5th Annual Connie Chin Memorial Prize for Writing in East Asian Studies Awarded
Yinuo Jin
Yinuo Jin (MA '25, East Asian Studies) was awarded the 5th annual Connie Chin Memorial Writing in East Asian Studies, for her paper "Active Cooperation and Legitimate Transgression: Yan Yonghua’s Interactions with the Couple’s Retreat Garden."
"The thesis provides a close analysis of a nineteenth century Suzhou couple’s garden, with special attention to the unusual prominence given in their writings about that garden (and indeed the design of it) to the role of the wife, Yan Yonghua, in building, enjoying, and writing about that garden. The thesis is thus an important contribution to women’s studies and gender history of China’s late imperial period,” comments Ron Egan, Stanford W. Ascherman, M.D. Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Jin's advisor. “There are at least three aspects of Yinuo’s work on this topic that strike me as exemplary. The first is her very competent close reading of the poems that Yonghua and Bingcheng wrote, which are the primary source we have today for reconstructing the dynamics of their relationship. [...]Second, she is very careful in the way she goes about inferring the nature of the wife-husband relationship from the poetry, constantly reminding the reader what we can say as well as what we might expect to find that the textual sources actually do not confirm or even that they contradict. [...] Third, Yinuo is not hesitant to point out how her findings [...] appear to contradict the conventional understanding of even the most congenial 'companionate' marriage of late imperial China as scholars have abundantly described it in the scholarship of recent decades.”
In Jin's own words: “In my research, I’m drawn to how the gendered dimensions of garden space in late imperial China reveal not only female and male roles, but also how material culture both expresses and complicates systems of value, power, and meaning. This study focuses on Yan Yonghua, a late Qing female poet who helped shape the Couple’s Retreat Garden not just as a space of aesthetic beauty, but as a site for enacting companionate partnership, an ideal that was emotionally resonant and socially strategic. Through spatial practices, poetry, and collaborative inscription grounded in this ideal, Yan asserted both physical and cultural presence within a space long coded as literati self-representation. The garden, in this reading, becomes more than a retreat: it is a porous medium where meaning, identity, and agency are negotiated in stone, script, and silence. Her case reveals how the flexible, liminal nature of garden space could offer women in her historical moment a medium for cultural production and self-fashioning, allowing for quiet yet enduring interventions in a world where space itself encoded power."
Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Center for East Asian Studies, the Connie Chin Memorial Writing Prize in East Asian Studies recognizes and rewards outstanding examples of writing in an essay, term paper, or thesis produced during the current academic year, in any area of East Asian Studies, broadly defined. It is dedicated to beloved colleague Connie Chin (1946-2020), who enjoyed a 44-year career at Stanford beginning in 1976, moving several times between the Center of East Asian Studies and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, where she spent her last 13 years as Department Manager.
Past Recipients:
4th Annual Prize (2024)
3rd Annual Prize (2023)