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Yanshuo Zhang, "Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
5:00am I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change and head to work. Meetings, workshops, one more Celsius. No slowing down, working late, but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com. welcome to the new Books Network.
- [00:30]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Yan Shuo Zhang about her book titled Creative the Tiang and Multi Ethnic Imagination in Modern China, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2026. Now, this book takes as its subject one of the ethnic minority groups in modern China, specifically the Qiang, and what that really means. Right? We're talking about a people, a concept, we're talking about different sorts of media and cultural productions and determining what it sort of means to be a ethnic minority group in modern China today. All sorts of questions of identity and other are all intertwined through this investigation. So we clearly have a lot of things to discuss. Yan Shuo, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:26]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [01:27]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:33]
A
Yes. So my name is Yan Shuojia. I am currently an assistant professor of Asian languages and literature at Pomona College, which is a liberal arts college located in California. So I obtained a PhD from Statebrew University in 2018. And personally I teach courses on Chinese and Asian cultures, literatures as well as cultural history. So I'm very excited to talk to everyone about my book today. So this book, Creative Belonging, started out as doctoral dissertation which I completed at Stanford. And when I was completing the dissertation, one question I had in mind was how do we understand China in small tech ethnic perspective in terms of understanding China from diverse and multicultural light? So when I was pursuing my PhD, I had a very diverse and interdisciplinary dissertation committee that encouraged me to pursue the question of multiethnic China from diverse disciplinary perspectives. So I wanted to write this book because I actually grew up in China and I spent the first 18 years of my life in China. You know, combining that personal experience, personal history, with a scholarly perspective that I cultivated as a Chinese scholar educated in America. I thought I would love to present both personal as well the scholarly understanding of how does it look like to be an ethnic minority group today? China especially because China has a history of multi ethnic exchanges and inter ethnic communications. So that's the broader picture of the book.
- [03:19]
B
Thank you for that introduction. That's a very helpful start to the conversation. Staying on the big picture level then of your goals for this project. Who do you hope reads the book and what do you most want them to take away from it?
- [03:32]
A
Yes. So I really wanted this book to be a contribution to China studies Asian Studies, but also to foster a stronger conversation between China Studies and global studies of recent ethnicity. So when I was in grad school, I noticed that a lot of curricula here in the United States, maybe in the Western world, tends to focus on urban China. You know, the Beijing, Shanghai or the dazzling lights of urban centers of China and the different ethnic groups who live in the geographic borderlands of China tend to be somehow marginalized or neglected in the current curriculum, college curriculum that's geared toward American and Western audience and students. So that in mind, I really wanted to write about China from a perspective that's kind of bringing our attention to the rural and the some marginalized communities. So the first audience I want the book to have is China scholars and people who are interested in China, diverse perspectives. I would like those scholars and communities to see China from different light. So in order to do that, I actually conducted a lot of ethnographic field research. As I mentioned, I grew up in Sichuan Province, which is the southwestern province in China, bothering Yunnan and very close to Tibet. So this is a multi ethnic region that's home to over 20 ethnic groups in China. And a lot of those groups speak diverse range of languages that fall into the Sino Tibetan Tibetan language families. So I wanted to present this book as this one of the new studies with fresh insight from the ethnographic research that I conducted from the conversations or histories I contacted with people, novel writers, cultural entrepreneurs from the Qiang minority ethnic region, which is deeply embedded in this inter ethnic cosmic zone that's straddled in the Sino Tibetan border. End. So I want Chinese scholars to read this book and think about China from a different perspective. And I would also love for general readers who are interested in indigenous culture and cultural diversity read this book. So one of my goals in this book is to not just refer to China Studies or what is called Xenophone studies, but also to branch into for example, Native American studies. So I actively cite and reference to Native American studies scholarship in terms of understanding indigenous identities of groups that have been historically marginalized to understand idea of how indigenous and minority communities use creative acts such as literary Writing, filmmaking, even grassroots, colorful preservation projects to serve their creative agency and to claim ownership to their cultural and ancestral memory in today's world. So that's kind of like the broader picture in which I would love for readers from beyond China studies and beyond academia to take a look at this group called Tian, who has a recorded history of over 2000 years in China, even though the concept of Qiang has changed. But what can we learn from this group and its evolution of identity to understand indigenous identities in the long duration of global history?
