About Me & About This Site

My Personal Journey

Admittedly, I am, by no means, an expert on life, but as a 33-year old (as of 2023), I have graduated summa cum laude from a women's college, traveled the world a bit, pursued a professional career, honed my academic skills as a doctoral student, experienced life's ups-and-downs, and collected a substantial amount of wisdom and life perspectives from people I've connected with over the years. There is so much I have and would like to share, but as a natural introvert, I consistently held back. And so, I resorted to taking written notes. For as long as I can remember, I have always enjoyed writing. Growing up, journaling alone in the late evenings was my way of processing the day's events and making sense of new ideas, emotions, and experiences. I wrote for personal reasons, and never with the intention that my writing would be made visible to others (that would send me into anxiety mode). To my young self, to write meant to have an internal dialogue and to dream big. If you can write it, you can become it.

And then I did the impossible (or so I thought) and became a teacher. It was a decision made from the heart and it is, to this day, one of the best decisions I have made. Becoming an educator did not convert me from an introvert to an extrovert (what some hypothesized!), but my everyday interactions with my students helped fuel my passion for teaching and allowed me to find my voice, however quiet, in the classroom. I became more self-confident and self-driven with each new day, and increasingly more inspired and invigorated to teach beyond my certified subjects and share beyond the classroom walls. Fast forward five years and in August of 2018, I was making my writing visible to anyone who cared to engage with my recollections of past experiences (and occasional academic essays).  

Today, this site serves multiple purposes: to encourage you (and myself!) to continue wondering, wandering, and becoming (a shift from my original site purpose of “to inspire, teach, and empower,” which was meant well but felt too shallow / detached and no longer resonated with my philosophy of sharing experiences from the heart and on the ground). What hasn’t changed is that I still consider myself a lifelong learner and a strong advocate for young people. I have always cared about learning (a shift from my original wording of “I have always loved school”—which I have since interrogated and found problematic; curriculum people, iykyk!). I will forever embrace being a nerd, and will tirelessly advocate for more education (informal, formal, communal, experiential, conceptualized broadly from all walks of life).

Here, whenever the opportunity arises, I hope to share my "book smarts," or academic pursuits, with you, which perhaps will assist you if you are in that stage of your life. But learning does not only come from formal schooling and established institutions; rather, much of what I have learned in life has been passed on to me as perspectives and experiences from family, colleagues, friends, students, and young children; has become engrained in my mind from unforgettable experiences; or has become part of my life from self-discovery, diligent research, and sustained trial-and-error.

On this site, I, too, will devote much space to share my "street smarts," or everyday life skills, which may save you some headache, pique your curiosity, inspire new practices, or help you avoid some unpleasant, unnecessary experiences. I update this site when I can, which isn’t very often because doctoral student life x parenting life combined with my “regular life” is a very involved, messy kind of life. As such, most of the site is “under construction”—particularly in the realm of “street smarts.” There are some pages that no longer matter much to me—though they did when I first dreamed them up in 2018. Rather than delete and erase them from my digital footprint, I’ve intentionally kept them as a form of documentation (or digital artifact) of my own evolution as a person. Some of these pages and images represent sites of tension for me—collisions among my many selves spanning the past, present, and future. I’m okay with that and hope you will approach them with an open heart.

Writing in an open, stream-of-conscience mode to an anonymous audience outside of myself is a new experience for me (and a rather frightening one, to be honest). But if there is one important thing I have learned in life, it is that taking risks that align with your heart can lead to a beautiful, fulfilling fullness. Teaching, for example, has empowered me to become the resilient, independent, and curious person I believe I am today. I have much to thank my students for, including teaching me about how little it is that I know about our changing world and how much more I’d like to learn alongside them. I am optimistic that this site will bring a sense of personal fulfillment for me as well. Even if only in a small way, I hope what I share on this site will inspire you to take chances, to pursue that something deep in your heart, to find joy and glimmers of hope even in the midst of dark phases, and to always keep learning, always keep shifting. I hope, too, that my more random posts might put a smile across your face, because even as an “academic person,” I can write more light-hearted posts.

In any case, life as I’ve come to know it is a journey, not a destination, and I warmly welcome you to join me and to experience mine. 

My Professional Aspirations

I have a passion for teaching and inspiring young adults to reach their full potential. I have a major in biochemistry, a minor in art history, and a concentration in German language from Wellesley College. I spent the early years of my life traveling the world—although I was born in China, I spent most of my life living and studying in Sweden, the U.S., and Austria. As a world traveler, an avid learner of languages, a science nerd, and a connoisseur of culture and design, I have an affinity for novelty. I am someone who embraces diversity of life experiences, and am always looking for new challenges to stretch me personally and professionally. 

As an introverted female leader in the field of education, what drew me to teaching is my desire to be an advocate and role model for those historically marginalized and disenfranchised. This has been a driving force for me during my years as a public high school teacher; now, as a doctoral candidate (ABD: all but dissertation!) at Columbia University Teachers College, I am eager to push the boundaries of our education system to make education more accessible to and inclusive of marginalized learners in the 21st Century.

When I first wrote this site philosophy, there were three central questions I was most interested in pursuing further as part of my own research: (1) How do we best support women’s advancement in society from a young age? (2) How can we better design assessments that measure academic aptitude and transferrable skills more precisely? (3) How can we improve our education system to better empower introverted students to become compelling leaders in an increasingly loud society?

Then, while simmering in deep thought during grad school, I found many of my original interests shifting, reshaping, and coalescing into a topic of youth participation in digital spaces and the ways in which their participation may be a way of reclaiming their narratives, of making sense of their multiple identities, of seeking and negotiating belonging, and voicing their concerns, pleasures, struggles, and everything in-between... something along those lines! For years, I was playing with potential lines of inquiry for my dissertation while pursuing concurrent research projects.

Eventually, I decided to commit myself to amplifying Asian American youth voices through educational research in digital spaces—a project that is evergreen and especially relevant today because of the hypervisibility of Asian American identities amidst COVID-19 and the rise of Asian (American) representation in both politics and popular culture. I focus on digital spaces because these represent the “home turfs” of today’s Gen Z and already house an abundance of richly layered identity narratives authored by Asian American youth. Through ‘traveling with youth’ into these spaces with a methodology called digital ethnography, my dissertation uncovers the stories not yet heard, exploring how youth participants mobilize digital resources to craft, negotiate, and expand their identities as and beyond “Asian American.”

This page was written on August, 2018 and updated again in July, 2020; the site philosophy is bound to mold with time…

If you are interested in a regular dose of random thoughts as they emerge, please follow along on Instagram: @booksmartstreetsmartblog