How’d I get here?
I grew up in a bilingual household. English at school, Cantonese at home with my grandmother. Language was never just words; it was connection, culture, and identity.
My younger sibling is disabled and non-verbal. Watching my family navigate systems of communication, and seeing what clicked versus what failed, gave me an early, visceral education in clarity and empathy.
When I became a teacher in a dual immersion, full-inclusion classroom, the challenge wasn’t just language. It was designing learning experiences that could meet every student where they were. The same lesson had to challenge a gifted reader, support an English learner, and reach a student who needed a completely different entry point. That’s where I internalized what good design actually does: it doesn’t pick a user and optimize for them. It finds the structures that work across the widest range of people, and makes everyone’s experience better in the process.
That instinct followed me into tech. As the sole content designer on a zero-to-one product launch at Meta, I helped grow Messenger Communities from nothing to 2M+ daily active users, applying the same thinking I’d honed in a classroom: meet people where they are, reduce friction, and design for the edges.