- [07:22]
B
So a lot of what you explained there then has some clear interdisciplinary goals and the methods you use are part of that. Do you want to tell us more about your methods and the importance of interdisciplinarity?
- [07:36]
A
As I mentioned, when I was studying at Stanford, I was fortunate to work with diverse range scholars from the fields of Chinese studies, literary studies, comparative literature, as well as history and anthropology. So I had really big, you know, the patient committee and I benefited as a graduate student from taking courses in a range of disciplinary fields. And you can really see my attention to interdisciplinary scholarship by flicking through the different chapters of the book. For example, the book is divided into three parts. In the first part, we have this literary historical excavation of what I call the textual traditions in China, because the word, the Chinese character, had existed in China since the artist recorded history of China dating back to the Shang dynasty, you know, the Bronze Age of China. So in the first part of the book, the first two chapters, I delve into this deep historical and textual excavation or exploration of how the word and the image of the Shang evolved in Chinese history. So and also, you know, venture into the study of poetry. So I cite a lot of classical Chinese poetry, especially in the Heart and two, you know, very important dynasties of China, the Han and the Tang dynasties, which are considered to be one of the two most cosmopolitan dynasties Chinese history. So even during those two cosmopolitan eras, you see the Qiang mentioned Chinese poets, but at the time, Qiang was mentioned more as a cultural and racial barbarian episcopal Chinese poetry. So in my book, especially the first chapter, I delve into that interesting and fascinating poetic history of China to understand how the Qiang was constructed as literary imagery in classical Chinese literature. And then later I also combine a textual analysis or literary analysis, as I mentioned before, fresh insights from ethnographic research. So for example, contemporary Qiao people, you know, there are 55 ethnic minority groups have been officially recognized in China, and the Qian is one of them. So today's Qiang has been constructed as one of China's multi ethnic and disturbance. So there has been this strong desire to see the Qiang as a cultural guardian of Chinese China's ethnic heritage and tradition. So in light of this, today, if you go to the Qian regions of western China, for example, I incorporated a story of someone who make the Qian red pipe, the food. And Qiandi was a very important recurring image in classical Chinese poetry. And nowadays this image has been reclaimed by villagers and musicians who belong to China group and they make the Chinese pipe as part of the intangible cultural heritage that has been institutionalized in China. So you see this historical trajectory of pre modern or classical literary imagery making its way into current multicultural politics in contemporary China. So I think that's a vastly fascinating field for us to be as scholars, students, as you know, people who are interested in history and cultural history. So in other words, I combine this textual analysis and literary analysis with ethnographic research and also this I call chance historical analysis because usually, for example, in the field of China studies, you have this divide between classical study or pre modern China studies and modern China studies. So what I feel is that one of those categories might be important in establishing boundaries. At the same time, as scholars, we need to challenge and question those artificial boundaries. So studying the evolution of the idea of Qiang over a long historical duration in China, I think we can get into this interesting and sort of in depth investigation of multiethnic cultural politics in China. So that's how I come by is literary analysis with ethnographic and historical methodologies. But then later we can talk about the chapters in the book that focus on the facial culture, cinema making, you know, image making industries in contemporary villages. So yeah, I'm really, really invested in this interdisciplinary approach and I want to talk more about it with everyone.
- [12:25]
B
Yeah, no, I definitely think we'll talk more about, as you said, film and other cultural productions later. But before we get there, I want to talk more about this transformation or trajectory over the longer period that you've just mentioned. Because when taking this wider timeline view, right, not just looking at modern or pre modern separately, you do see this pretty big change. And so I wonder if we can talk more about why and how that change happened. Right from the Qiang being other or even barbarian to, as you mentioned, sort of cultural guardian, that's a pretty big transformation. So how, when and why did that occur?
