Living as a Self-sufficient Second-class Citizen: Chinese International Undergraduate Students’ Journey to Permanent Residency in Canada

In recent years, Canada has become one of the world’s most popular destinations for studying abroad, and China has become the top sending country of international students to Canada. In Canada’s 2015 International Student Survey, more than half of international students indicated an interest in applying for permanent resident status following graduation. Meanwhile, the deflation of Western degrees in the Chinese market and recent spate of media coverage circulated portraying the outbound Chinese students as low-quality students have created barriers for studying abroad returnees for seeking desirable employment in China. Thus, it is logical to estimate that a considerable percentage of current Chinese international students will eventually become Canadian citizens. During my undergraduate years as an international student at the University of Waterloo (UW), I heard many of my fellow Chinese international undergraduate students express their strong and sustained desire to stay permanently in Canada but complained about Canada’s “backwardness” and its “lack of urban vitality”. Such irony sparkled my scholarly interest and I decided to conduct an ethnographic research on the Chinese undergraduate student community at UW. My thesis looks at the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate students’ aspirations and perspectives on becoming permanent residents in Canada. Specifically, I examine how they envision their future in Canada in relation to their individuality, self-happiness and self-satisfaction, neoliberal potentials, moral personhood, and skepticism toward Canadian multiculturalism

White-collar men and masculinities in contemporary urban China

This work investigates the characteristics of masculinity that are at the symbolic heart of China’s economic success, and of which the figure of the white-collar man is emblematic. Based on fieldwork observations, interview and media publications, it examines the gendered practices, aspirations and attitudes of men who identify with or aspire to white-collar status alongside discursive representations of the Chinese white-collar man, interrogating the links between practice and discourse. Drawing on various approaches to theorizing subjectivity, it argues that white-collar masculinity is performed in ways that suggest both radical shifts and continuities in understandings of gender, which challenge the prevalent teleological narrative of China’s modernization. The first chapter sets the scene for white-collar masculinity in the reform era and discusses fieldwork methodologies. Chapter two sets out the theoretical framework adopted to analyse the gendered white-collar subject, and examines academic literature on masculinities in China. Chapter three examines the ‘body culture’ of informants, and how they ‘bring themselves’ to white-collar discourse through attention to their bodies in areas of daily life such as dress, movement and hygiene. Chapters four and five look respectively at the production of corporate masculinity both inside and outside the office, through an exploration of business and leisure practices, and their overlap. Chapter six takes a close look at the young white-collar man as (heterosexual) boyfriend and husband and the final chapter investigates sexualisations of young urban middle-class males, and comments on their transformative possibilities

Talk piece with John Beatty, a 23-year veteran of the Portland Fire Department

Talk piece with John Beatty, a 23-year veteran of the Portland Fire Department and an Air Rescue Firefighter at the Portland Jetport

Senate journal, 9 June 2005.

Titles and imprints vary; Some volumes include miscellaneous state documents and reports; Rules of the Senat

American family entertainment and the only child generation in contemporary urban China

As a result of the economic reform which took place three decades ago, imported American family entertainment had gradually become an important part of the everyday entertainment for Chinese consumers. During the same period, a particular group of Chinese people, generally referred to as the post-80s or the only child generation, had emerged, grown up and become the main contributors to China’s media consumption. In this thesis, a study of the only child generation and the American family entertainment will be presented. The study sees the only child generation as groups of audience exposed to American family entertainment as the media, and the focus of this study is to understand the audience-media relationship between the two. As they are two objects emerged within their own social and cultural boundaries, the thesis will first tackle how the connection between the audience and the media was established. Then, the only child generation will be approached as a social creation. Findings on their social sophistications that are able to influence their relationship to media will be presented. Four case studies form the reset of the thesis. Each of the case studies will focus on one significant aspect of the generation’s social characteristics and how it is connected to the group’s receptions to media texts

"Friends and foes on the battlefield": a study of Chinese and U.S. youth literature about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

In order to understand how postwar generations??? understanding of the history of World War II has been shaped by the information sources made available to them, this dissertation examines the representation of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)???fought between Imperial Japan and China, with U.S. as the latter???s major military ally???in youth literature published in mainland China and the United States from 1937 through 2007. The study is based on a sociopolitical analysis of the historical context in which Chinese and American youth literature about ethnic Chinese experiences during the Second World War was produced; a content analysis of 360 titles of illustrated popular reading materials in Chinese; and a literary and visual analysis of important works of youth literature in both countries. Those who obtained the opportunity to ???tell??? the war history, which part of it they told, and how they told it were all highly politicized. In China, the subject matter and main themes of war stories served the shifting agendas and needs that might or might not be shared among different political and interest groups, from the war years, through the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949, to the post-Mao era after 1976. Further comparison between public literary sources about the war and Chinese private memories of it suggest a chasm between the ruling Party???s master narrative and the way individuals remember their own experiences during the years of 1937-45. In the United States, the narrative space for ethnic Chinese wartime experiences expanded or contracted in a racialized society that perpetuated Asian Americans??? alien identity. The result was a dearth of information that could help ethnic Chinese youth to understand their ancestors??? role during the war and, in the larger American society, amnesia about a military conflict with ongoing political, economic, and social ramifications