Career Change?

Chaotica (Luan...) asks in an email if I will go back to research in the future. My first answer is: I don't know. My second answer is: Have I really left it? Our understanding of research need not be restricted to in the university, at least the way I see it. In my view, what I am doing now is a form of research; you could call it participant-observation or my sociological phase, an immersion in one specific Chinese medium, and the media is something in which I have been interested for a long time--from bronze vessels to silk manuscripts spit out of the mouths of anamolous creatures to Daoist talismanic script to paintings of cranes hovering over the palace to the Complete Books of the Four Repositories (Siku Quanshu四庫全書)-->from uttered words to strange symbols to calligraphic forms and manuscripts to printed texts--from the newspaper to radio to television to the internet. So, the way I see it, I am simply following through, for right or wrong, in that Benjaminian pattern. And...I'm speaking and reading Chinese in a Taiwanese work environment. I start May 1st.