- [13:05]
A
Yeah, that's wonderful question. I think this question taps into again, long historical evolution of cultural concepts in China. And I think you can start with the early 20th century that's the so called Republican era, which I talked about in some chapters of the book. So by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, China was facing with this transformation from being a, an imperial dynastic country to a modern nation state. So the last imperial dynasty, Qing dynasty, was decidedly multiethnic dynasty, with Tibetan, the way, the earth, the Qiang, everybody mingling the same empire, that was China. So but in the late 19th century, China was also faced with imperial invasions or, you know, activities from Western missionaries. And even later Japan came into the picture. So there was a strong desire China was transitioning from an empire to modern nation state to recognize and even take names to the different ethnic groups of China. Because for example, according to Benedict Anderson's idea, the nation is an imagined community. And every nation is do its own job of imagining and even institutionalizing different ethnic groups and minority groups of that nation. So in the Republican era, the early 20th century, especially from the 1920s through 1940s, was a moment when modern Chinese nation state was establishing its boundaries, sovereignty, its sovereignty and its boundaries. And at the same time you see this introduction of Western disciplines such as ethnography, ethnology and anthropology being introduced to China. And that introduction of Western discipline basically shifted the epistemological perspective from regarding those groups such as the Chiang as barbarians to seeing them as interesting subjects for ethnographic investigation. So as early as 1920s and 30s, there were a bunch of Han Chinese ethnographers who went to the minority regions of China. And one of them was named Zhuang Shi Ben. He was a photographer who was based in Shanghai. And he ventured to some of the ethnic Tibetan and Chiang Portlands in Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. And I wrote about Zhuang in one of the chapters of my book. He was immense, interesting figure. He mingled with locals. He then put on, you know, Tibetan and Chiang ethnic customs. And he utilized his graphic lens to document the first human images of those communities that had always existed in the cultural imagination of China, but that lacked a human face. So Zhang Yibin gave those people the first human face, endowed like human aura, cultural aura to those communities. He started to see those communities as being part and parcel of the Chinese multi ethnic national identity. And so that was the 1930s and 40s. And then when you come to 1950s and beyond, we enter into the so called communist and socialist era of China. And that tradition has been inherited to this day. And then especially I think in the current era, in the post 1980s period, the, the China has been practicing multiculturalism and we can also talk about the 2008 earthquake. That also kind of made it an important moment for the Qian to be recognized as guardian of China's traditional culture. So we will see this general shift in national discourses, in political discourses, in terms of regarding the former barbarians as part and parcel of an important Chinese multiethnic nation state, modern era.
- [17:09]
B
And is this happening just with the Qiang? I mean, you mentioned, for example, Sichuan and Yunnan have lots of different ethnic minorities in them, for example, that would have been impacted by the earthquake. So is there a broader transformation going on of ethnic identity in this more recent era, or is it just with the Qiang?
- [17:27]
A
Yeah, that's a very important question. So in my opinion, there have been a lot of broader changes and shifts in terms of ethnic identity, information and articulation in the post 2008 or era or in the 21st century. So maybe we could go back to Qiang for a couple minutes, because the 2008 Sichuan earthquake actually damaged a lot of the Qiang villages. So because of that. But you know, the Qiang villages have also been inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its unique architectural fabric, its unique architectural traditions. So at the moment, because of the Chang architectural dwellings, you know, some of the people have been relocated from their native villages to new tourist villages. So you see this important shift in the way of livelihood that local people are embarking on. So previously, for example, the Qiang and some of their neighbo in Sichuan Province have been nomadic communities or have been practicing animal husbandry or cultivating far land. But since 2008, a lot of those minority communities have been working on tourism, and tourism has been almost omnipresent sort of manifestation in different minority villages and regions. And I write about this in chapter three and four of my book in which delve into the impact of tourism on local minority cultural articulation, especially in the field of cinema and literary writing. So for example, in chapter five, I wrote about how contemporary minority writers from the chat Asian critique tourism. So tourism is a double aged work. On the one hand, you see more visibility of minority cultural manifestations because tourism tourists, usually from urban China or even abroad, have come to those regions to interact with local architecture, local people and story is being circulated on those communities, and tourists are becoming those sort of catalysts for creating good spectacles about minority communities. But on the other hand, as was the case elsewhere in the world, tourism can also serve to commodify culture. So in chapter five, for example, I wrote about how certain delve into the impact of tourism. And they critique the commercialization of tourism on minority identities. And this also taps into the question of gender, because we see this gender divide of Chiang women being more savvy at selling and fetishizing their cultural symbols to a range of touristic destinations, whereas Changban in this marginalized community in the wave of tourism. So a lot of interesting themes have emerged in the post 2008 era because of the introduction of tourism and because of the flourishing of vehicle culture, social media, in terms of creating both spectacles, also exasperating some of the identity crisis of those communities.
