大象传媒

Education

• PhD, English Literature, Cornell University (2006)
• MA, English Literature, Cornell University (2003)
• BA Honours, English and History, University of Toronto (2000)

Biography

Between 2000 and 2020, I studied and worked in English departments across the United States and Canada, including Cornell University, Macalester College, the University of Nevada at Reno, and McMaster University. In 2021, I returned to the Lower Mainland, where I was born and grew up (on x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m land/in Richmond), to teach at 大象传媒 in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies as well as the Global Asia Program. 

As a scholar of empire, reproductive labour, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, my work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by my positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. My first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, investigates the centrality of reproduction to postimperial projects of governance and nation-building through readings of twentieth-century literature and policy from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014. I'm currently completing a SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949, about Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule, that will appear with Stanford University Press in 2026. Here, I delve into the heterogeneous social worlds that flourished in port cities like Hong Kong, London, and Liverpool during the first half of the twentieth century, developing vivid accounts of port city life pieced together from a range of archival materials, including photography, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, that testify to the reach and limits of empire as a structure of meaning. Finally, I鈥檓 working on a collaborative book project with my geographer sibling . Entitled Cold War Relations, the book turns to the vernacular photographic archives of American Vietnam War workers to explore Asian women鈥檚 wartime domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work across decolonizing southeast Asia. Between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded  and currently serve on the editorial boards of  and . 

Publications

Cold War Relations: Photography and the Gendered Work of Empire (with Wesley Attewell). In progress.

Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949. Forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

鈥淢odernism and the Queer Theory of Diaspora.鈥� Contemporary Queer Modernism, edited by Melanie Micir, Routledge, 2025, pp. 281-299. 

鈥淟ooking With Images: Chinese Diasporic Worldmaking Beyond the Frame.鈥� Modernism/modernity Print Plus 鈥淰isualities,鈥� Volume 8, Cycle 1, 2024. .  

鈥淒ecolonizing Across Borders: Diasporic-Indigenous Encounters and the Predicaments of Arrival.鈥� Diaspora and Literary Studies. Edited by Angela Naimou, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 346-360. .

鈥淗ong Kong in Transition: Photography and Liberation at the End of the Pacific War.鈥� Trans Asia Photography 13, no. 1, 2023, .

鈥淐onversation, Collaboration, and the Work of Teaching Global Asia/s鈥� (with Anushay Malik). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9, no. 1, 2023, pp. 3-14. .

鈥淓xit Survey: The Terrain of Struggle.鈥� English Studies in Canada 46, no. 1, March 2020 [published 2022], pp. 13-21. .

鈥�(Un)Learning at the Edge of Empires.鈥� Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 1, 2022: 82-88. .

鈥溾�楽weating for their pay鈥�: Gender, Labor, and Photography Across the Decolonizing Pacific鈥� (with Wesley Attewell).  Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 2, 2021, 183-217. .

鈥淏etween Asia and Empire: Infrastructures of Encounter in the Archive of War鈥� (with Wesley Attewell). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2019, pp. 162-179. .

鈥淟ocal Knowledge: Of Homecomings and Orientations.鈥� BC Studies 198, Summer 2018, pp. 25-26.

鈥淚ntimacy Out of Doors: Labor, Landscape, and Chinese Diasporic Practices of Looking.鈥� Photography and Migration, edited by Tanya Sheehan, Routledge, 2018, pp. 199-215.

鈥淟ooking in Stereo: School Photography, Interracial Intimacy, and the Pulse of the Archive.鈥� Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, vol. 4, no. 1-4, 2018, pp. 19-44. .

鈥淣ot the Asian You Had in Mind: Race, Precarity, and Academic Labor.鈥� English Language Notes vol. 54, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183-190. .

鈥淭he Return of the Native: White Supremacy, Indigenous Rights, and the Struggle for Britain.鈥� TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 35, 2016, pp. 173-197. 

鈥淟oving Revolutions: Reading Mixed Race at Mid-Century.鈥� Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights, edited by Allan Hepburn, McGill University Press, 2016, pp. 216-239.

鈥溾�楩or Karnak 1923/From London 1942鈥�: Approaching War in H. D.鈥檚 The Walls Do Not Fall.鈥� Tulsa Studies in Women鈥檚 Literature vol. 34, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-27. .

Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

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