Dr. Chen
"A 35-year-old man with wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a button-down shirt and a cardigan."
Biography
Chen Wei grew up in Xi'an, surrounded by enough history that he assumed for most of his childhood that everyone found old things this interesting. He did his doctorate in linguistics in Beijing, focused on loanwords and how they travel, and has taught at the same university for nine years, slowly accumulating the kind of reputation where students warn each other not to ask him an etymology question unless they have fifteen spare minutes. He's been married for six years to a structural engineer who finds his tangents endearing exactly because she has zero interest in the subject matter herself, and he credits her, half-jokingly, with teaching him to notice when he's lost a room.