Dear all,
There is something quite peculiar about conducting fieldwork in a place that should feel like home, yet it doesn’t entirely. As a Chinese researcher working in China, I navigate a strange in-between space—familiar yet distant; belonging, yet observing. I speak the language effortlessly, understand the unspoken rules, and instinctively know how to position myself in conversations. And yet, I am not entirely of this place anymore. Years abroad have shaped how I see, how I question, how I interpret. When I introduce myself, people often tilt their heads slightly as if trying to place me: Am I one of them? Or an outsider looking in?
This tension of both knowing and unknowing has followed me throughout my fieldwork. It is a constant negotiation—when to blend in, when to lean into my ‘foreignness,’ when to press forward with a question that might not have occurred to me had I never left. It is a delicate balance, one that I am still learning to maintain.
In a way, this experience reminds me of tulips—flowers I once saw only as a distant symbol of another place, but which have now become a quiet presence in my life. In the Netherlands, where I now live, tulips are everywhere, so deeply intertwined with the country’s image that they seem native. But of course, they are not (According to Wikipedia, the tulip (Tulipa) originated in the Tian Shan mountains of China). Tulips arrived in the Netherlands, adapting, thriving, and eventually becoming part of the landscape. A Dutch friend once told me that tulips are at their most beautiful just before they fully open—when the petals are still holding onto their shape, when the flower is suspended between what it was and what it is becoming.
When I see tulips planted in China—in carefully arranged urban gardens, along university campuses, in small decorative pots on hospital windowsills—I feel a quiet recognition. They are here, but they are not from here. They exist between worlds, between identities. And perhaps, in some way, so do I.
This in-betweenness has shaped how I approach my research. I find myself noticing details I once overlooked—how hospital corridors feel different in the morning than in the evening, how hierarchy is woven into the smallest interactions, how the digital infrastructures I study are seamlessly embedded into daily life in ways that are both innovative and unsettling. At times, I wonder if I would see these things differently had I never left. Would I question them as much? Would I take them for granted?
Fieldwork, I’ve realized, is not just about studying a place; it is about studying one’s own relationship to it. And so, I keep moving forward, balancing the familiar with the unfamiliar, the insider with the outsider, the known with the yet-to-be-understood.
Best,
