Seeking a Future for the Past

Abstract

This book began as a dissertation project at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010, a time when Hu Jintao was president of China, I used SMS to keep in touch with interlocutors, and Dabaodao was a neglected inner-city neighborhood. Now-a decade later-Dabaodao, China, and the world have profoundly changed, and I have moved from being a (naive) PhD student to teaching and researching at a university department. Along the way, I have been very fortunate to meet some exceptional people without whom I would not have been able to complete this book.My first heartfelt thanks go to all my interlocutors in Qingdao. No ethnographic study could ever be carried out without the help of countless kind people in the field. Over the course of ten years, many of them have become trusted friends. I cannot, for privacy and safety reasons, reveal their identities here. But I feel the deepest gratitude toward all those who allowed me into their lives and selflessly shared their stories and experiences with me. I am exceptionally fortunate to have had the chance to learn from every single one of you.Then, in roughly chronological order, I would like extend my profound gratitude to my former adviser, Joseph Bosco, for his unwavering support and guidance. His critical but always encouraging comments helped me enormously in moving this project along. His intellectual rigor, attention to detail, and in particular his open-mindedness and selflessness both as a scholar and as a person have been most inspirational. I feel privileged to have had the chance to learn from him.