Echo grew up in Baoding, Hebei, a northern Chinese city with history dating back to the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 24 CE). After completing her B.A. and M.A. degrees at Guangxi Normal University’s College of Chinese Literature, Echo joined the CLI team in January 2010 and in the ten-plus years since has contributed to nearly every aspect of the Institute’s development. 

Tristan is from Guilin and holds a B.A. in English from the Guilin Institute of Tourism. Upon graduation, Tristan worked as a local tour guide for four years followed by another four as manager at an international hotel in Hangzhou. Since joining the team in 2012, Tristan has epitomized CLI’s ethos of always striving to facilitate the best possible language learning environment for our community and every student we host.

Dayong joined the team in the summer of 2009 and is CLI’s longest-serving Chinese teacher. Dayong is from Harbin (哈尔滨), capital city of China’s chilly northeastern province of Heilongjiang (黑龙江). When asked to produce a bio for the CLI homepage, Dayong said, “At CLI, I’ve learned that the world is a big place, and every single person in it can be your teacher in some way.”

After earning her M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Summer began her career at China’s prestigious Hanban (汉办), the parent organization of the Confucius Institute, and taught Chinese at Thailand’s Ministry of Education. Fortunately for CLI, Summer’s next move was to return to her hometown of Guilin and join the CLI team as Student Activities Manager, where she organizes the out-of-class components of CLI’s language learning system.