On Doing Research

A week or so ago, a good friend told me my blog is a schizophrenic combination of cute China stories and academic cultural analysis. Yes! I wanted to shout to his email, that is entirely the point of blogs. They are what you make them, unrestrained to fit into any particular ‘genre.’ His comment got me thinking that when I started this blog I think my goal was to write about the process of doing research. Research is filled with ups and downs. I wanted to try to write about the approaches one takes to tackling this task.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned it is hard to write about ‘doing research’ because it everything happens slowly and in increments. And eventually events and situations that are unrelated become mixed into each other and somehow fit together.

Take this weekend, for example. Saturday morning I talked to a very important person whose help can make my life in the countryside much easier. We discussed my research in the countryside, and he tried to convince me that I could get all the information I needed from the countryside in a few short day trips.

I have been looking forward to the warm weather so I can go live in the countryside and work with rice farmers. I was trying to explain that I did not have one particular goal I wanted to get from interviewing rice farmers, but I wanted to live with them and understand their lifestyles. I want to go in with an open mind and not have set goal in mind. I thought I had adequately prepared myself for his reaction, but during our conversation, I had a difficult time just articulating my thoughts in my head let alone trying to then spit them out in Chinese. I walked away from that conversation feeling like I had failed. But I did not feel entirely discouraged because I was already thinking up alternative solutions to the problem.

Then later that evening, a friend of mine from a town about an hour away from Harbin texted to say she was going home the next morning and asked if I had free time and wanted to go with her to do some investigation of rice in her town. Yes! We met early Sunday morning and spent a productive morning interviewing rice shop owners in her town. I walked away from that experience feeling like some Rice God had descended upon me and handed me a day’s worth of research without me having to lift a finger.

This is how China works. Some days I sit around and dwell on how I am going to get past one particular blockade. Other days I get more phone calls than I can handle from people wanting to take me places, to meet people, to see things. In the end, these experiences mesh together, things work out, and research gets done. Because much of the process of research happens over time and in retrospect, it is more difficult than I anticipated to simply write about the process of doing research.