Qihao Liang
Posts by Qihao Liang

My name is Qihao Liang, and I’m a rising senior in Sociology in the Honors Program. I am deeply grateful for the U-M Library Student Mini Grant, which supported my May 8 to 23, 2025 fieldwork in Taiwan for my honors thesis on investment and education migration between Mainland China and Taiwan since 2008. I also want to thank Dr. Liangyu Fu, Director of the Asia Library, whose research guidance, fieldwork planning, and safety check-ins made this work possible. Writing in mid-August, I see how being on the ground in Taiwan reshaped my project; embodiment became tangible (what Ruth Behar calls “the vulnerable observer”), bringing emotional resonance and my own researcher subjectivity into view. Stepping onto the island as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with relatives separated across the Strait, I learned that self-exposure, the experience of being scrutinized and scrutinizing, and the slow time of fieldwork with participants—walking, eating, talking, getting lost—led me and, I hope, my readers to places that Zoom calls, archives, and scraping Instagram, Xiaohongshu, or Threads cannot reach.