Biography

I was born in Taipei, Taiwan, my spiritual hometown, on quite a hot summer day in 1997. It was late enough in June that I was born a Cancer–which, if you know me well, explains a lot of my idiosyncrasies!

My time in Taipei didn’t last long. When I was five months old, I was brought to Shanghai, where both of my parents were perpetually busy business people trying to take a bite off the red hot 90s Chinese economy. Though very different from the way it seems now, Shanghai has always been an eclectic city, where every seemingly everlasting view could become unrecognizable in a matter of weeks. By the time I was five, my parents trusted me enough to let me embark on my mini voyages on the streets of Shanghai; I like to think that’s where my undying love for cities (as well as my well-known penchant for long, aimless walks) began.

But at the time, my real aspiration wasn’t crystal clear to me. The SARS epidemic swept across China, which upended my three months long blip in kindergarten & I skipped straight to elementary school. There I went on a pretty smooth sailing path, learned to speak both English and Mandarin like a native, and hopped between every aspirational profession you can think of that Asian parents liked: scientist, dentist, lawyer, real-estate tycoon… none of which, obviously, stuck.

Though I spent summers in the U.S. sporadically (and spoke English half the time in my school), I remained in China until I was 15, when I finally moved to Northern California, in many ways where my “real” hometown is supposed to be. Interestingly, it was the experience of living in the safe, comfortable, affluent, yet extremely drab suburb of Pleasanton, that I started to appreciate the disheveled way of life that I had in Shanghai. There were many ways in which I found Pleasanton charming (day trips to San Francisco! The spectacular weather! Shoutout to Amador Valley High & all the awesome people there!), yet by the time junior year rolls in, I had my eyes set on the greatest city on this planet–New York.

I guess some force above heard my calling, and I was conveniently accepted into NYU while getting slaughtered among the UCs (my parents’ preferred choices). I moved to New York, and subsequently began the best four years of my life. I was clear-headed enough about what I wanted that I majored in Urban Design and Architectural Studies, which culminated in me getting to know my mentors, Mosette Broderick and Jean-Philippe Dedieu, getting to travel across France and the U.K. to conduct field studies and rising to become the Vice President of the Urban Design and Architectural Society. A few internships ranging from interior design to master planning tossed in here and there, and just as I thought I was going to graduate into the brave new world, the COVID-19 pandemic upended just about everything.

I did not want to stop in my tracks, and this past year and a half became a time of reflection, reassessment, and self-improvement that’s long overdue. I was briefly forced to reckon with the reality that I might have to go to graduate school sooner than I’d like, so much so that I studied for and completed the GRE. Since then, I started working simultaneously for two nonprofit foundations rooted in architecture, started taking some MOOCs on GIS and computer programming, and began working through a long list of books that I have always wanted to read. Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida, Thomas Dyja… name someone who wrote something about dense cities, and they might have been an inseparable part of my lockdown.

As I try to straddle the line between architecture, more theoretical urban design, and even flirting with elements of civil engineering/real estate, I’m left to contemplate one question: What is it out there for someone like me who likes all of them? I suppose in the next year or two, this will be the question that I’ll be searching for an answer to. But one thing’s for sure: nothing’s more devastating for me than watching cities I love to contract, empty, and suffer under lockdowns. The mission of my life is simple–I want to do everything I can to make cities everywhere a better place for you and me.