Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

This chapter identifies and analyses some of the major trends of the millennial novel in French from the huge and diverse corpus on offer: ‘reality, not realism’, ‘history, but for the present’, ‘fantasy and the ludic’, ‘language, but not for language’s sake’. The titles signal how these millennial versions of trends recognisable from past centuries have taken on nuances that clearly distinguish them from their predecessors. The millennial ‘realist’ novel stages authentic, non-fictional voices within a fictional frame, using the fictional as a means of investigation into reality; the millennial historical novel takes a présentiste (Hartog) approach to history, often using the present tense to bring even the distant past into the realm of the present. The millennial version of the fantastical and ludic novel benefits from the readers’ greater awareness of the novel as a created object, an awareness which is also exploited by writers of more popular literature. So too do the novelists who experiment with language, producing works that depend on the reader’s acceptance of it as belonging to a fictional universe. The chapter concludes that a readership trained in the art of novel-reading is vital to the success of all of these trends.