raised in Shanghai, I came to Hong Kong for higher education and completed my bachelor’s and MPhil degrees at HKU. This university is already home to me, and pursuing a PhD here is a familiar yet still challenging task.

During my undergraduate studies, I was trained in sociology, counseling, and Buddhist studies, and I developed a general interest in religion and literature. After being admitted to the Institute, I started researching the Yao people thanks to Professor Palmer’s introduction. However, COVID-19 prevented me from conducting fieldwork during my entire MPhil period. Fortunately, the Yao Dao Team at the Institute has accumulated an incredibly rich database of written materials, and I started studying their stories by experimenting with the method of “textual anthropology,” namely, to treat texts like anthropologists treat people.

My past research projects include a study of the Charters of Emperor Ping (評王券牒), rice-related myths and rituals, the stories of Woman Huang (黃氏女), Tan Qing (譚清), Zhu Yingtai (祝英台), etc. They have turned into several unpublished papers as well as two presentations at ICAS-12 (Aug 2021) and the International Conference on Daoist Ritual and Chinese Society (Nov 2021). For my PhD studies, I plan to conduct a comprehensive textual analysis of all Lanten narratives scattered in storybooks, ritual texts, and oral traditions.