Abstract
One day in September 2008, my supervisor Professor Gerard A. Postiglione greeted me with “Welcome to Hong Kong” in his office with a mountain view. Then, I started my Ph.D. life which lasted more than 4 years. After about 1 year’s reading and discussion with my supervisor, I determined to study the educational development of Chinese Muslims. There are ten Muslim ethnic groups in China, and I choose to focus on Hui people, because they speak local Han dialects, which is easy for me to understand. If I choose to investigate in Uyghur or Kazak communities, I need to spend a lot of time for language learning.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2011, Linxia prefecture’s governmental newspaper Nationality Daily (minzu ribao 民族日报) featured a series of articles about Linxia Hui businessmen in Qinghai and Tibet in order to construct Linxia as a pivotal port connecting the Tibetan areas and the inland through the slogan, “Based on the great market of Tibet, integrate into the Lanzhou metropolitan region” (yituo zangqu dashichang, rongru Lanzhou dushiquan 依托藏区大市场 融入兰州都市圈). Fisher also points out that there was a large number of Hui Muslims in Tibetan areas and that most of them were from Linxia.
- 2.
Kang炕 is a traditional heated bed in northern China. See the details in Yan (2003, Chap. 5).
- 3.
It is a common phenomenon in China that people are inclined to upgrade your title when referring to you. In addition, local people are not familiar with those academic titles.
- 4.
In this sense, Feyerabend’s (1975) methodological anarchism can be termed as a methodological pluralism to guarantee the understanding of the world and creative ideas.
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Hong, Y. (2019). A Han Researcher in a Muslim Village: How to Enter the Field and Participants’ Heart. In: Tsang, K., Liu, D., Hong, Y. (eds) Challenges and Opportunities in Qualitative Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5811-1_3
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