FEATURED POST

Hi!
 

I started this blog because I've always been curious about how people become who they are.

That question is personal for me. I was adopted from China as a baby, and going back to visit at eleven made me start thinking a lot more seriously about identity, belonging, culture, and the spaces we grow up in. I wanted to understand how much of who we are comes from where we start, who raises us, and what kinds of environments make us feel safe enough to actually become ourselves.
 

That curiosity eventually turned into anthropology, though not the version most people picture. I don't think of anthropology as just the study of distant cultures, I see it everywhere I look. A high school has a culture. So does a senior living facility, a workplace, a family dinner table, a club meeting, or even a two-minute conversation between strangers. Every one of those has its own unspoken rules about who gets to speak, who gets left out, and what makes someone feel like they belong.
 

I've tried to chase that question through actual projects, not just essays. I founded Forge2gether, my non-profit, to get young people interviewing and really listening to someone meaningfully different from themselves, across age, culture, belief, or background, and built a training program to help students actually practice speaking across those differences instead of just avoiding them. I also founded and lead my school's Career Counseling Club, because I'm just as interested in how people imagine their futures as I am in how organizations end up shaping who someone becomes.
 

Some of that curiosity has taken me outside of school too. Through research with the University of Pennsylvania's positive psychology department, I developed a first-of-its-kind piece of software that ended up accelerating their studies on human worldviews many times over, and through work with Traice, a venture-backed Silicon Valley company studying how AI might reshape leadership, coaching, and the way teams understand each other, I got to watch that same underlying question, how people understand themselves and each other, play out at a completely different scale.
 

But honestly, some of what's taught me the most has been much quieter than any of that. I volunteer weekly at an assisted living facility, where I spend hours on art projects, cultural and holiday programming and also, just sitting with older residents and making them feel heard.  Those hours have taught me that connection rarely shows up in one big conversation. More often, it shows up slowly, through repetition, through quiet attention, and through the simple act of coming back the next week.
 

This blog is where I write down what I notice: the hidden rules, the small rituals, the reasons some rooms feel like they belong to you and some don't. It's part observation, part reflection, and part an ongoing attempt to understand people a little better than I did the week before.