ABOUT ME

Born and raised in Hong Kong during the 1970s, I left home at age 16 to study at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, where I spent my most formative years with classmates from all over the world. As an undergraduate student at Oxford (New College) during the 1980s, I heard Terry Eagleton lecture on marxism and discovered photocopies of Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial writing in the English Faculty Library. Attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 1990s, I encountered feminism in Nancy Fraser’s critique of Foucault and Nawal El Saadawi’s fiction and activism, while learning that queer theory mattered but so did Queer Nation marches and ACT UP protests. Grounded in this rich and varied intellectual foundation, I pursued my first major research project on queer culture in Hong Kong as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at UBC during 1999-2001. In 2002, I started a tenure-track position at SFU where I have continued my intellectual adventures as a Professor in GSWS and, more recently, as the founding co-director of the Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research.

I am currently working on projects in several intersecting research areas, including a SSHRC-funded project on Vancouver: A Transpacific Film City, which explores how screen-based media projects mobilize transpacific migrant connections contribute to placemaking and urban identity in the filmmaking citiy of Vancouver. Building on my previous publications on queer cinema, I continue to explore new angles on queer screen culture, with a fresh focus on its worldly character, transnational circulation, and impact on notions of place and community. With co-author Audrey Yue I am co-writing an article on Sinophone networked publics. I am also in the exploratory stage of an oral history audio project which aims to document Queer Asian cultural activism in Vancouver during the formative period in 1990s-2000s.

I am a film buff and tennis fan. My hobbies are photography, travelling, hiking, kayaking, and yoga. I love to learn productivity techniques and geek out on macOS/ios apps.