Lijie Zhou 周丽婕
Details withheld — living person.
📖 English version below — Jump to English ↓ · 本页中文在上,英文见下方。
周丽婕,生于中国山东省青岛市。Chuck Eesley之妻(二人于2015年12月29日在加州圣何塞成婚),斯坦福大学家族档案的另一半建立者。她于2018年陪同丈夫前往英国牛津公共图书馆,参与了将Eesley家族世系追溯到18世纪初期Hanwell教区Joseph Eesley和Frances Ayris夫妇的研究工作。
她的家族
更新后的家谱(GEDCOM)现已开启周氏一脉的记录:
周玲和李恂于1982年在青岛成婚。周丽婕次年出生。这一支周氏现代青岛生活背后的远祖之地是胶州市 — 周兆祥家族的起源地。
注:本页两位主角的姓名汉字已由家族确认(周丽婕、母亲李恂);周氏祖辈一支(兆祥、运哲等)的汉字仍以推测为主,待家族进一步确认。
English
Lijie was born in Qingdao on China’s eastern coast, in Shandong province — the home of the Zhou and Li families this side of the archive is being built around. She and Chuck married on 29 December 2015 in San Jose, California, and made a life together at Stanford, where they continue to live, and where this archive itself was put together.
She joined Chuck on the 2018 visit to the Oxford public library where the volunteer genealogist worked through the Eesley line back to Joseph and Frances Ayris. The Oxfordshire half of the surviving English research record bears her presence as well as his.
Annual practices with Chuck
- The charity bike rides — the annual ADA Tour de Cure and MS Society Waves to Wine rides she and Chuck have ridden together for over a decade, plus the destination rides (Sequoia, Asti Tour de Vine, Mo’omomi Beach on Molokai) that sit alongside. The corpus runs from 2014 through 2026 as five-minute YouTube videos collected year by year.
- The scuba diving trips — their shared liveaboard practice, opened with Thailand’s Similan Islands in December 2023 and continuing with a Philippines trip planned for the 2026–27 new year.
Other details withheld — living. The biographical layer here is meant to grow as Lijie chooses to add to it.
Her family
The Zhou side of this archive now opens. From the updated GEDCOM:
- Father: Zhou Ling 周玲. His parents:
- Zhou Zhaoxiang 周兆祥 (1 August 1930, Jiaozhou Shi — the ancestral inland city-region — to 9 December 2022, Qingdao).
- Sun Yunzhe 孙云哲 (d. December 2023, Qingdao).
- Mother: Li Xun 李恂. Her parents:
- Li Zhongchu 李仲初 (2 December 1921 – 1 November 1982, Qingdao). Died six weeks after his daughter’s marriage; never met Lijie.
- Shang Yaozhen 尚耀真 (15 September 1921 – 10 January 2013). Outlived her husband by thirty years; the one grandparent on Lijie’s side who lived to know her grown.
Ling and Xun married in 1982 in Qingdao. Lijie was born just over a year later. The ancestral place behind the modern Qingdao life is Jiaozhou Shi — the inland city-region from which Zhou Zhaoxiang’s family came.
Childhood photographs newly placed
- The earliest frame of Lijie in this archive: a c. 1988 studio portrait with her paternal grandfather Zhou Zhaoxiang 周兆祥, taken inside his own photography studio in Qingdao, in front of one of his own painted backdrops. Lijie is about five, in a patterned print blouse with a pink necklace, standing under Zhaoxiang’s right hand; her grandfather is seated centrally, in his late fifties. A boy of about ten in a red Young Pioneer scarf stands on Zhaoxiang’s other side — most likely a cousin from one of Ling Zhou’s siblings’ families. The frame is the only photograph in the archive that holds Lijie and her paternal grandfather together — the founder of Qingdao’s first photography studio captured inside his own shop with his granddaughter at his side. Set as Zhaoxiang’s portrait on his page.
- A flash portrait from the early 1990s shows young Lijie (~10) standing next to her father Ling Zhou in his People’s Police service uniform, indoors against venetian blinds. Set as Ling Zhou’s portrait on his page.
- A second 2010s frame from the heart of Qingdao — Lijie in a dark coat and red gloves, waving at the gate of Dexian Road Elementary School (德县路小学) in the Shinan district old town, with the twin red-roofed towers of St Michael’s Cathedral visible just beyond the schoolyard. Her primary school in front, the cathedral behind — the entire walking-radius geography of her Qingdao childhood in one image.
- The maternal-side early-childhood set (c. 1984–88) on the maternal early-childhood page — infant Lijie with her mother Xun Li and grandmother Yaozhen (c. 1984), and, a few years on (c. 1988), a young Lijie seated beside her great-aunt Yaoxiang, who holds baby cousin Junjun.
What’s still to add
- The earlier Zhou and Li generations — great-grandparents and beyond — where Lijie’s family is able to name them.
- Generation names (字辈 / 班辈) if the Zhou family uses them — the traditional Chinese lineage device where a single character is shared by all male family members of one generation, drawn from a generation-poem (字辈诗) written by an ancestor.
- Lijie’s siblings if any, and her aunts and uncles: paternal aunts Ai Hua Zhou and Ai Qin Zhou and uncle Quan Zhou; maternal uncle Mengling Li and aunt Bo Li.
- A “Zhou and Li families of Qingdao” document — the place-of-origin narrative for both her father’s Zhou line and her mother’s Li and Shang lines, analogous to the Wildermuth villages of Württemberg and the Eesley parishes of Oxfordshire on the existing sides.
- Photographs and oral history — the Zhou side’s analog to Robert Earl’s memoirs and Aunt Maggie’s photo deck.
See also — family threads
Lijie is an anchor for five of the ten threads in the Family threads synthesis essay:
- Thread #1 — Education as inheritance — Stanford graduate; the Zhou-side instance of the same thread Robert Earl founded in 1948.
- Thread #4 — Returning to the places that matter — the 2019 Lingyin Temple three-frame echo with her parents’ 1982 honeymoon image.
- Thread #5 — Service, stewardship, and giving — co-founder of the Zhou & Eesley Family Foundation, Jan 2021; current lead of the ASPIRAS AI cohort with fifteen Malaysian non-profits.
- Thread #8 — Place-and-language curiosity (Japan and China) — the Qingdao-born half of the bilingual archive practice; her schoolyard fence and St Michael’s Cathedral are named.
- Thread #9 — Crossing for what’s next — the largest single crossing in the contemporary archive: Qingdao → Palo Alto, the same shape as Johann Michael’s 1847 emigration at a different scale.
- Thread #10 — Building things (entrepreneurship) — co-founder of the Zhou & Eesley Family Foundation alongside Chuck.
Structured record: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Lijie Zhou (GMLV-Q8P).
Appears in
- Thailand — Similan Islands liveaboard, 2023 — essay
- Chuck and Lijie's annual charity bike rides — essay
- Family threads — the values and practices that run across the generations — essay
- The Qingdao Families — Zhou, Li, and Shang — essay
- Philippines liveaboard — December 2026 to January 2027 — essay
- Chuck and Lijie's scuba diving trips — essay
Pictured in