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Most of us are part of a unique community where we feel comfortable. Most of us have a certain place in the world, separated from others by language, history, economics, religion, geography, worldview, culture, nation, or myriad other things. And most of us give little thought to these barriers that define our particular place. For some, the barriers provide comfort. But when we move beyond our place-when we question assumptions and traverse the boundaries-we can make discoveries about the world and about ourselves.

This movement, this approach to self-challenge, is part of what defines a liberal arts education. And Diana Fu, a College of Liberal Arts (CLA) honors student, has embraced this approach. She is a talented writer with an impressive intellect, able to cross the boundaries of academic disciplines, languages, and nations. She will graduate this spring summa cum laude with a double major in global studies and political science and a minor in psychology, taking with her a backpack full of honors.

Fu is a published writer of fiction and nonfiction, she has earned University scholarships, and she won a national journalism award. She has also been involved with the Carnegie Mellon/Macarthur Honors Program, done an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and interned with the Center for Victims of Torture. Her CLA honors thesis, "A Cage of Voices: Producing the Dagongmei in China," won the Sidney Devere Brown Prize for best original research paper at the 2005 conference of Midwest Association of Asian Affairs. And she capped it all off recently when she was named a Rhodes Scholar.

The research that led to the Sidney Devere Brown Prize, and that helped her land the Rhodes, began early in her academic career. As a sophomore she studied the media portrayal of sexual harassment in China, and later conducted phone interviews with women's rights activists in China as a part of her internship with The Center for Victims of Torture. "I gave her some guidance on searching Chinese databases; the next thing I knew Diana had left both me and the librarian in the dust," says Dan Kelliher, political science professor. "Her performance was spectacular. I was amazed by her resourcefulness."

One of the connections Fu made as a part of her early research was with the Migrant Women's (Dagonmei's) Home in Beijing, one of the many civic organizations that have sprung-up in China since the 1995 U.N. Conference on Women held in China. She followed-up her work by spending a year in China as a volunteer researcher at the Migrant Women's Home. She also interned with the Beijing University Center for Women's Law Studies and Legal Services and studied Chinese literature at Beijing University.

Defining identities

An estimated 60 to 100 million migrant workers have left rural China for the cities in search of better opportunities. Approximately one-third of these are women, and they suffer from a double marginalization because of their gender and migrant status. The civic organizations that serve these women are designed to empower them-the Women's Home supports migrant women through training and workshops. But while they are allowed some autonomy by the government, the organizations are also expected to serve the interests of the party-state, warranting them the peculiar name of "Government-affiliated non-governmental organizations." Fu's research focused on this precarious position.

She interviewed migrant women at the Home, scholars, women's federation officials, people's representatives, lawyers, and journalists. She also consulted over 100 source materials in both English and Chinese, approaching her topic from multiple disciplines, including women's studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, linguistics, history, political science, anthropology, ethnography, and sociology.

Ultimately, while Fu has great respect for the women who founded these organizations, she argues that they fall short of their goals. At the same time that the Women's Home empowers migrant women by providing an channels to articulate-through contacts with the media, professors, legal experts, women's federation officials, social workers, etc.- it simultaneously limits their voices by expecting them to reinforce the party-state's discourse which asks them to be model workers sacrificing for the nation's economic transformation.

In her paper, Fu writes that "by empowering its member migrant women to speak only as dagongmei [the term dagongmei translates to migrant women, but it carries strong political connotations], The Home is a cage that contains the voices of a group of subalterns whose interests are relegated to the shadowy peripheries, but whose bodies dwell in the industrial cores of a modernizing China."

A cross-disciplinary thinker

The quality of Fu's research and writing left a strong impression on her thesis advisor. "Diana Fu's research is a superb example of what it means to internalize and practice interdisciplinarity-theoretically and methodologically-and to produce something creative and powerful with it," says Richa Nagar, U of M associate professor of women's studies, and currently a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "Her work makes me hopeful about the tremendous potential of dialogues across borders-the borders of political theory, feminist theory, and ethnography; the borders of theory and praxis; and the borders of Northern academia and Southern NGOs."

This approach is not new for Fu. In April of 2004, she wrote an opinion piece for The Minnesota Daily that described a trip she had taken to a national undergraduate research conference. Realizing her own liberal arts biases, she made a plea for a broader, more open-minded approach to scholarship. "What do I mean?" she asked. "Simply that perhaps instead of training us to be overly critical thinkers bound to our disciplines, perhaps college education should teach us to be open, cross-disciplinary thinkers. Perhaps the writing of this very article is reflective of my own disciplinary bias to question the natural."

Fu's interdisciplinarity also extends beyond academia. As a columnist for The Minnesota Daily since fall of 2002, she has written about politics, film, culture, history, academics, and life. Her articles have been widely read-even by faculty, who swear they never read the Daily-and frequently reprinted.

Unfortunately, that same approach of crossing boundaries that has earned her loyal readers in Minnesota drew an acrimonious response in China. She continued to write articles for the Daily while in China, and two of them upset some Chinese-one about attending a dance class and the other on discrimination in China.

The responses, which criticized Fu for "airing dirty laundry in public" based upon Fu's authority, on her voice and identity as a Chinese American, surprised her. "Contrary to some readers' perception, I had no malicious intentions of deriding either Chinese people or Chinese culture," she says. "I learned from this experience that to be a daring columnist, one has to grow thick-skinned. Piquant writing is supposed to provoke debates."

Fu was born in China and lived there until her family immigrated to Canada when she was eight years old (Fu received a Canadian Rhodes). Her family later moved to Minnesota where she attended Eden Prairie High School. This movement makes it impossible to place her within a narrowly defined identity. In fact, it was a shared sense of being somewhat out of place in the world that helped her connect with the women at the Women's Home. "I made some good friends there," she says, although she is quick to point out that her mobility gives her opportunities they do not have.

Fu's next move will be to Oxford for the Rhodes where she hopes to pursue Development Studies-a combination of politics, economics, and anthropology used to examine the change/transformation of societies. After Oxford, an academic career (Ph.D.) seems likely. And not surprisingly, Fu's vision of an academic career will cross traditional barriers. Her goal, she says, is to combine prose with academic writing. "I would like to find creative ways to do activism-communicating differently with people outside of academia by using creative writing to engage them."

Ultimately, Fu's accomplishments as a scholar and a writer reflect back to China, Canada, and Minnesota. She may at times be out of place, but she also exemplifies the possibilities of the modern world-fluid; able to move between boundaries of nation, disciplines, and language.