I am a bilingual, bicultural, queer, Asian-American social worker. I was born in Chengdu, China, in the land-locked province of Sichuan, home to the giant pandas and delicious spicy and mouth-numbing food. I moved to New York at age 9 with my mother, and my identity and upbringing as a third culture kid and 1.5 generation working class immigrant continues to inform who I am and how I move through the world. 

I received my undergraduate degree in psychology from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and conducted neuroscience research, though I was always called to clinical work, especially with marginalized communities. I received my Master’s of Social Welfare from UC Berkeley in 2013 with concentration in Community Mental Health and have since worked for over a decade for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health mainly with people experiencing homelessness as well as Chinese immigrants. In February 2026 I transitioned full-time to my private practice seeking a sustainable path to clinical work.

Like many mental health professionals, I am a wounded healer. I live with Major Depressive Disorder and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and am in recovery from disordered eating as well as drug and alcohol use. My upbringing was filled with hushed conversations about mental illness and substance use - these issues were pervasive in my family yet too shameful to speak of. I believe it is important to share my mental health struggles because it allows me to bring my authentic self into my clinical practice, and because I want to de-stigmatize mental illness and change perceptions of what mental illness and substance use look like. Being in therapy, taking medications, and partaking in community have been and remain active parts of my growth and recovery, and I am grateful to able to pay it forward in my work.

Outside of work, I enjoy being mediocre at cycling, fiber arts, ceramics, and photography. You may see me at the park or the beach with my dog Little Edie. Reality television is a not-so-guilty pleasure I enjoy indulging in. I also actively engage in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist activism, and have a history of involvement in community and labor organizing, as our personal wellbeing can never be separated from our collective liberation.