In this raw and intimate episode, historian Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson spills the tea on the psychological rollercoaster of archival research: it offered the ‘biggest high’ and also ‘fucked [her] up’.
From her formative childhood experiences in Beijing, to stumbling upon a human tooth in a Queensland court file, to reckoning with the human face of anti-Chinese racism, Sophie walks us through the time capsules of human drama she uses to tell the stories of Chinese Australia.
What does a former market garden reveal about Chinese and First Nations cooperation? How could language be a technology of resistance for racialised migrants? And why did her ex’s probate records provide a lightbulb moment about migration?