The Columbia Journal of Asia

Immortality and Rebirth in Jade

Zhiying He — 2025-12-06

This paper examines a white jade cicada from the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, exploring its material, symbolic, and ritual significance within early Chinese funerary culture. The cicada is an insect associated with periodic molting, and it has become a metaphor for rebirth and immortality. During the Han Dynasty, cicadas were carved in jade or other stones and placed on the tongues of the deceased, signifying the preservation of the soul and the wish of rebirth.

Methodologically, the paper integrates archaeological contextual analysis with textual analysis of Han Dynasty classics, such as the Book of Rites (Liji) and Huainanzi. It places the jade cicada within both Daoist beliefs and Confucian frameworks of filial piety. A comparative analysis of this artifact alongside twenty-one cicadas in the ROM collection, dating from the Shang to Qing dynasties, allows for a broader understanding of the material choices and craftsmanship of this specific jade cicada. By comparing jade cicadas with examples made of glass or stone, the paper highlights how material quality and carving techniques reinforced social hierarchies in funerary practice and how the deceased's social status was associated with the materiality.

The paper further investigates the role of jade’s materiality, including its durability, beauty, and philosophical implications, and explores its function as an elite funerary object. Through the close examination of the materiality of white Hetian jade, which was imported via the Silk Road, the paper finally explores the cultural exchange in the Han.

Ultimately, the jade cicada served dual functions: for the deceased, it showed their wishes of immortality and rebirth; for the living, it expressed their filial piety to their family members through the use of precious materials. Through the perspective of material culture, this single artifact thus reflects a broader social and cultural background in Han Dynasty China.

The Formation and Dynamics of Colonial “Lived Spaces”

Nam Khanh Hoang — 2025-12-06

This study examines the nuanced experiences and perceptions of urban space among different social groups in colonial Hanoi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by analyzing the French colonial agendas, as reflected through modern urban planning and practices, and its reception among the colonial urban inhabitants, as suggested through their responses to the Statue of Liberty—a colonial urban monument. While existing scholarship has often framed colonial cities as stages for consolidating imperial power, introducing Western ideals of modernity, and forming systems of oppression and exploitation against colonial subjects, it has often overlooked the perceptions and experiences of colonial settlers and native communities, who account for the majority of the city’s population. To address this gap, this study utilizes Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “lived spaces” to explore the multiple layers of experiences of colonial subjects reflected in memoirs, records, and testimonies. A detailed analysis of these sources suggests that colonial subjects were not passive recipients of the colonial agendas but rather active agents constantly challenging and reinterpreting the imposed ideologies according to their interests. Hence, the colonial city, rather than a stage for advancing colonial rule, was a “contact zone” where colonial agendas clashed with subalterns’ resistance.

Taming China’s Frontier

Park Hang Fung — 2025-12-06

This paper focuses on the formulation and implementation of Imperial Japan’s policy of ethnic control in the Gando region by delving into the prelude and development of the Gando Intervention from October 1920 to May 1921. The Gando region had been a significant base for the Korean independence movement due to its proximity to the Korean Peninsula, which was favorable to independence activists’ military operations along the Sino-Japanese border. From a different perspective, Japan also sought to expand its influence on Gando and eliminate anti-Japanese forces which continued to disrupt its colonial governance over Korea. China, which officially owned the territorial sovereignty over Gando, or Yanbian (based on the Gando Convention in 1909) had to deal with conflicts between Korean independent activists and Japan as well as Japan’s ambitions towards control of Gando. This formed Gando as a contested space where three sides of power existed. By analyzing newspapers and official documents produced by these three sides, this paper highlights the complex interplay of imperial expansion, ethnicity, and the geopolitical situation in the early twentieth century. This paper breaks from the traditional narrative of military history, focusing instead on Japan’s ethnic exploitation over the expatriate Koreans in Gando.

