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Paper short abstract

Through shame, anger, and the subtle hurt of feeling wronged in intimate fieldwork encounters, we navigated and unsettled boundaries between the performative and the authentic, the unfolding and the fractured, the present and what lies ahead.

Paper long abstract

This article documents my experience around the age of twenty, during which I initiated three short-term, student-led field visits to a politically sensitive model village. Without institutional support or a clearly defined research purpose, we entered the field with vague motivations, non-professional identities, activist hopes, and deep uncertainties and anxieties about our future academic paths. In this endless river, drifting with helplessness and confusion, we eventually learned to create hope through the philosophy of letting go. The article presents a series of explorations, tensions, and transformations around “the political” and “ethics of care.”

First, we reflect on the assumptions, mindsets, and imaginations produced within the Chinese context that frame the countryside as a site of revolutionary history and governance experiments. Gradually, we learned to listen to the political textures in villagers’ everyday acts of “wandering and playing”(zhuanshua) in a village that appeared outwardly silent yet remained politically charged. Second, our practice aligns with what María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) terms an “ethics of care”—a thick, entangled, and impure state of involvement and remaining. This article discusses how, in a non-pure research identity, we relied on roles “granted” by our interlocutors and responded to an emergent relational ethics. It also explores how, in vague motivations and moral uncertainty, we came through experiences of shame, anger, and the subtle pain of being wronged in intimate fieldwork relationships, we navigated and unsettled the boundaries between the performative and the authentic, the envolving and the fractured, the present and the future.