Can you tell the readers of the newsletter a bit about yourself?

Hello, I am Belinda. (My last name in Mandarin is HE and first name in Cantonese is HIM; since I am not a man, I usually go by Belinda to make everything easier!) I am a person who seeks to fight against any form of binary thinking and a woman whose interests generally revolve around violence, crime and punishment, in particular, how art and law, image and justice define and are defined by each other.

Even though I grew up as a cinephile and hail from a Chinese immigrant city, I came to the study of cinema and Chinese history by way of a border-crossing detour via journalism and nonfiction writing concerning human rights issues. After I completed my undergraduate studies, a global gap-year volunteering programme enabled me to keep moving across more than 30 cities and marginalized areas across continents. The participants were both practitioners and first-hand observers within various host families and local communities. This combination of participants’ varied backgrounds or areas of expertise and different levels of collaboration provided me with the opportunity to experience and reflect on diversity, identity, labor, and migration in ways that would never be possible for a single traveler. Before this, I had been suffering from disappointment and depression produced by my personal experience in the field of journalism. It was during my journey with this group that I made my decision to change my intended major from Journalism/Communication to East Asian/Chinese Studies at CUHK. 

That’s a significant shift. Why did you decide to do a MA in East Asian/Chinese Studies and come to CUHK?

I wrote about social problems and cultural events in shifting roles (as a student, a contributing journalist, intern, researcher, curator, etc.) when I studied, worked, travelled and lived in cities including Beijing, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seattle. Hong Kong was a unique place where I learned much more about myself and refreshed my ways of thinking about the world within and through history.

CUHK’s MA in Chinese Studies (it used to be East Asian Studies in the year when I came to CUHK) programme marked a turning point of my life story. I always wanted to study in Hong Kong due to my personal fascination with both Hong Kong cinema/screen cultures and Hong Kong’s defining spiritual wealth: the rule of law (legal culture in general). The rich intellectual traditions in Chinese cultural history and youth movement at CUHK seemed to be a great attraction and served as an invitation for people like me to start a new exploration of the present past.

Where has life brought you since you graduated from the MA programme?

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, affiliated with the China Studies and Taiwan Studies programmes, at the University of Washington, Seattle. My research concerns the history of Chinese and East Asian cinema, art, animation, performance, and exhibition, with a focus on atrocity, violence, and witnessing. Through an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of film studies, media archaeology, art history, and legal humanities, I study the role of photography, film, and museum in policing, judging, punishing, and transitional justice, with a focus on the weaponization of looking in both local and transnational contexts. My work also engages the dynamics between violence, political filmmaking, and art as activism across mainland China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as within and beyond the Global South, particularly through what I call “cinema as show trial.”

I am currently a Society of Scholars Fellow funded by the Walter Chaplin Simpson Center in the Humanities, allowing me to work with a wonderful intellectual community of cross-discipline humanists. I am also co-organizing the Dissent Images Research Group at University of Washington with a group of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and public health scholars who all are passionate about the role of image politics in making sense in a time of chaos.

Do you think the knowledge and skills you learned at CCS have been useful to your further studies and career?

Yes for both. We were encouraged to take courses in various fields and disciplines, such as history, anthropology, communication, cultural studies, and so forth. Part of my best memories about CCS were from the classrooms where people with various backgrounds discussed subjects that are fluid and boundary-crossing.

Overall, I have two keywords that summarize what I appreciated and learned at CCS: archival work and human encounter. One of the most helpful courses was the Interdisciplinary Chinese Studies Seminar Series in which we worked with a wealth of primary materials and secondary scholarship. We developed individual projects and enjoyed the flexibility of approaching China and Chinese studies through a topic of our own choice. Such experiences allowed us to see archival work as a mode of thinking at the heart of our exploration. In my case, a variety of illustrated newspapers, trade journals, folk artifacts, ethnographic notes, and digital archival databases were examples of primary sources that I had never had a chance to take seriously before.

More importantly, I learned that any kind of archival work would be fundamentally about human encounters. Sites ranging from the CUHK Library, Universities Service Centre for China Studies (USC), Hong Kong Film Archive, to the private repositories in Taiwan shaped my roadmap for accessing not information, but the dynamics among people, materials, and spaces. Without countless discussions and actual encounters with people, I would never have been able to find my own “field” and field sites, not to mention an archive of “raw materials” that are significant and noticeable only through their interdisciplinary use in a way not often done in the field.

Last but not least, many people I got to know through my CCS experience at CUHK, from Belgium, Taiwan, South Korea, Norway, Singapore, and so forth, now have become colleagues in related fields, mutual supporters across academia and industry, and long-term friends with a shared “moveable feast.”

Your learning experience sounds very promising and fruitful! Do you have any outstanding memory from your time at CCS or CUHK?

For me, one of the most eye-opening experiences at CCS was to see my position within something much larger than me. Such a position was and is never fixed. Many first-time experiences at the time made me see myself and think with possibilities. When I studied at CCS, it was my first time to think about what research would mean and realize the magic of producing something as one’s own knowledge; it was my first time to reflect on local media labor as well as to understand “thinking by doing” through an independent project funded by the CUHK civic engagement programme; it was also my first time to conduct a few research trips around Taiwan for completing a historical project about violence in the age of White Terror. My days at CCS, CUHK and my living experience in Hong Kong set the foundation for all my ongoing work and research interests, as if those were the “childhood” of my academic life. I have to keep working and growing as my best appreciation of the moments when I roamed through Chung Chi College, the Lake Ad Excellentiam and chatted about group work with class friends at Tin Tin Bar.

Any message to current students and/or teachers?

Words about those professors, teachers, peers, and great friends I met and worked with at CCS will be in the long acknowledgment pages of my dissertation. Borrowing and slightly revising the words of an inspiring female author, here is something brief I hope to share with current students: Sometimes when you’re in a dark place it’s easy to think you’ve been buried. Dark places could be everywhere. There are always moments of being buried, in life, in research, and in memories. But you’ve actually been planted. May you find the way to BLOOM through CCS experiences when you study, work, and live at CUHK.