Chu is an anthropologist in training and a first-gen Burmese diasporic writer currently based in the traditional, ancestral, and historical meeting point of the Apache, Comanche, Sioux, Cherokee, Iroquois peoples, or the Texas Panhandle region.
 
As an (auto)ethnographer, Chu enjoys reflexively pondering upon her own encounters in life in juxtaposition to a broader cultural and social infrastructure(s). As she pays attention to the actual things people say, she is also intrigued by many unspoken cues in people's gestures and manners. If the world is, as they say in Burmese, bawa zatkhone (theater-stage of life), all human beings would be storytellers in their own ways and Chu's job as an anthropologist is to ethically retell their (and her own) stories.

Born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar and currently a migrant in the US, Chu is infatuated with the stories of diasporic kinship, belonging, and refusal towards their newly adapted ways of life. As a writer and an anthropologist, Chu is interested in engaging with the concepts of temporal positionalities, intense feelings, and shifting materialities in attempting to understand what it means to be a human.

Chu's current project looks at the ways in which anti-coup activists navigate social media as a double-edged sword–both a powerful talk-back tool against oppression (the military junta) and as a weapon that may exacerbate injustice in Myanmar. She is interested in exploring how individuals fight for their rights and seek joy while consciously navigating digital promises. If you are interested in collaborating with Chu, reach out to her via email.
 
As a feminist decolonial scholar, Chu believes that the personal is the political and therefore aspires to use analytic autoethnography as a critical reflexive tool of ethnographic refusal against the anthropological gaze. When she is not challenging her own privileged background as an ethno-religious majority Bama-Buddhist woman, she writes against whiteness and neocoloniality in higher education.

Fun Fact about Chu: in her native language Burmese, her first name Chu has three meanings: coin money, floral arabesque (like the ones in the photo above), or stylized lion with a flowing mane. She picks the last meaning because lion with a flowing mane symbolizes, to her, strength, independence, and fierceness, all three qualities she aspires to emulate!