Ying TONG
Associate academic, Faculty of History, University of Oxford
DPhil, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford (2020–2025)
Modern Chinese Literature, Chinese Department, Peking University (2017–2020)
Hi, I’m Ying.
This is my space for research and storytelling : )
I’ve always tried to get to the bottom of how human individuals cope with challenging situations, especially when there are no guidebooks, models, or precedents to draw on. It might have been quite different if I had first been led into a physics or math world, but given how knowledge and experiences have been orchestrated in my own background, my focus has been on individuals’ selfhood (mainly their dynamic emotional and psychological landscapes) as they navigate social-cultural circumstances from scratch.
Among all the methods I’ve used, historical research and fiction writing have been the two most effective and thorough ways to explore these questions. After years of practice, I’ve given them different questions to answer:
In my historical studies, the timeframe is modern Chinese history since 1900, a period marked by profound political and cultural transformations. I have long reflected on how various individuals and groups (such as first‑generation modern intellectuals, factory labourers, and revolutionaries) emerged as self‑aware agents and navigated their times. You can explore my projects on wartime women revolutionaries and popular ritual participants here, or on my university profile page.
In my fiction writing, which is wilder and more intense than academic writing, the settings often revolve around the crises and self‑actualisation of main characters in Chinese or international contexts. For stories set and published in China, I focus on the post‑1980s era, and on how individuals survive, break through, and make order out of self–Other tensions and generational gaps. For stories with a global backdrop, I tend to address my protagonists’ confusion and reconciliation around cultural and ideological boundaries when exposed to new environments.
Lately, I’ve also been interested in writing sci‑fi, a way to present how individuals deal with hidden ambition and regret they couldn’t actualise in everyday life. Drafting sci‑fi itself is a way for me to make use of the hills of scattered knowledge I’ve been collecting ever since I found the solar elevation angle intriguing as a high school student.
For storytelling, you can find more details here.