EDUCATION:

• Doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity (University of Southern California, 2024 - Present)

• Master of Arts in History (University of British Columbia, 2024)

• Bachelor of Arts in Honours History with High Distinction in International Relations, Chinese Language and Culture (University of British Columbia, 2022)

 

BIO:

I am a 2nd generation Asian Canadian born and raised in so-called "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/undocumented Chinese population in Brunei Darussalam and my father is Chinese-Vietnamese from Vietnam. I grew up speaking Cantonese (廣東話) and Hakka (客家話) at home, taking Mandarin (華語) classes on Saturdays (and a few university terms of exchange in Taiwan), and now have taken up learning Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) as an adult. 

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I am professionally trained as a Sinophone/Chinese Diaspora scholar and as a historian of Southeast Asia, but have now made the pivot to Asian American Studies. I see my trajectory as being representative of my own lifelong journey of trying to figure out where I fit into the world as someone who is not always read as "Chinese" yet also not "Malay" or "Vietnamese" or "Canadian".