Prof. Gordon Mathews has written or edited books about what makes life worth living in Japan and the United States, about the global cultural supermarket and the meanings of culture today, about the Japanese generation gap, about what it means to “belong to a nation” in Hong Kong and elsewhere, about how different societies conceive of happiness, about Chungking Mansions as a global building, and about low-end globalization around the world. He is currently writing books about African traders in Guangzhou (an RGC grant enabled him to spend a year in Guangzhou in 2013-2014), about asylum seekers in Hong Kong and the global treatment of asylum seekers, and about the meanings of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China, and how these shape people’s lives before death. Over the past year, he has written papers on anthropology in East Asia, on happiness and neoliberalism in Japan, and on how to smuggle goods past customs in China. Mathews is really happy to be an anthropologist because the discipline enables him to investigate so many different topics. Anthropology is incredibly fun because so many different things in this world can be explored!