By ANDREW KUECH. 7/16/2015. Pretty hard to believe how much time has passed already here in Hong Kong. Working solitarily in a library for weeks on end with few interlocutors or friendly faces can be a little isolating at times, but still fun. I’ve had a chance to sit in a few guest lectures here on various topics in Chinese politics and history here, which has been really great. I definitely thought I’d meet a few more visiting researchers during my time here, but that has turned out to not be the case. Met another French PhD student doing research here, catching up and sharing notes with him has been pretty fun.
As time winds down here in Hong Kong though, the panic of getting everything possible out from the library that I can has set in. There are so many resources here it poses a bit of a problem as a researcher. First, so much time needs to be spent in the initial few days or weeks to figure out just exactly what resources are available and worth spending your time working with, especially as you need to decide how much material you can sift through with your language ability. Then once you begin sifting through these materials, you inevitably discover more and more interesting things that you also want to explore and examine. Your available time decreases as fast as the new material you find increases, its almost maddening at times. Despite this research conundrum, I most definitely have found a huge quantity of information, collections and materials that will be super helpful to my dissertation project. I’ll be scrambling for my remaining few days here to squeeze in as much useful worktime as I can, but if I left today I would be pretty content and satisfied with how productive this trip has been and how useful the ICI grant money has proved to be. I have a few of the more colorful images of the US that Ive found attached here.
