Forgotten Dreams of Mao’s Ousted Class: An Intimate Ethnography on how the Chinese Intelligentsia Survived the Mao Zedong Era

This project combines history, anthropology and politics to complicate official representations of Chinese history told by the current regime of power.

Starting from my own family history, which sits at the core of this research, Forgotten Dreams of Mao’s Ousted Class is guided by the stories of my Chinese grandfather and Finnish grandmother as a mixed-racial couple of the intelligentsia class at a time of political transformation when an imagined socialist future seemed within grasp.

In a novel enquiry to re-conceptualize how collective memory is transmitted, this first ever state-of-the-art ethnographic project documents and analyses silenced stories of grievous loss and trauma of the Chinese educated elite to reconsider what lurks beneath the nation’s autocratically monitored socialist dream that holds post-Mao Chinese society together.

My three-year postdoctoral project is an intimate ethnography that bridges ethnography and biography to offer a new methodological approach to studying the transmission of loss by state violence in contemporary history.

Professor Alisse Waterston, the supervisor for the outgoing phase at City University of New York (CUNY), and Professor Maarit Forde, the supervisor for the return phase at the University of Helsinki (UH), will support my work and mentor me to deliver an innovative and novel intimate ethnography monograph that combines methodology and theory; politics and ethnography; the personal and the historic.