Next up in our Honours Student Interview Series is Aydin Quach, who graduated with a double major in International Relations + Chinese Language and Culture.
Scroll down to read through the complete interview and learn all about their honours thesis research and writing process.
What is the title of your honours thesis?
From Chinese Men to Chinese “Boys”: Unearthing Masculinities and Intimate Labour in Colonial Singapore
What interested you in this topic? Why did you choose it for your thesis?
I got interested in my topic and research for a few reasons. First was the fact that I am an overseas Chinese person who is of mixed ethnicity, with my dad being Chinese Vietnamese and my mom being Chinese Bruneian/Malaysian. I have always felt confused about where I “belong” in terms of cultural placement in the world. Certainly, growing up in Vancouver and in many places and spaces full of Chinese Canadians and speaking Cantonese and Hakka at home was one angle, but I always felt that I was not the “same” as my friends who had backgrounds more firmly situated in East Asia (China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). I was always a bit different because my parents and grandparents were born and raised in Southeast Asia. Singapore, in particular, was a cultural space and place that felt legible to me, being “in-between” the subjectivities of Chinese-ness and being from Southeast Asia. Studying Singaporean and Malaysian history in my coursework and spare time was one way of connecting with my mother and her family, since I had cousins who lived and worked in Singapore too. Secondly, I am also queer. I admit at the time of my undergrad, I was struggling to figure out how queerness manifested in myself and in my being. I took GRSJ courses and all the courses on sexuality and gender in Asian Studies, but something was always missing — my own relation to Southeast Asia and my own contestations with race and ethnicity. I also, perhaps erroneously so, thought that I could never *really* do work in these fields because of this alienation. As such, I never saw myself as a gender/sexuality specialist until the honours program. At the time of being in the honours program, I did most of my courses online on Zoom and spent a lot of time online. I got acquainted with Singaporean queer politics and also the nature of queer activism in Singapore, such as with Pink Dot.
How do you interpret the queerness of Singaporean history?
To me, there has always been something very…queer about Singapore: consider the way Lee Kuan Yew would deliver speeches about “tough men” protecting the island, the penis-shrinking scare of 1967, the way gay life in Singapore is an open secret, and Section 377A outlawing gay sex. I wanted to chart and explore the historical nature of queerness on the island by connecting it to legal histories of colonial occupation by the British. I wanted to demonstrate that Section 377A existed, but also that it connects to questions of emasculation of ethnic minorities by the white elite, and also how its discontents feed everyday gay culture in Singapore. This would later become the topic of my Masters Thesis.
How do you personally navigate having multiple research interests?
Studying gender and sexuality through history felt like a way to tie my interests all together as a cumulative project representing my undergrad experience. I wanted a way to look at where queerness and my Asian identity were interplaying in the archives. I loved studying Chinese in Asian Studies at UBC. I also enjoyed my political science courses on Southeast Asia and gender in politics courses. I blended this all together with appreciation for the historical method I learned from the honours program as a way of creating a more informed and colourful present.
What was your favourite part of the research process?
Getting funds to go to Singapore for four weeks and do archival research over winter break in 2021 was a game-changer. I got so much time to spend in the National Archives of Singapore, the National Library, and local cemeteries, to do the work in deep immersion in the city. Spending that time alone in the city just as it was opening up from lock down was a bit difficult, I admit, but it gave me lots of time to sit and write my thesis. It was also a surreal experience to be in a city alone (not travelling with my parents) and to just “blend in” with everyone else. What I did not expect to end up doing was (historical) ethnography. At the time, I was not trained as an ethnographer, however under the advice and inspiration of my mentor at UBC Asian Studies, Dr. Ayaka Yoshimizu, I started an informal process of journaling my everyday life in Singapore.
How was your research conducted in dialogue with the lived experiences and perspectives of locals?
I got acquainted with local queer organizations, poets, artists, and activists. We would go for walks, cafe chats, runs by Marina Bay Sands, and do other tasks together. These folks would talk to me about their experiences growing up queer in Singapore, as well as some things they found interesting about my research findings while in the archives. Some also shared some personal tidbits about how they express their sexuality in Singapore that would plant the seeds for what would later be my MA thesis about military garments as fetish garments in Singapore.
What was your favourite memory of research and travelling?
My favourite part of the process and my research trip to Singapore was when I went to Bukit Brown Cemetery. I write about this in the conclusion of my thesis. I detail what walking in the cemetery felt like as well as what it felt like to see abandoned graves of Chinese sex workers and paupers. It marks the first writing I have done about sensory and haunted ethnographies.
What impact has the research process and travelling for research had on you as an individual?
There are still fragments of my experiences with queer Singaporeans that remain important to my present-day research. One such moment was when a queer person told me that I had “Asian hardware, but white software,” noting that I looked like I could fit into Singaporean society, but the second I opened my mouth, my way of thinking revealed that I was “white” or “western.” It remains something I want to think with more.
Where have you gone with your research or career?
After finishing my BA at UBC in 2022, I went straight back up Buchanan Tower to do my MA in History. I finished that in 2024. I am now a Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of Southern California. My MA focused a lot on Singaporean queer history and progressively became more and more theoretical in their approaches to what could count as an “archive” — I started to use Grindr, Queering the Map, queer art exhibits, as well as local Singaporean gay forums and archival practices to chart a different “sensual” history of fetish and queerness in Singapore that was not found in the official, government archives due to censorship in my BA honours thesis.
As I write about in my MA, I was increasingly looking back at the archives I used in my BA honours thesis and wondering why so much material was redacted, hidden, or kept outside the National Archives of Singapore. My current Ph.D. is in American Studies and is not really *directly* related to history. While doing my MA degree, I started going to EDM music festivals and realized there was a huge gay and Asian (“gaysian”) scene. I wanted to explore this gaysian worldmaking process and how gaysians all over the transpacific (specifically East/Southeast Asia and North America) would travel to events and cluster together to make “gaysia”: a space where they can practice and marry their queer and Asian diasporic identities. I also wanted to see how this was connected with the historical violence of the 20th century that led to Asian diasporas in North America and their “return” to Asia now to party and work. I was interested in how my queer Việt Kiều (Overseas Vietnamese) friends went back to Vietnam to work after graduation during COVID. For this research, I wanted to build on my historical training, but I also wanted to playspace to use ethnography, which I grew to love because of my BA honours thesis experiences. With this idea, and with my background in Asian Studies and History, I applied to USC’s American Studies program with the hope of specializing in Asian American Cultural Studies and got in! My work since then has expanded to include nightlife at large (sex work, dance, music, etc.). Despite being in an interdisciplinary program, I am most certainly a “child of history,” and it still affects my approaches to research and discussions in class. I am also still the person my classmates go to for historical method and archival theory.
What advice would you give to someone who is excited but nervous about writing their honours thesis next year?
Everything will work itself out. Do not strive for perfect work. Strive for work that matters to you. I will also say that you need to allow yourself the time, space, and energy to enjoy the practice and art of writing. Given the rise in AI and ChatGPT, perfect can sometimes be boring. I love to see the raw and the imperfect because it shows that you are human. Be experimental, be playful, and push yourself to try something new.
Do you have a fun or anecdote you would like to share?
