Creating Kinship Through the Animating Potential of Qi

Abstract

I detail how a return to Asia as a third-generation Chinese American grants me the cultural resources to be in fluid relation with others. This article illustrates how the cultivation of one’s vital energy or qi life force can serve as an onto-epistemology and a methodological orientation, given its unique existence as both movement and substance, offering up a perspective to live within the interstices of the potential and the actual. In this autoethnography, I detail how local Taiwanese dynamics illustrate the vitality of qi’s characteristics, often demonstrating a socially embedded pedagogy of cultivating a heightened awareness of others, in essence, issuing dynamic invitations to kinship. Last, this article issues a call to open to a spirit of continual activation of possibility as a radical replacement to a perception of reality as a series of arrivals at static conditions.