- [20:48]
B
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- [21:18]
B
Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about those visual representations in more detail? For example, contrasting the kind of representations of the Qiang made in the more sort of national, global cinema. Right. The sort of state version of it versus telling us more about what these indigenous Qiang critiques are of it. Like what are the competing images being made?
- [21:43]
A
Yeah, I think you mentioned a very key word here, competing image and sometimes even contradictory image. And we can definitely talk about it. And I think this kind of contradictory image is at the core of, I think, imagination. Because as the title of my book indicates, I really want to delve into this sense of creative belonging, of how minority groups resort to a diverse range of local, national, global, historical and contemporary cultural and literary sources to imagine the place in contemporary world. So this is a vastly creative enterprise. So in terms of cinema and visual culture, I can give you a few examples. So, on the one hand, we have a very locally grounded image making industry. For example, when I was in the field, I was conducting a lot of interviews with villagers. And what I was told was that a lot of villagers told me that before global and cinematic representations took place, locals tended not to see their villages in aesthetic light. They only saw it as a place of living, a place of going through their daily Life. Since the 1990s or so, starting from domestic tea industries and century industries in China, you see more and more representations of the town in the media industry. And then later there was a Los Angeles based Chinese American filmmaker by the name of Tiffan. She once visited Taobingqiang village, which is one of my major field sites by chance. And according to Lucas, she was fascinated, this Chinese American filmmaker, she was fascinated with Chinese cultural symbols and architecture. So she stayed in the village. She returned and stayed in the village for a few months to create a story. And she made a movie called Forbidden Kiss, or literally it means kisses in a forbidden village. So she really taps into this exoticized spectacle. And in this movie we see the story of the Qian being ployed as guardian of pristine sexual worries and sexual conducts in China. Because of course this is a fake life story, but we have a very telling tale of a Western or American architectural student by the name of Jack who goes to the village to study textual history. But he plundered in the village, right? So because Jack is portrayed as this outsider, is very ignorant about ch traditions or Chinese cultural traditions. So he usually the protagonist Ji, or you can maybe think him as an antagonist in some sense. So he violates a lot of local cultural rules and sexual traditions to the resentment of local villagers, especially men in the village. And then later he finally comes to a point of having a moment of reconciliation with villagers. Of course there is a romantic story involved in the story, but at the same time, we see like global cultural political dynamics being played out here because Cowping Chan village has been portrayed as symbolic embarkment of China's fraud encounter with west and fraud encounter with globalization. So indeed, a lot of, you know, starting from the early 20th century, a lot of Western missionaries and Chinese have come to this region of China. So some of them had a similar encounter as the fictional character Jack. Right? So they went to the co regions, they collected plants, species, men, and they also conducted a lot of research and explorations in the region. So, you know, Story of Jack, in other words, portrayed in Forbidden Kiss is such a symbolic tale of China's encounter and China's self positioning in contemporary society, even, you know, back to the early 20th century during the modern era. And the Qiang as a small minority group, has been portrayed as this impersonification of China and China's contradictory experience in the contemporary world. So I. I think that's a very important reason why small minority groups like Qian, they deserve more studies. Because if we go beyond this case study, we see the Xiang not just as One of the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups of China, but as a reference, as a signifier of the broader impact of globalization on China. Then we tap into this very intricate and interwoven world where the local meets the global. And then so beyond Forbidden Case, there are also Other cinematic representations in a country predicting sort of our enriching the global. In chapter four, I discussed two indigenous films. One is called Ten Years in Search for Qiang, which was produced by a game director by the name of Gao Tongzi. Even though he is of Han origin, he was born raised in the Qiang regions of Sichuan. According to his interview with him, Mr. Gao regards himself as a local, as indigenous person. So this is where you see this collaboration between Chiang and Han ethnic groups in terms of creating visual representations of minority identity. I think this phenomenon is tremendously interesting because despite Mr. Gao's origin as a Han person, he regards himself or even as insider. And he documents the migratory past of two villagers from two villages who have relocated to more towards sea region after the 2008 earthquake. And that's where I theorize about indigenous identity being a fluid identity or fluid indigeneity. Because we are looking at this general trend where indigeneity can be negotiated, it can be ray shaped and ray remade, reinvented through this constant cultural exchange between the local, national and the global. And that's where I think I want to introduce the enemy cultural landscapes in the local region in order to really shake some of the ideas of minority groups being those passive CP of national policies in China, they're the victims of globalization. I very much against those simple binaries, but rather I want to excavate the more intricate, complex and inspirational stories that gleam in the field. And I combine those ethnographic research vignettes with film analysis, texture analysis, to tell the more complex stories of the channel as a symbolic reference to China's encounter with globalization. Yeah, so that's what I discuss in certain chapters of the book.
