The Arc
The story, on paper, looks like a straight line upward.
Small city in central China. Not poor, not rich—the kind of place where the highest aspiration most people voiced was stable, and the highest compliment you could pay someone was reliable. I was neither, particularly, but I was relentless. I studied like the alternative was unthinkable, because in many ways it was. And it worked: I got out. I got into UCLA. I crossed an ocean, landed in Los Angeles with accented English and a certainty that the hard part was behind me.
Then I graduated, moved forty minutes north to Silicon Valley, and got a job at Google.
The straight line continued. On LinkedIn, it looked like a success story. At dinner tables—both in China and here—it was a success story. The kind parents mention casually to relatives. The kind that ends conversations because what is there left to say?
Here's what nobody tells you about arriving at the destination: sometimes you get there and realize you'd been so focused on the journey that you never stopped to ask if this was actually where you wanted to go.
The Paradox
I'm a software engineer. I want to get that out of the way early, because it's true, and also because it's the least interesting thing about me.
The honest version: the more I've immersed myself in tech, the more I've felt the edges of my world shrink. There's a particular kind of professional success that quietly hollows you out—where the job gets bigger and the person somehow gets smaller. I've been in that feeling. It's not dramatic. It's just a slow, creeping sense that you're becoming fluent in one very narrow language while forgetting all the others.
My hobbies didn't save me from that, exactly. But they reminded me what full felt like.
What Actually Fills the Tank
Five obsessions, each with its own page on this site — because each one deserves more than a paragraph.
1️⃣ Lifelong Student: I grew up in bookstores. I still read every night, on paper, without a screen. The fear that drives me isn't professional — it's the fear of ignorance, of the world moving forward while I'm stuck in the shallows.
2️⃣ The Long Way Round: I can't travel as often as I'd like. The job, the calendar, the general infrastructure of adult life — it's all real. Which means every trip I do take is planned with an intensity that borders on obsessive, optimized down to the quality of light at each location. Since my daughter arrived in 2023, the stakes have gotten higher and the joy considerably greater.
3️⃣ Behind the Lens: I've been shooting on Nikon since 2011, when a stranger at a UCLA student event handed me a DSLR and accidentally changed my life. Photography taught me to slow down, look harder, and make decisions about what matters. It's also the reason this website exists — social media destroys image quality, and my photographs deserve better than that.
4️⃣ Into the Wild: I'm a naturalist in progress — hiking, backpacking, tide pool foraging, birding, and currently enrolled in Park Management and Ecology programs at West Valley College. The goal is to stop being a visitor in the natural world and start being genuinely fluent in it.
5️⃣ The Freedom Number: I plan to retire before 45. That's not a fantasy — it's a project. The financial architecture behind that goal, including a century's worth of credit card points, index funds bought during every major drawdown, and three investment accounts already opened in my two-year-old's name, all lives on that page.
The throughline across all five: I like to understand things deeply, and I like to plan things deliberately. A well-composed photograph and a well-structured retirement account require exactly the same discipline — decide what matters, eliminate everything else, and be patient.
The Real Agenda
I plan to retire before 45. That's not a fantasy—it's a project, and I'm already deep in the execution phase. The financial planning, the deliberate life design, the constant recalibration of what's actually worth my time: these aren't side interests. They're the main event.
I became a dad in 2023, which sharpened all of this considerably. There's nothing like watching a small person encounter the world for the first time to make you serious about what kind of world—and what kind of example—you're offering them.
The dream, simply put, is to stop working for a living and start living on purpose. This site is a document of that transition in progress.
This Site
Everything here—the travel writing, the photography, the thinking-out-loud—is an artifact of that pursuit. The section called The Other Résumé is probably the truest self-portrait I have. If something there resonates, I'd enjoy the conversation.
This site has no ads, no sponsored content, no affiliate links. Just honest writing and photographs from someone who'd rather be outside.
If something here made your trip better, your thinking sharper, or your afternoon more interesting—a coffee goes a long way toward keeping it going.