Warning
Reading this page will not likely result in any sense of intellectual accomplishment. Most likely, you’ll feel a complete waste of time. In most cases, your time will be better spent doing the readings for your course or working on your assignments. However, if after reading this warning you still decide to read on, then dive in at your own peril.

Disclaimer
The author will not claim any responsibility or be held liable for any emotional distress or cognitive confusion that may result from reading such grotesquely bizzare and exotic notions as “school being fun” or “life being enjoyable without gas, electricity, or Disney World.”

Now you really want to read it, don’t you?

Many Different Hats
In my official capacity, I’m an English professor (Rhetoric & Composition and Technical Writing/Communication), but I see myself as wearing many different hats. Academically, being who I am, I’m also interested in cross-cultural communication, second language writing, writing technology transfer, and so on. Outside my academic capacity, I wear too many hats: Chinese, Chinese American (as some people view us), Southerner (I still don’t know how I got this label; maybe it was because I came from southern China and now live in southern U.S.), husband, father, son, brother, friend, sports fan, golfer, enthusiast of Chinese and American cultures…you name it. The ones I like the most, however, are teacher, scholar, friend, family man.

A Conventional Account
I did my bachelor’s in English at Soochow University in Suzhou, China. Suzhou is a beautiful city, with some world-famous gardens. There’s a replica of a part of one of the gardens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. If you go to China, I strongly urge you to visit this city, which is only about 60 miles west of Shanghai.

After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I got my first job as an assistant professor at the same university where I got my degree. I taught there for about eight years, during which time I took a year off and attended a one-year graduate program at Shanghai International Studies University from 1986-1987.

In January 1992, I decided to take on a new challenge and came to the U.S. for further study. My first stop was Iowa State University, where I got my Master’s degree in Business and Technical Communication in 1994. In the fall of that year, I went to Purdue University to begin my PhD study in Rhetoric and Composition, with a specialization in Professional and Technical Writing.

I finished my PhD in December 2000, but I started my position as an assistant professor of technical communication at Eastern Washington University in September 1999. I taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in technical writing and directed the program in technical writing for three years there. While we enjoyed the Spokane area and the inland Northwest tremendously, my family decided we needed a more culturally diverse environment, and I decided I wanted to join a more rigorous program. That’s how I came to Georgia State in the fall of 2002. That’s why some of you are now stuck with me when taking courses in the Rhetoric and Composition program.

 
My Path to the Academia
If you ask me, my path to the academe has been a very lucky one. It was something I couldn’t even dream of in my wildest dreams in my childhood.

I was born to a farmers’ family, and neither my parents could read or write. Being the 4th and the youngest child in the family, I wasn’t expected of much in my education. Nor did there seem to be any money in my family that could afford a decent education, or anything else for that matter, for me. My parents were working on a community farm and were making what is now worth about 5 to 10 cents a day. That was barely enough to feed the family. Naturally, such things as toys, new clothes, and the like did not exist in my vocabulary. From the times of my elementary school years to my senior year at high school, the first and pretty much the only thing I had to do after school every day was to work on the farm to help earn some money.

However, if you think my childhood was boring and miserable, you’re so wrong. Sure, we didn’t have toys, new clothes, Disney World, not even running water, electricity, or gas, but we had everything in the nature to enjoy and have fun with: rivers, woods, bamboo gardens, caves, boats, and most importantly, a lot of friends. On top of that, my parents always had a lot of love for us, often expressed, though, in their unique, harsh manner. One thing that impressed me so much was their genuine joy each time they saw my report card from school.

One thing that would seem so weird to many of the kids nowadays is that going to school at that time was actually a lot of fun, at least to me. Even though it was a good 45-minute walk on the muddy roads to school every time, even though it was incredibly hard to do so especially on rainy days, which there were a whole lot of them, missing school was something unimaginable to me. Many times, as I recall, when I had a low fever or some other minor illnesses, I would conceal it from my parents for fear that if they knew they would not let me go to school. What’s the fun of staying home doing house chores or farm work when you can be with all your good friends at school?

For a time, though, there seemed little hope of me ever going to college. After all, my eldest sister didn’t even finish elementary school, and my second sister didn’t go to high school. My brother did go to a two-year college, but he was extremely lucky. Fortunately, a couple of years before I graduated from high school, China reinstated its college admissions system, and everybody could take the admissions exams for a chance to go to college. The chance, however, was very slim, as low as a few percent in the late 1970s. For some reason, I got lucky and became a member of the so-called elite to go to college. The rest, as they often say, is history….