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B
Yeah, that definitely helps give us a picture of the more nuanced perspective, as you said. Can we also talk a little bit more about something you mentioned earlier in terms of differences or changes with kind of gender norms and gender roles with this post 2008 sort of change?
- [29:18]
A
Yeah, that's a very important dimension of chance as well as in many ethnic minority groups shifting experience in contemporary China. So I think gender is such an important question. And usually when we talk about gender with regard to ethnic community, I think at least through my encounter there tends to be more pre scholarship tends to talk more about how ethnic communities are gendered or sexualized by external forces, for example, by external fair directors, tourists or communities. While that is an important lens, I think we shouldn't also forget about the internal gender dynamics that are at play in shaping communities themselves. So in chapter five of my book I focus on contemporary minority literature authored by Chiang and some other smaller minority groups in southwestern China. And I think I. I was really delighted to translate some of those minority literary words for the first time into English and introducing them for the first time into sport realm of global literary studies. So gender does play an important role in shaping minority group's experience with modernization and globalization. So for example, there is this again a pair of contradictory images embedded in contemporary minority literature. So in chapter five I talk about the so called languishing ethnic mother and the casting her image with the so called indigenous seductaries. So I surveyed a whole group of fictional autobiographic literary works produced by Chan authors in chapter five. And one thing I noticed through this literary survey was that there are two contrasting and vastly different images that reference to the minority experience with minorities. For example, a lot of male writers from the Qiang community tend to have this journey of return to their home villages. So they grew up in a rural minority region and later took up educational and professional opportunities in urban China. So in the middle age those male authors have this intellectual and cultural homecoming. They revisit their home villages. However, instead of feeling a sense of belonging and being welcomed back to the home village, those male intellectuals tend to have this profound sense of intellectual wandering because they feel like they have the artists on the homepage for long enough to be considered as outsiders. But at the same time sticking their food on the home village triggered childhood memories. And one such writer called Yang Zi, he's a very famous poet in Shang community. He wrote about how he remembers his mother. So this, there's this autobiographic My mother in the mountains or mother in the mountains. So he documents this journey of how his mother was a very hardworking farmer in the Qian community and she raised her, she raised him poet single handedly. But the poet later decided to go to urban China to seek his fortunes. But then he lost a huge chunk of his fortune and his mother tightened her her belt in order to find enough money to help the son, right? So when the son goes back to the village, there is moment of looking awkwardly at the mother, feeling ashamed of not being able to make a name of himself in urban China and coming back to his mother as this moment of intellectual wandering homecoming. But at the same time coming to course with this those tremendous human costs and perfect costs of kind of abandon the childhood homeland in order to save for a new life. So you have this image of a very enterprising modern son, forward looking masculine figure, embodied the Poet image of son and then his mother is this hard working self erasing old women bearing the burdens of traditions. And the mother is no longer seen as this viable source of livelihood by the modern children who are so eager to leave her Boston to embrace a life in the urban centers. Right? So this is very token moment how those minority writers pause in their Middle ages and they look back on their life trajectory and they think back on this kind of transformation of their identities from a rural ethnic person, an urban educated person in China, and this kind of important question of where does the ethnic community go? Where does ethnic identity go in the future? Right? So a lot of times those intellectual moments are framed in gendered terms and kind of casting that image of the English mother is the image of the indigenous seductress. And that's the image that I talked a lot about, which the Qiang community, when I was in the field, I was repeatedly told the story of the so called poisonous cat, or in Chinese, du yamao. That's kind of indigenous. You can think about it maybe superstitious or spiritual reference to a group of women that locally believe to have bewitching power over others. So the Qian community has long held this tradition as certain women transform into the shape and form of a cat temporarily, and they would, you know, if they feel resentful, for example, towards someone, they could assume the shape of a cat and kind of cast their spell on others, and they would resume their human shape the next day. We see, like contemporary works making reference to this tradition. But at the same time, for example, there's a writer by the name of Yao Min. He wrote a story called the Fragrant Key, which I analyzed in chapter five. So this is a very poignant story of one such so called poisonous cat who is portrayed as this quintessential power of monopolizing tourist resources in the region, Right? So in this fictional story of his law school village, Ada Yin is an indigenous seductress who is a very beautiful, charming entrepreneur Chiang woman. She is so good at turning everything, Xiang, into tourist spectacles, tourist architects, that she makes a lot of money, you know, to the detriment, to the detriment of her fellow pledgers. And we have this story of this indigenous seductress embodying the vices of touristic development and probing or prompting locals to rethink their relationship to tourism and to commercialization. So in other words, you know, gender has been a very important topic in contemporary minority literature in China. And again, I'm very delighted to have been translating those fascinating literary works into English for the first time. And I really look forward to the readers response to this rich body literature and to see how you add to global literary studies and comparative studies.
