Class of 2023

Weining Fang obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Financial Management with a minor in Global History from Nankai University, China. Her recent research interests focus on popular culture and social stratification in China, in particular how people’s perception has been manipulated by cultural phenomena in the workplace, entertainment industry, etc. Weining has also been working as a research assistant at Cohen Lab at Stanford and at CAMLab at Harvard. She also completed several internships in major content platforms in China, including xiaohongshu, kwai and bilibili.

Carrie Jiang is academically interested in combining film and media theories with East Asian cultures, particularly the relationship between East Asian directors’ cinematic expressions and their respective sociocultural contexts. She studied film and media as an undergraduate student at Swarthmore College, where she researched world cinema, Chinese diasporic contemporary cinema and Japanese film history. Being born and raised in Shanghai, China and having a language proficiency in Japanese, she is dedicated to learning more about the interconnectedness, similarities and discrepancies between these two cultures. Of course, she is also excited about embracing other cultures, theories and histories while studying at Yale. She loves watching TV shows, dramas and experimenting on new cooking recipes when she has free time. She is also currently learning Korean out of personal interest.

Ruiyuan Li received her bachelor’s degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, majoring in Public Administration and also completing minor courses in International Economic Law. During her undergraduate period, she studied a series of topics concerning Chinese hukou system with related social and economic problems, thus attracted by unique state-society relations in contemporary China. After graduation, she took internships in several institution or companies with focus on data policies for digital governments and cities, which sparked her thoughts on the trends and role of technology in Chinese and international politics and administration. She enjoys spending her leisure time in history and culture museums, as well as watching movies and TV.

Da Ling received her B.A. degree from China Foreign Affairs University, majoring in Japanese. During her junior year, she also studied at Waseda University as an exchange student. Her current academic interests include Japanese literature and culture, Japanese film, animation and manga. She also likes reading books about comparative literature and continental philosophy. What’s more, she is a postmodernist both mentally and physically. Outside of academics, Da Ling has been a big fan of rock and roll music since a very young age; Patti Smith and Alanis Morissette are two of her favorite singers. During her leisure time, she likes going to live houses, museums and galleries. She is also a fan of Yohji Yamamoto, a famous Japanese designer.

Kaixiao Liu received his Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Fudan University. His academic interests include political behavior, state building and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on China. He hopes to combine inspiring ideas with innovative empirical methods to produce exciting research in his master studies. Born and raised in Guangzhou, Guangdong, Kaixiao loves eating Cantonese Dim-sum and cuisines. He also loves playing soccer and basketball. His favorite player is Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James. Kaixiao has practiced violin for more than twenty years, and he used to be a member of several youth symphony orchestras in Gaungzhou, Shanghai and California. He participated in more than fifty concerts in different countries including China, Germany and the US.

Andrew Nguy is interested in the development of Chinese Buddhist liturgies, especially in the late-imperial period. As an Asian Studies major at Pomona College, he joined translation projects and volunteer programs at local Buddhist organizations. Andrew also contributed to didactic panels on poetic names of garden landmarks while working as a curatorial intern at the Chinese Garden at The Huntington Library. During a semester on the Associated Kyoto Program, he began learning Japanese tea ceremony which inspired his Fulbright project on contemporary tea culture in southeast China. Outside of research, Andrew enjoys practicing calligraphy and guqin, watching anime, and drinking tea. 

Aika Sato spent most of her formative years in the two cities she calls home, Shanghai and Tokyo. She grew up witnessing the past haunting the present in different parts of East Asia: ultranationalism, antagonism, and discrimination. Such upbringing fueled her interest in historical reconciliation.

She earned dual BAs in International Liberal Studies and Political Science from Waseda University and the National University of Singapore (NUS) respectively. Over the past four years, Aika has put the ideals into practice by both embarking on her own fieldwork, and learning in the journalism industry through her experiences at the Japan Times and Reuters. For example, she flew to Nanjing to interview survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, and to South Korea to talk to the former “comfort women”. That work has had a profound impact on her, both intellectually and personally. Aika went on to pursue an MA in China Studies at Yenching Academy of Peking University. Alongside other like-minded friends at Yenching, she co-founded the Yenching Academy East Asian Studies (YCAEAS).

