Our Team

President
Lâu Yū-Kî | 劉又齊
she/her

Sabrina is from Taipei, Taiwan. She moved to Pittsburgh for graduate school in 2007. Her mother tongues are Taiwanese and Taiwanese Hakka but she is a perfect example of native language loss brought by settler colonialism. Aside from a speech she memorized for a Hakka speech contest when she was 13 years old, she does not speak Taiwanese Hakka. Her already rusty Taiwanese has worsened after her grandma’s passing. She is well aware of the language endangerment and wants to dedicate her free time to connect with her roots and document stories of Taiwanese Americans living in Pittsburgh in the 1970-1980s.

Sabrina is a workers’ rights activist. She works as a researcher and campaigner at the United Steelworkers union. She has served as a member of the National Executive Board of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) since 2017. She co-founded the Pittsburgh chapter of APALA in 2019 to promote workers’ and immigrants’ rights.

She is an amateur photographer and videographer for KITA’s documentary project.

Vice-President
Tshuà Sù-Tîng | 蔡思亭
she/her

Sih-Ting Cai is from Banqiao, Taiwan. She spent much of her childhood at her grandmother's house, where watching the daily noon broadcast of 'Everyday Happiness' and the evening 'Yang Li-hua Taiwanese Opera' was her main source of learning Taiwanese.

Growing up, her struggles with her grandparents’ native language often led to misunderstandings and barriers between her grandparents and her. This generational gap was a major reason why she joined KITA, hoping to recover lost stories and missed memories, and through fostering dialogue and enhancing understanding, enable us to better understand ourselves and each other.

Professionally, Sih-Ting focuses on health policy research, working on health insurance and health care reforms to build a society where 'the elderly can feel comfortable to age and the young can happily grow up'.

VP of Development
Lîm Gî-Lîng | 林宜羚
she/her

Lucy, a Taiwanese native, grew up in various parts of Taiwan, making it difficult for her to identify with a single city. Her father was from Tainan, and her mother from Taoyuan. During her childhood, her parents spoke only Mandarin Chinese with her to help her develop “standard Mandarin,” making Taiwanese her third language, after Chinese and English. It wasn’t until she went abroad that she began practicing Taiwanese more frequently. Once, while visiting a traditional market in Xiamen, China, she was surprised to discover that she was one of the few tourists who could communicate with the locals in their language.

While pursuing her PhD in Anthropology and Archaeology in the United States, Lucy became interested in the Asian residents living in nearby senior housing. This sparked her curiosity, leading her to explore the history of Asian and Chinese Americans in her free time. She holds a strong belief that the material of oral history is as valuable as archaeology, considering it one of the most crucial contemporary human historical records, alongside official documents. Lucy hopes to document the oral histories of Taiwanese American in the cities where she resides. After relocating to Pittsburgh, she met a group of like-minded individuals and co-founded the KITA Foundation.

Secretary-Treasurer
Kang Bēng-Sûn | 江孟純
she/her

Meng is from Taichung, Taiwan. After graduating from the Department of Psychology of the National Taiwan University, she moved to the United States for graduate studies. She has lived in the United States almost longer than the years she lived in Taiwan. Her English is more fluent than her Taiwanese even though Taiwanese was the language spoken at home growing up.

Meng is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. She offers consultation, psychotherapy and clinical supervision. She is passionate about topics related to intersectionality and mental health.

Meng believes that transitional justice and the collective wellness of the Taiwanese people are interconnected. She hopes to care for generations of Taiwanese/Taiwanese Americans by remembering the daily lives of people from different era via KITA’s storytelling.