I came from Mainland China. My hometown is Jining, Shandong Province, the same as the hometown of Confucius. My childhood was spent in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, the "City of Springs".
I went to Nankai University in Tianjin for my college, the same school in which the great geometer Shiing-Shen Chern studied. After I got my bachlor degree in 2006, I went to Chern Institute of Mathematics of Nankai University, an institute founded by Chern in 1985. I studied there under the supervision of Prof. Weiping Zhang. In 2008 I got admitted to Graduate School of Princeton University and then I came to the US.
When I went to Tianjin, my family moved to Qingdao，a city on the east coast of China, famous for the beer.
I am married to Ning Lin, who is now an assistant professor of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Princeton University.