Suturing the Fragments: Topological Agency and the Making of Coherent Worlds in Chinese Family Care.

Drawing on Li Shen's Memoir of Illness and Treatment as core ethnographic material, I develop a topological agency framework to examine how Chinese families integrate heterogeneous medical resources amid a fragmented health care landscape. I identify two core topological operations: temporal folding, which activates intergenerational embodied knowledge, and spatial stretching, which crosses hospital-home boundaries to build family-centered care. Grounded in Confucian family ethics of xiao (filial piety) and ci (parental kindness), I recenter the family as a collective agent, challenge the individual-centered paradigm, operationalize topological theory, and offer a localized perspective to inform global scholarship on medical pluralism.