- [37:15]
B
Yeah, there's certainly a contribution there in and of itself. And it goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning of our conversation around the multiple contributions of the book and the multiple audiences that it might be relevant to. So in some ways I think we've come full circle and therefore it might be a good place to conclude our discussion. Though I do want to ask what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [37:41]
A
Yes, definitely. So in fact, I have an ongoing project that is led by the American Council of Learned Society, Sao Luz Foundation. So it is titled Researching Humanistic China Studies Incorporating Literary and Cultural Factions from the Minority Communities of China into North American College Classrooms. So this is a group project. I am principal investigator of this project. As I mentioned, you know, part of my goal beyond writing this book is to introduce more exciting primary sources to the broader global scholarly community and to global community of literary and cultural scholars and students. So what I found out so far is that, you know, despite this scholarly contribution that a lot of different scholars have made, we lack teaching sources for the most part to get students, especially in the west, to engage with China's economic group. Part of my asset is granted. So a core spirit of SAO's grant is to translate, introduce, and kind of make known to the world the teachable resources. So what we've been doing is that I'm leading a group of scholars, students, also artists around the globe. So most of our memories are in mainland China and also the United States, Canada and beyond. So we have a team of very important contributors, including those indigenous writers and cultural workers from China and also other parts of the world. We are really actively translating a whole body of literary works into English. And also at the same time, we are putting together our exhibitions. For example, next month in April, I'm having an exhibition titled Asian Indigenous Past and Present. I mean, collaboration with Scripps College here in Claremont. And we're presenting contemporary artist Jing Bu Zhang, who is also a work contributor and project. So he has done a lot of artistic portrayals of the architectural dwellings of the Tian and the Tian communities of China. So those works will be displayed on Scripps College campus as part of my SAX Grant project and my curriculum effort. So the hope is that through this kind of visual, literary and Cultural engagement. We're hoping to introduce China's ethnic cultural heritage to a broader global audience and to encourage more teachers and students to engage with this material. For example, you don't even have to teach a whole course on the minority cultures of China. But if any teacher from anywhere in the world could find a piece or two to teach to introduce to their students China or Asia cultural traditions, that would really enrich the curriculum. Similarly, if someone teaches about Native American cultural traditions or indigenous cultures in other parts of the world, they could take a picture, an image from our database. The end product of this project would be an open access database that anyone anywhere in the world could access. So we want to take down the institutional barriers and encourage broader global engagement with these resources. So yeah, it is really my goal to help spread knowledge about diversity in China in Asia, and to foster this moment of constructive conversation in our world today where we can see beyond political and national divides to look at some of the common themes, sentiments and emotions that people have around the question of belonging. Right. Going back to the title of my book, Creative Belong, so how can we belong creatively in the world across gender, linguistic, cultural and national divides? So that's kind of the improper that me and my team are diligently working toward, and I would be excited to see how the broader global community responds to this effort.
- [42:10]
B
Well, it certainly sounds like a very big effort with lots of goals embedded in it, so best of luck to you and your team pursuing it. And as you said, it is related to the book we've been discussing. So if anyone wants to learn more, that book is titled Creative the Tian and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2026. Yanshuo, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:35]
A
Thank you so much, Brenda. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for your.