About
The rest of this site is the academic version of me. Here is my personal story: where I grew up, how I found geography and planning, the places I've walked, and the systems I can't stop watching.
01 A little about me
I grew up in Qingdao, Shandong, a coastal city in eastern China, where I lived through high school before coming to the United States for college in 2020. COVID delayed that journey by a year, and when I finally arrived, I was not entirely sure where it would lead.
Geography had planted a small seed much earlier. As a child I loved maps and could finish geography puzzles surprisingly quickly. But I did not arrive at college planning to become a geographer or a planner. One of my first interests was psychology. Between studying online, adjusting to a new language, and generally not knowing what I wanted to do yet, that path never quite took off.
Then I met Dr. Mark Reisinger. His World Regional Geography course (GEOG 151) seemed to travel everywhere. Through his stories, sense of humor, maps, and accounts of different cultures, geography became a way of seeing the world.
Planning came even more accidentally.
I took a planning course taught by Frank Evangelisti, then Planning Director of Broome County, NY. I became fascinated by something different: the policies, laws, institutions, and small decisions through which cities actually get made. While Geography had made me curious about places, planning made me curious about the systems behind them.
A few interesting classes, generous teachers, unexpected questions, and quite a bit of wandering eventually brought me here.
If I had to describe myself without using student, planner, or researcher, I would probably choose one word:
Thinker.
I like figuring out how things work. I also tend to ask far too many questions along the way.
02 A world beyond the map
I especially love traveling alone.
Solo travel gives me a particular sense of freedom: to wander down a street for no reason, change plans halfway through the day, sit somewhere and watch a city go by, or discover something I did not know enough to look for.
I experience cities slowly. I walk. I ride public transit. I look at maps. I visit city museums. I watch streets from street corners and neighborhoods through train windows. Sometimes I drive through landscapes simply to understand how places connect.
Museums and food are, of course, non-negotiable.
And then there are airports.
I genuinely enjoy flying, and I probably enjoy airports more than a normal person should. I like the anticipation of departure, watching aircraft arrive and leave, listening to ATC, following operations, and observing the extraordinary choreography required to move thousands of people through a terminal and across the world.
Apparently, even my choice of television tends to involve systems, procedures, investigations, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, airports.
Travel reminds me how large the world is, and how little of it any one person gets to know.
Advisory
PSA
A small piece of advice: don't watch Air Crash Investigation on an airplane.
Seat 14A · Window · Learned the hard way
03 Places I've explored
drag to spin
Somewhere out there
Hover a point
Dots mark cities and parks. The warm areas in China show the 23 of 31 provinces I have visited so far.
Fly to
Qingdao is home.
04 Rules, procedures & other rabbit holes
One question is never one question. It arrives with a procedure attached, and the procedure has a history, and the history has an exception.
Who has the authority to make this decision?
What procedure has to be followed?
What happens when two institutions disagree?
Which rule applies, and where does its authority stop?
Who can investigate whom? Who gets to ask for the records?
And what happens when a seemingly simple decision passes through courts, legislatures, agencies, and layers of oversight?
A Senate cloture vote
becomes a question about institutional design.
A court order
leads to jurisdiction and enforcement.
An inspector general
leads to appropriations, oversight, public records, and eventually an entirely different question from the one I started with.
What is the rule? Why does it exist? Who can use it? Where are its boundaries? And what happens when the system is actually put under pressure?
It is an admittedly nerdy hobby. I am perfectly happy with that.
05 Watching cities move
I have difficulty simply passing through a transportation system without looking at how it works. Airports are probably the clearest example.
I can spend a surprising amount of time watching aircraft movements, listening to air traffic control, following arrivals and departures, and noticing how passengers, crews, vehicles, security, gates, and aircraft interact within the same enormous system.
Cities produce smaller versions of the same fascination. I notice the gestures subway operators make as part of safety procedures. I watch pilots and ground crews coordinate around an aircraft. I wonder why a sign is located where it is, why passengers queue where they do, or why one station feels intuitive while another does not.
None of this necessarily begins as research. Often, I am simply curious.
Airside
Pushback, taxi, and the ground crew's hand signals form an entire language on a stretch of concrete.
Platform
Fare gates, door markings, the pause before departure. Station design tells you what it expects of you.
Wayfinding
One arrow in the right place saves a thousand questions. One in the wrong place creates them.
These are sketches for now. I will replace them with my own travel photographs.
06 On my bookshelf
I read across energy, cities, institutions, inequality, environmental policy, and political life.
07 On screen
Documentary
Airports, customs, border enforcement, and the endless creativity of people trying to get things through them. I came for the airports and stayed for the investigations.
TV series
Investigations, procedures, teamwork, and a cast that somehow makes solving crimes feel familiar after enough seasons. One of those shows I can always come back to.
Documentary series
What keeps me watching is less the crash than the process afterward: evidence, systems, human decisions, engineering, and the chain of small failures that produces an extraordinary event.
And again, save this one until after landing.
08 A few other things
When I am not thinking about cities, institutions, or transportation:
Some interests are better left unexplained. They are simply fun.
