A short biography

Born in Hangzhou, China, I moved to Tucson, Arizona at the age of four. I grew up in the desert — well, not quite in the desert, but we lived at its edge: once, a bobcat came and ate half our chickens. After we mistakenly raptor-proofed the chicken coop, it came back and ate the rest of our chickens.

In 2012, I moved to the East Coast, both to get away from all the scorpions and to attend Swarthmore College. Although I encountered linguistics early in my time there, I persistently deluded myself that I wished to become a doctor; after taking all too many chemistry courses, I received my B.A. in Linguistics in May of 2016. For a year, I worked as a research assistant at Princeton. Then — antiechoing Louise Glück — I moved to LA.

I moved to San Francisco in 2022 and took a break from my PhD to work a couple of years at Sanas.ai, a machine learning speech technology company, as their Analytics Technical Manager.

Outside of linguistics, my interests include poetry, singing, divinatory methods, and photography. And food. And æsthetics.