Joan A. Kleinman Travel & Language Grant: Aurelia Chen
The Joan Andrea Kleinman Travel and Language Grant is made in memory of Joan A. Kleinman, a scholar of Chinese language and literature and co-researcher with Dr. Arthur Kleinman of projects in medical anthropology. Joan Andrea Kleinman was committed to language as the basis for cultural and international studies and developed Chinese fluency only after her initial graduate studies in French. The goal of this grant is to promote language acquisition for use in the service of global health research. The language acquisition aspect of the summer research project may involve formal coursework or informal tutoring.
One or two annual awards are made to support summer field research and language learning outside of the United States in East Asia: China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. This grant supports research on the broadest aspects of health, illness and social suffering. Aurelia Chen was a 2024 award recipient of the Joan Andrea Kleinman Travel and Language Grant. We're pleased to share Chen's recent statement about her experience and more.
Nearly a year after my fieldwork had ended, I presented my work at the 27th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in June 2025. At the end of my presentation, an audience member asked me, “Why did you choose to focus on renqing in your research on caregiving?” I had not anticipated learning about Chinese cultural values, such as renqing, during my fieldwork. For five years, my family has been caring for my grandmother at our home in New York because it’s just the cultural norm. But thanks to the Joan Kleinman Travel & Language Grant, I saw firsthand how Chinese cultural norms and traditional values influenced caregiving practices.
The Chinese language holds nuances that reflect centuries of cultural values and social relationships. Renqing (人情) is one of those values that has no literal translation into English. The grant led me to a telecare call center in Shanghai, where I spent six weeks conducting ethnographic fieldwork with telecaregivers supporting Shidu older adults (older parents who lost their only child under China’s one-child policy) through remote technologies. On my first day at the call center, the supervisor said to me, “China is a renqing society.” At the time, I did not realize what it meant. Throughout the next six weeks, I witnessed how renqing manifested in the day-to-day care. From my observations, renqing refers to a social and cultural norm of human relationships in Chinese society that shapes how people interact through obligations, reciprocity, and mutual care. It governs how people give, receive, and repay favors. Many telecaregivers felt a natural obligation to give back to parents, either their own or other people’s. This sense of duty rooted in renqing meant they consistently went beyond their formal job responsibilities, treating some Shidu older adults not as customers or patients but as extended family members.
Beyond exploring my academic interest, the fieldwork is personally meaningful as it reshaped my approach to caregiving. The empathy and care I saw at the call center gave me a window to understand how I could be a better caregiver in my own home. Telecaregivers showed me how to listen with intention, how to hold conversations that convey genuine care, and how small, kind gestures help build trust with older adults. These are lessons I bring home in my effort to deepen my connection with my grandmother.
Since graduating, I have been thinking a lot about building technology to improve care for older adults and their caregivers. As a Computer Science student, this experience has changed how I think about developing technology for the aging population. I realized that technologists often design solutions without considering the cultural context of care. I am deeply grateful to Professor Kleinman’s mentorship and Joan Kleinman’s legacy. With the support from this grant, I learned about the connection between cultural values and new forms of technology-enabled eldercare in ways that continue to support my path forward. I had the opportunity to share my research at the 2025 Harvard Global Health Symposium. The paper from this research, “Renqing-Infused Telecaregiving: An Ethnographic Study of Telecaregivers for Shidu Older Adults in China,” will be published in the Springer Nature conference proceedings for the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction later this year. At the conference, I connected with researchers from around the world, including Singapore and Taiwan. Seeing eldercare innovation from this global perspective has reinforced what I learned from my fieldwork in Shanghai: we need to build technology for caregivers and older adults with empathetic design and cultural context in mind. I hope to create agetech that recognizes care as a deeply human practice. I am incredibly thankful that the Kleinmans supported a research project that gave me the confidence to see myself as someone who can contribute to human-centered agetech.
Special thanks to Aurelia for sharing this special experience with us.