I moved with my mother to the United States from China when I was a child. Upon arriving in this country, my mother worked as a live-in domestic worker, housecleaner, and caretaker for children. I also lived with her in the homes of several American families in Colorado and New Jersey before we were able to be reunited with my father in the housing projects of New York City. These experiences from a young age taught me a lot about the difficulties of being an immigrant. I spent much of my childhood watching my parents struggle, sacrificing their own health and emotional well-being to raise me and my younger brothers. I've watched them get mistreated by employers and discriminated against in society. I've also spent parts of my childhood in households where I felt like a second-class citizen and servant, compared to the pampered children of my mother's employers.

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Throughout my twenties, I've worked as a community organizer for various immigrant rights organizations, I've been primarily driven by the need to better understand inequality in the United States, why people in the Hispanic and African-American projects I grew up in are trapped in a cycle of systemic poverty, and what life is like for other immigrant workers in New York City. I am also curious about the political circumstances of the country my parents ran away from, the history of the cultural revolution, the fate of the Chinese people during times of growing uncertainty across the globe. With China's rise in economic power, increasingly competitive with the United States, I worry about anti-Asian racism and how Chinese-Americans will be treated as tensions rise. I am interested in better understanding the relationship of the Chinese diaspora to other communities in North America, Africa, and other parts of the world. As a backpacker in my twenties, I took photos of Chinatowns in Latin America, and learned about the 苦力 coolie  system, in which Chinese were imported as slaves to Latin America. As a han 汉 (ethnic majority in mainland China), who grew up identifying with the minority politics and social justice language of the United States, I am particularly concerned with the treatment of indigenous, Muslim, and other racial minorities in mainland China, and the racial consciousness of Chinese people as China builds its Belt and Road.