ABOUT ME

I was raised in what is now known as Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral, and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, səlilwətaɬ, and Skwxwú7mesh First Nations. I am an uninvited settler on their land. I come from a family of immigrants to Canada who themselves were immigrants to Southeast Asia, having lived in Southeast Asia for generations. My mother’s family is part of the Stateless Chinese population in Brunei Darussalam and my father is Chinese-Vietnamese from Vietnam.

Drawing from my own identity as part of the Sinophone diaspora, I became interested in understanding how those who have complex migration histories understand their own identity. This is how I first got into the discipline of History and considered it as a prism through which I could develop and magnify my research questions. Questions around what is “Chinese” across the Sinophone diaspora are of particular interest to me.  This extends of course as well to other intersections of my identity as well such as my position as a Queer cis-male in academia.