Wang Lezhi (Mr)

Thesis Title: Marginality, Indigeneity, and Modernity in Borneo's Small Towns
Supervisor: Assistant Professor Seng Guo Quan

Having lived most of his life in higher latitudes, Lezhi is now adjusting to the Southeast Asian lifestyle with much excitement. His doctoral research looks for developments in the western parts of Borneo during its colonial history that planted seeds for what emerged as volatile political dynamism in the region after independence. This transnational endeavor that covers where is now Sarawak, Malaysia, and West Kalimantan, Indonesia, will be tackling themes such as borderland, national identity formation, social ecology, imperial knowledge production, and memory studies. In doing so he hopes to put some light on the region's alternative and plural manifestations of identities that intrigued him. His work also engages with the established idea that the Japanese occupation of maritime Southeast Asia brought fundamental revolutionary changes to its political landscape, whereas Lezhi focuses more on the continuities between pre-war and post-war. Other possible trajectories he is interested in taking are the comparison of Borneo and Taiwan’s respective models of Hakka settler colonialism, as well as to study the Chinese “secret societies” of Southeast Asia in juxtaposition with those in northern China and the Grand Canal region, where Lezhi originally came from.

Besides history, Lezhi has passion in learning new languages, cooking, taking care of his plants, and traditional Tianjin comedies/storytelling. He also engages in translation work between English, Chinese, and Indonesian. His favorite novel is Dream of the Red Chamber which he rereads every couple of years.