Her research interests include memory, feminist theory, gender and sexuality, and history of Japanese colonialism/occupation in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Her most recent project has been focusing on the “comfort women” history.

Academic interests aside, she loves anything that makes her feel alive: feminist movement, aesthetics/fashion (and the philosophy behind it), music playing/listening, yoga, poem writing etc.

Candice Snowden was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but calls South Florida home. She majored in East Asian Studies at Wellesley College, ultimately focusing on minority identities in contemporary China and the state’s differing policies toward them. As a graduating senior, she earned the Wellesley-Yenching Fellowship that allowed her to teach at Nanjing Normal University for a year. She went on to teach at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine while earning her Master’s degree in International Education at Concordia University Irvine. For her Master’s thesis she surveyed Chinese college students’ perceptions of Russia, Japan, and the United States. At Yale, Candice hopes to continue studying identity in contemporary China, with a focus on generational identity, student movements, and popular culture. Outside of the classroom, Candice is an avid fan of figure skating, gymnastics, and cinema.

Wen Rui Tai was born in Hong Kong in 1998, and was since raised in Beijing. She received her B.A. from Smith College for English Literature and Theatre Studies. Her interest in East Asian Studies was first sparked during her junior year abroad at the University of Oxford, where she analyzed Voltaire’s 1753 adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao. She has also written on China’s cultural policy during the Cultural Revolution, ethnographic film and Postmodernist consumer culture in Japan.

At present, she is mainly interested in studying the epistemic divide between China and “the West” in a globalizing (or, perhaps, de-globalizing) world, and the role that China’s domestic realities might play in shaping its image abroad.  

Having deferred her studies for a year, she has gained valuable experience working closely with various Chinese companies and NGOs, and done field research in China’s rural area, which she hopes would contextualize and inform her studies at Yale. 

Additionally, like she wrote a year ago in her pre-deferral bio, she is still a fan of biking, Samuel Becket and Harry Styles, but her affair with sundried tomato and basil Wheat Thins is, alas, a thing of the pandemic past.

Anqi Yan was born and raised in Shenzhen, China and received her B.A. degree from Haverford College, majoring in Growth and Structure of Cities (which explores topics in anthropology, political science, urban planning, history, etc.). Her primary interest lies in civil society engagement in the political realm in China and how this engagement structures people’s interactions with the government and defines citizenship. From 2019 to 2020, Anqi worked as a part-time research assistant at Sun Yat Sen University and received the Hanna Holborn Gray research fellowship to study a water governance project that heavily co-opted civil society organizations, in Guangdong, China. Anqi looks forward to refining her research skills and exploring more exciting research topics in the field of Chinese politics and political anthropology at Yale. She also loves cooking and reading non-fictions.

Sisi Yang cares about gender equality, the environment, exploitation of labor, and migrants’ rights. Lately, she has conducted a half-year fieldwork in Hong Kong, exploring how Indonesian domestic workers deploy unusual forms of tactics to occupy Victoria Park, a major park in the heart of Hong Kong, on their Sunday day off. At the same time, she initiates a project to teach Cantonese lessons to Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers in collaboration with Mission for Migrant Workers.  

Sisi has a background in Linguistics and Philosophy from her undergraduate study at Fudan University in Shanghai. She commits herself to the path of being an anthropologist after her one-year postgraduate study of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She also develops a strong interest in historical approaches when she writes about the history of Hong Kong migrants. Therefore, the interdisciplinary nature of the East Asian Studies program at Yale will surely accommodate her interests and boost her academic progress.   

Nurtured by the mountains and seas in Hong Kong, Sisi enjoys outdoor sports such as hiking and kayaking. She appreciates cooking as an art of creativity and bonding. She is also learning illustration because she believes visual arts to be powerful ways of expression. 

Tiffany Yang

Xinyue Zhang is interested in the social and cultural history of 20th century China, with allied interests in intellectual history, political and social thought, and science and technology studies. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in History and Social Studies and a minor in East Asian Studies. Drawing on a variety of written and visual materials, her honors thesis explored gender discourse and urban women’s experiences in pre-WWII China, with a focus on how Chinese women reconceptualized the meaning of the family, the public sphere, and the nation-state in the crucial window between 1934 and 1937. Outside of academics, she is an amateur translator, has internship experience in public interest law, and enjoys sipping a good cup of tea.