David Li-Wei Chen is a Taiwanese-American whose family immigrated to the United States in the mid-1970s when he was almost two years old. He was exposed to both Taiwanese and Mandarin languages growing up. Like many growing up in United States, he attended Saturday Mandarin “Chinese” schools, which became popular in the 1980s and are now mainstream. He learned basic Chinese language grammar structure and the importance of written traditional Chinese characters, phonetics, and tones that provided him language tools that he applied when visiting relatives in Taiwan. He took Japanese language in high school for his foreign language requirement and applied the tools he learned from the previous Mandarin courses.

He obtained a Bachelor of Science in civil and environmental engineering from University of Washington (UW) and later obtained his Master of Science in civil and environmental engineering from University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he also took some freshman Mandarin courses. He always recognized Taiwanese language as the mother tongue of Taiwanese people, especially communities overseas, and is currently applying his language experiences from learning Mandarin and Japanese to developing Taiwanese language materials for overseas Taiwanese youth. He currently resides in Southern California.