I have been a fan of historian Liam Kelley’s history blog, perhaps, as far as I know, the only American-Western scholar to bridge the history of China and Vietnam in a serious and meaningful way. His blog and academic writing have not played a small role in my decision to choose to do a PhD in China.
Recently, using autoethnographic narrative, he has written about the decline of Asian Studies in the West. As I was reading the article, I could not help but reflect on my own journey as an American of Vietnamese heritage studying at a Chinese university in Shanghai, though the pandemic, for now, has made international study impossible.
After studying software engineering and working for a large multinational IT company for many years, I decided to leave the industry but only after several years of struggling to find some sense of dignity and meaning in the work itself given the ups and downs of global economy following the financial crisis of 2008 along with constant threats of layoffs and the diminishing spirit of working for work’s sake.
So, sometime in 2016 before Trump was declared winner, I left for Washington, D.C. Seeking then what I perceived as a higher purpose, one that involved working for the US government, I enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. Although their international studies was mainly a Master’s professional program, it blended scholarly and policy perspectives. Lacking the knowledge of academia and Asian studies in general, I chose to concentrate my studies on Southeast Asian, with an emphasis on Vietnam, without realizing that the program was dying. Although Southeast Asian Studies might have been a strong program in the 1980s and 90s, it was no longer the case when I got there. I think this reflected the geopolitical and political economic interests. For instance, China, energy, and security studies were much stronger.
In our Southeast Asian Studies, our professors were still stuck with cold war ideology: democracy versus communism. So, there wasn’t much relevancy to contemporary events, particularly the changing relation between Vietnam and China. Our knowledge of historical events came from reading articles that were hopelessly outdated.
After graduating in 2018, I wanted to pursue a PhD related to China or Vietnam or both, but after looking at many U.S. universities I could not find a program that carried the spirit of Kelley’s analysis. At the same time, I started reading Daniel Vukovich’s book on the production of Western knowledge on China, and I did not find American universities well-versed in handling such deficiencies and inherent biases in their research.
While living in Danang in 2019, I first heard of East China Normal University, where I’m currently doing my PhD. It came from a French professor of Vietnamese heritage teaching courses in luxury marketing at the university. Although I had no interest in marketing at that time and had wanted to pursue the study of history, culture, and politics, the name of the university remained in my mind, a memory that influenced latter decisions. Yet I’d have to stop here for now and continue another time of my recollection of the events leading to the decision to study in China. In future posts, I’d like to explore other dimensions of this journey, particularly the multiplicity of identity—Vietnamese and Chinese—how did I come to identify what was Chinese and what was Vietnamese.