Khaana Khazana

Megha Rastogi — 2025-12-06

This work aims to understand the relationship between food workers, gender norms, and class dynamics within economically and culturally diverse Indian cities. While food workers, specifically chefs and line cooks, inhabit a central role in urban food economies and cultural systems, their labor and positionality transcend the spatial confines of a restaurant. However, present research solely focuses on food workers as laborers, rather than considering how their positionality shapes local and regional sociopolitical processes. This gap has manifested in both the subjugation of food workers to the boundaries of the restaurant and a dearth of insight into their perspective regarding the experiences, principles, and values that govern their work. The physical space thus provides ethnographic glimpses of restaurants in India; the consumers and food workers present in a restaurant interact with the spatial boundaries of the eatery in significant ways. Interviews with the food laborers reveal wider implications about social values from their position in both local and global political economies.

I contend that the experiences of food workers display characteristics of broader sociopolitical frameworks, where food workers contribute to the creation of sociopolitical cleavages within domestic and professional spaces. This research bridges these gaps through the triangulation of participant observation, qualitative interviews, and menu analysis at four eateries in Mumbai conducted over a week. I find that occupational limitations and systemic inequity of urban India faced by chefs have contributed to their views on gender, language, and westernization, thus impacting the larger political economy. The research suggests that Western ideals and influence shaped how some food workers in the Mumbai restaurant scene approached their work, while fiscal necessity motivated others. My study suggests important findings about the interplay between political economy and social factors—such as class, gender, and westernization—for food workers in major cities of the Global South. Through this project, I hope to highlight the agency of food workers: rather than viewing them through their occupation, this paper endeavors to view their occupation from the perspectives of food workers themselves.

Ganda Land, Ganda Labor, and Ganda’s Love

Nine Abad — 2025-12-06

This paper investigates how the U.S. military-industrial complex in the Philippines sustains racialized and gendered sexual economies of capitalism that disproportionately exploit poor transgender Filipina women (trans-Pinays). It traces the historical foundations of these dynamics from colonial agricultural dispossession and liberal economic restructuring to contemporary security agreements and military basing. Through the lens of militarized intimacy, U.S. imperialism operates not only through territorial domination but through desires that eroticize and exploit the feminized colonial subject. Trans-Pinays, situated at the margins of legality and visibility, become effective laborers within these economies: desired yet disposable, visible yet unprotected. Understanding these systems of domination is essential to exposing how those systems sustain themselves through intimate acts of dehumanization. This article examines the complex interplay of American imperialism, militarized masculinity, and the commodification of trans-Pinays’ bodies, using the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude as a critical site of analysis. Jennifer Laude’s murder is not an isolated act of transphobic violence, but rather an imperial crime that renders visible the violence embedded in capitalism.

Untitled (Portrait of an Asian Woman)

Yueyi Hu — 2025-12-06

Untitled (Self-Portrait)

Yueyi Hu — 2025-12-06

The Prodigal Daughter

Kate Huang — 2025-12-06

These Hills Have Tears

Luke Rimmo Loyi Lego — 2025-12-06

Cover Art

Yuhan Zhang — 2025-12-06

Abridged Artist Statement:

Lungta (wind horse) is a mythical Tibetan creature symbolizing the “inner air” (tib. rlung) that travels through the “subtle channels” (tib. rtsa) of the body’s psycho-physical systems; and it is also the practice of releasing prayer papers into the wind, trusting their movement to disperse aspiration and dispel obstruction. This work presents a figure wearing the “chungbala chyukti” attire of the Rang (or Byasi Sauka) Tibetan community living three valleys stretching between India’s Puithoragarh district and Nepal’s Sudurpashchim province. The Northern end of the three valleys lies at the center of the Kalapani territorial dispute and has been an unsolved consequence of the 1816 Treaty of Sugauli, which attempted to divide the land by locating the “true” source of the Kali River, resulting in Rang community divided under two administrations. I do not claim to represent them; rather, their circumstances open up a broader question: when powers assign bodies to cartographic positions, what forms of movement and meaning remain impossible to contain?

Masthead

Columbia Journal of Asia Editorial Board — 2025-12-06

Letter from the Editors-in-Chief

Isabel Andreatta — 2025-12-06

Letter from Isabel Andreatta and Linda Qin, Editors-in-Chief of Volume IV, Issue 1 of the Columbia Journal of Asia.