About Me

I grew up in Guangzhou, in a city best explained by its ordinary things — the arcade houses that carry pedestrians through the rainy season, the patterned floor tiles worn smooth at the threshold, a bowl of wonton noodles served the same way for decades. None of it was called heritage; it was simply how life worked. I have been trying to take the measure of that kind of ordinary ever since.

I trained first as a landscape architect, at Purdue University and then in practice in Guangzhou, where I worked on the adaptive reuse of a historic textile plant. The evening a band I loved played the live house inside the complex we had designed, I understood that preservation is less about freezing a place than about returning it to life. At Cornell University I turned to historic preservation planning — tracing New York State's vanished kitchen gardens for my thesis, writing a cultural landscape report for a museum in Auburn, leading a twelve-person community design team in a lakeside village, and mapping the houses of the Underground Railroad in Ithaca.

These days my work centers on Indiana. I research and write about the state's overlooked past — a Chinese restaurant that flourished beside Monument Circle a century ago, the first drive-in banks built for a city learning to live with the automobile — and I build digital tools that put preservation within reach: mapping Green Book sites, walking users through Section 106 review, helping find the consulting parties who belong at the table.

Preservation work keeps teaching me the same lesson: policy cannot protect what it cannot see, and archives cannot hold what was never recorded. My research develops tools and methodologies for community preservation — an infrastructure for the spatial memories that official records were never designed to hold — so that the people who live with historic places have the means to document, interpret, and decide their future.