Sometimes Powerless, Always Helping: Emotions and Affect of Chinese Doctors in Africa

Paper Abstract: This paper focuses on two terms that adequately capture the complexity of Chinese doctors’ experience in Burundi: affect and emotion. The focus will be on how specific conditions evoke changes in Chinese doctors' emotions compared to their previous experiences. By doing so, this paper will investigate how Chinese doctors operate within a concrete context and how they perceive morality. It seeks to outline the contours of local working conditions and contrast them with domestic working experiences. I will pinpoint how and to what effect these experiences impinged on Chinese doctors’ sense of morality and sentiments. The local working conditions provide a perspective on various moments of uncertainty and precariousness. To do this, this paper will locate changing meanings and practices of affect and emotions within the local environments that helped generate those meanings. I will narrate the intersections between these meanings and the transformations related to work—giving medications, experiencing a patient’s living and death, caring for patients, etc. I attempt to expand the emotional research on humanitarian workers from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Through examining the emotions of Chinese doctors in Africa, this paper highlights the importance of the doctors’ personal "prehistory" and their affection for political narratives. Their emotions are constantly negotiated across multiple juxtapositions: past and present, local and homeland, family and state, environment and deficiency. This paper seeks a comprehensive and holistic perspective on understanding Chinese doctors’ emotions.