I was born in mainland China and raised in Hong Kong. When my parents moved to Hong Kong, I was five years old. I went with Dad on a train and it took days to arrive. I still remember that Dad had a long carrying pole 扁担 and he had several big boxes of luggages on both ends. That was all we got as immigrants. We were very poor at the time. Dad saved up all he could to buy me a fish for dinner. He did not eat any so that I would not be hungry. It was his unconditional love that offered me the calmness when we left behind all our relatives and friends.

After moving to Hong Kong, we lived in a small apartment and it was shared among five other families. We had to share the bathroom and kitchen and learned to communicate in Cantonese, which was a language that we did not know. Growing up as an immigrant kid was not easy. Becuase of the upward mobility and the stress to improve my family's livelihood, I studied very hard and aspired to become a language professional to help bring out the voices of immigrants and refugees.

My own family spoke multiple dialects, including Yunnanese, Fukienese, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and so I was socialized into speaking multiple dialects. When we were immigrants in Hong Kong, my parents lost the professional credentials as they did not know English. English was an official language in Hong Kong when it was a British colony at the time. My parents became factory workers and they took ESL classes at night. It was a painful process for them and so I made the determination to study well in English language so that I could change our lives. It was a determination that shaped me to become a TESOL academic later on. I would say that being an immigrant was a blessing in disguise, as it gave me a purpose-driven life that I would not have if I did not go through the pain and trauma from the uprooting and transplanting experience.

I never thought that I would become an immigrant again because of the unpleasant past being an immigrant kid. However, when I pursued my doctoral studies at The Ohio State University, I met my husband, and then I got a tenure track job offer in New York when I graduated. So I became a second time immigrant in the U.S. There have been many negative connotations with the term, immigrant, in the U.S., and I went through a long time of self search and affirmation to become who I am today. I live in a multilingual and multicultural family, my husband is Japanese American, and he is biracial. My two girls are Chinese Japanese American who were born in the U.S. We have our unique linguistic repertoire in our household, and it often includes mixed codes in Chinese, Japanese, and English. It is inevitable that we carry along a sense of otherness with us as we do not look like our neighbours. My kids were asked questions like, "Why is your mom Chinese?" and "Why do you look different from me?" It is a challenging yet meaningful process for them to have a sense of belonging and be comfortable in their own skin.

I self identified as Chinese, female, cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, middle-class, and I am a mother scholar, which is an important identity marker for me. Due to having kids at an older age, I suffered from many complications and I went to the ICU with 4 or 5 bags of blood transfused due to hemorrhage. It was another transformative experience that I went through being a mom of two girls. Raising two girls as a full-time working mom was extremely challenging, as I don't have any grandparents, uncles, aunties, or friends in the area. My husband and I did everything ourselves, including taking care of the kids and working full-time. During Covid-19 when schools were virtual, we were burnt out, with nonstop duties of cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, and covering for each other's important meetings. Our work hours extended to late night and weekends. Being a mother-scholar is very challenging. The stress of working as a faculty and raising two girls is always there. I am experiencing the stress of being a mother-scholar right now and I want to advocate for structural changes for providing equitable work environments for working moms in the academia and the society as a whole.

Regarding positionality, I am a social constructionist, and I believe in the social construction of knowledge in situ. I am also a critical thinker. When I re-created the transformative emphasis in the EdD program, i intentionally designed it to have critical theories, critical media literacy, and contemporary social movements in the courses.