My early exposure to the pipa at age five sparked a lasting interest in the intersections of folk music, traditional culture, and regional identity. Then during my undergraduate years, I did ethnographic fieldwork on Tibetan opera and volunteered in the U-Tsang and Kham every semester, which opened up my interest in Tibetan and Himalayan cultures, especially in how they are sustained through ritual, performance, and belief.

In seven years of work across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and South China, my roles as a journalist, museum curator, intangible cultural heritage project manager, and environmental volunteer still focused on understanding and presenting the lived experiences and material culture of Tibetan communities.

My master’s research heightened my curiosity about the Tibetan salt trade’s socio-economic dynamics and micro-regions’ daily life through studying the oral histories of Kham yak caravans. My future work will continue to explore value theory, the social life of things, and the interaction between agriculture and pastoralism in Tibetan communities, with an emphasis on salt’s economic, cultural, and historical significance.