Image via Leo Shin.
Leo K. Shin is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is also the founding convenor of the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative.
Born and raised in Hong Kong and trained as a historian of China, Shin is interested in how the ideas of China and Chineseness have evolved. He is also intrigued by the production, transmission, and consumption of beliefs and practices that have shaped how the boundaries of China have been drawn and how China, as a nation and as an idea, has been historicized.
Like many in the discipline, Dr. Shin’s path to History was winding, with many side quests. Shin began his undergraduate career as a student in chemical engineering, where he immersed himself in math and sciences. As he started to take more advanced courses, Shin quickly realized the career trajectory offered by chemical engineering did not appeal to him. “The prospect of working in a huge chemical plant didn’t strike me as something I wanted to do,” he recalls.
Shin decided to pivot and major in Chemistry, but lab work didn’t quite fill his beaker, either. “I’m a little accident-prone,” he joked. “I knew I was bad at experiments because at the end of my lab sessions, there would be holes in my shirt, and I wouldn’t know how they got there.”
Determined to see his endeavours in chemistry through to the end, Shin began to seek other ways of making the program suit his own intellectual curiosities. “Along the way, I became interested in History courses. I took a Chinese history course to begin with. And then when I started taking courses in the history of science, I realized I became much more interested in the context of science, rather than science itself.”
Chemistry majors at Shin’s alma mater are expected to write experiment-based graduating theses. Instead of the predetermined path, Shin managed to persuade one of his chemistry professors, along with a faculty member in East Asian Studies, to co-supervise his research-based thesis on the history of alchemy. Little did he know, this research paper would be the catalyst for the rest of his career as a historian.
“When students ask me for career advice, I always tell them they should pursue what they are interested in, but also what they are good at,” Shin says. “Chinese history felt very natural to me, and it is interesting to me, both personally and later on professionally,” he continues. “I realized that I am inherently interested in the kinds of questions that historians ask, starting with some mundane basics, the what, where, when questions, but ending up with the how and why. Those are the higher level questions, and I could see why they are interesting and important.”
These days, most of Shin’s questions have to do with the how and why of processes that contend with imaginative abstractions of national and cultural identity. “History is not singular, nor is it always prevalent. The past is a combination of structures, contingencies, and our agency,” he reminds us. “If we don’t take China as a geopolitical entity as granted, and instead start with the premise that at any given moment, China as a geopolitical unit requires efforts to make it an entity, whether politically or culturally, how did China become China? How did China become Chinese?”
“History is not singular, nor is it always prevalent. The past is a combination of structures, contingencies, and our agency.”
For Shin, history is worth studying because it allows us to understand continuity and change: it’s an opportunity to ask questions about how societies came into being, and how they have evolved or transformed over time. “People need to understand context in order to understand how we came to where we are to begin with. Without understanding that, it is very difficult to move forward,” he says. “The insights we may be able to draw from understanding processes can then help us understand the contemporary moment much better.”
“I see my job as to encourage students to understand context, and to see different points of view,” he continues. “In my classes, I encourage students to read primary sources. These texts, from different perspectives, help students to begin to see alternatives, and from different points of view. They begin to see that the story is still worth telling.”
