2025 Peace Corps Week: Hilo born and raised Kacie Miura writes about her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in China
Kacie Miura served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, China, from 2009-2011. “My time as a Peace Corps volunteer was life-changing: it shaped my decision to dedicate my career to promoting a better understanding of the world.”
Each day this week — 2025 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 24-28 — UH Hilo Stories is featuring a former Peace Corps volunteer with ties to Hawaiʻi Island. This story is written by Kacie Miura, who served as a Peace Corp volunteer in Fuling, China, 2009-2011. Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations Miura now teaches at the University of San Diego, California.
Peace Corps China Story
By Kacie Miura.
In the summer of 2009, soon after graduating from college, I found myself stuffing my suitcase to the brim with everything I thought I would need for a two-year adventure in a foreign country. I spent my senior year applying and preparing for the Peace Corps, which I saw as an opportunity to travel, make a small difference somewhere in the world, and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And now, finally, I was heading to China as part of the 15th cohort of Peace Corps volunteers to serve there. I knew that I would be teaching English at a local college, but I had little clue about what to expect beyond that. Which town would I end up in? Would I be able to learn Mandarin well enough to build friendships with the local people? And, having spent my entire life in Hawaiʻi, would I get homesick?
After participating in two months of English as a second language training in Chengdu, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the Peace Corps dispatched us to our assigned sites. I had the good fortune of being sent to a teachers’ college in Fuling, a city known in the West as “River Town,” thanks to Peter Hessler’s popular memoir about his own Peace Corps service there in the late 1990s. Having read Hessler’s book closely, I set out to Fuling feeling reassured. After all, how much could things change in a span of ten years? I was born and raised in Hilo, where at the time not much ever seemed to change.
It did not take me long to realize that a decade of continued economic reforms, spurred on by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, meant that a whole lot could change very quickly. The college campus that my site mate and I were sent to had recently been relocated to a relatively remote, suburban pocket of the city that was marked by an often confusing mix of new and old. We lived in modern faculty apartments, but shopped for steamed bao and cold noodle dishes in dusty alleyways; we taught in technology-enhanced classrooms, but were surrounded by village homes that lacked flush toilets.
Navigating the growing pains of China’s modernization was sometimes challenging, but I felt incredibly lucky to bear witness to such an exciting and hopeful moment in China’s history. My students, who mostly came from rural villages, were confident that, with a college degree in hand, they would be incomparably better off (at least materially) than their parents, many of whom worked in factories on China’s east coast. In fact, the highlight of my Peace Corps experience was the weekends and holidays that I spent with students in their home villages, where I got to learn about how people in rural China viewed their country’s emergence as an economic superpower.
When sharing about my Peace Corps experience, I often get asked questions about why the organization sent volunteers to China, given that, during my service, it surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. While I would often talk about the time I spent in rural villages in order to convey the unevenness with which economic development had proceeded, I now more fully recognize that the real value of the Peace Corps’ operations in China was as a vehicle for public diplomacy. For most of my students, and certainly their relatives in the villages I visited, I was the first American they had ever encountered. Being able to find commonalities despite our different nationalities helped my local interlocutors and me to see cooperation between our two countries as a worthy and attainable goal.
Today, 14 years since I returned home from the Peace Corps, I am now a professor at the University of San Diego, where I teach international relations and Chinese foreign policy. My time as a Peace Corps volunteer was life-changing: it shaped my decision to dedicate my career to promoting a better understanding of the world. Scholarship opportunities through the Peace Corps also helped me to pay for a master’s degree, which ended up being a stepping stone toward a doctorate.
As a scholar, I have returned to China frequently. During a recent trip to Chongqing, I reconnected with former students and was heartened to learn that they and many of their classmates are now successful teachers, public servants, and entrepreneurs in cities and towns across the municipality. Even despite rising US-China tensions and the tendency for Chinese media to portray America in a negative light, these former students reassured me that they don’t think about the United States without also thinking about the friendships we built.
Unfortunately, in 2020, the Peace Corps withdrew from China, and in retaliation for the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the Chinese government ordered the United States to shut down its only consulate in western China. Today, when public diplomacy is most needed to preserve important elements of bilateral cooperation, there are few opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. However, for now, at least, the Peace Corps maintains a presence in numerous countries across the Global South. For college students in Hawaiʻi, the Peace Corps continues to offer a rare opportunity to spread the aloha spirit, learn about a different culture, and cultivate long-lasting friendships in a part of the world that they might not otherwise visit.
Kacie Miura is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego, California.
Peace Corps Volunteers Project
This week’s stories on former Peace Corps volunteers is part of a larger project headed by Su-Mi Lee, a professor of political science, who along with her poli-sci students and members of the local community are collecting biographical stories of former Peace Corps volunteers who have ties to Hawaiʻi Island. Learn more about Lee’s Return Peace Corps Volunteer Project (2023), and Return Peace Corps Volunteers video interview project (2024).
