Life, Written Down

• Preface
• Childhood
• Transition
• UBC
• MIT
• Turbulence
• Tenacity
• Employment
• Entrenchment
• Retirement

Preface

It is 2016. I will write down the story of my life. From the roots of my grandparents in revolutionary China, to the emigration of my parents to Canada, to the struggle over wants rather than needs in my own life.

The first section, childhood, covers my initial ten years in the embrace of a large extended family in China. My grandparents grew up in the chaotic birth of a nation to provide physical and moral shelter for their children. My parents grew up in the post-revolutionary countryside, studying their way out and up to become university scholars and pursuing higher education all the way across the Pacific. I was born into this academic family and would be a campus brat from birth in China to adulthood in Canada.

The second section, youth-hood, covers the next fifteen years of my self-defining adventures in the free world. Within five years of landing in Vancouver, Canada, I would complete my primary education through an accelerated program and attend university at age fifteen. For the next five years, I would make what had been my parent's university campus completely my own, graduating a literal poster-child: with top marks, horizon-expanding internships in Japan and America, and academic research that opened the door to graduate studies at MIT. For the next two years, I would have my proverbial undergraduate experience as an under-aged graduate student: living in dorms, immersing in school life, and graduating with a prize for the arts. The subsequent job search would bring me across the country to an empowered position with Microsoft. I would quit Microsoft after only 18 months to return to Vancouver to pursue a career in acting. I would quit acting after only twelve months to dedicate myself to a career in finance.

The third section, adulthood, covers the next ten years as I attempt to gain lucrative employment. I was determined to stay with my parents and to build a career in finance. I would prepare with an iron will and a laser focus to break into an investment banking job after only nine months. I would enjoy quiet employment for three years before rebelling and quitting to work for a wealthy Chinese investor. This job would carry me forward for the next six years to the present. I would engage in a series of power struggles before earning an imperial purview of my domain and a very flexible schedule.

My familial foundation and stable employment have led to my present state of semi-retirement with room to breathe and a chance to reflect on my total experience.

Childhood

The first section, childhood, covers my initial ten years in the embrace of a large extended family in China. My grandparents grew up in the chaotic birth of a nation to provide physical and moral shelter for their children. My parents grew up in the post-revolutionary countryside, studying their way out and up to become university scholars and pursuing higher education all the way across the Pacific. I was born into this academic family and would be a campus brat from birth in China to adulthood in Canada.

Father

My paternal grandfather is from Dai Village, about 80 kilometres east of the city of Weifang in the northern province of Shandong. Dai Village is a rural community of about four hundred farming families who lived in mud houses with no electricity, stoves under the beds, and livestock roaming the yards. Grandfather could not read or write, but he was an intelligent, industrious, and virtuous polymath with his hands who developed sophisticated systems for beekeeping, egg-hatching, and carpentry. He was the only beekeeper in the entire Village and shared the fruits of his labour with others. The family was poor but well respected, as a result, his studious children were nominated by the Village to be the first ever to attend university with the chance to lift themselves out of rural poverty, and they all eventually did. Before my father embarked on a lifelong career in medical research, his high-school was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution for two years, a period during which he worked as a barefoot doctor in the Village clinic, while nearby, grandfather taught the visiting Red Guards the minutia of farm work. Late in life, long after their children had left the Village, my grandparents joined them in the cities, where they would live with the families of my uncles on a rotating basis in Weifang and Beijing. Today, Dai Village is still there, along with the mud house my grandfather built with his own hands and members of the extended Dai family tree who may recognise my father, but certainly not myself.

My father is the youngest of five children, who, along with three male cousins, make a generation of seven males. Because of the closeness of my grandfather and his brother's households, the male children of the two families were identified numerically by their combined seniority. My father's older brothers are my uncles three, five and six. My father is the youngest at number seven. Coincidentally, my father and his male siblings also went on to have seven male children, and they retained this system of enumeration. I am again the youngest and number seven in my cohort. Today, in an act of unconscious anachronism, my nephews here in Vancouver call me uncle seven and my father grandpa seven.

Mother

My maternal grandparents are from Laoting county of the city of Tangshan in the northern province of Hebei. They joined the Communist Party in their teens and witnessed the birth of the nation in 1949 with grandfather as a member of the People's Liberation Army. After the founding of the Republic my grandfather was assigned to join the Party's workforce in Beijing. Shortly thereafter, he volunteered for the most patriotic assignment he could get his hands on: to leave the burgeoning capital for the remote county of Yuxian in the mountainous outskirts of the province. After a day-long journey of 300 kilometres by bus and by foot, my grandparents arrived in Yuxian, where they would get married, have three children, and dedicate the prime of their lives to the rebuilding of the nation from this rustic abode for the next twenty-seven years. In the twilight of their careers, they would finally ask to be reassigned back home, where they would retire in the coastal city of Qinhuangdao near Tangshan. Today, here in Vancouver, grandmother still enjoys her Party pension deriving from a lifetime of uninterrupted service since she joined the workforce in pre-revolutionary 1947 at age fifteen.

My mother was born in Yuxian County five years after the founding of the Republic. A brilliant student and passionate leader, she served in the youth league of the Communist Party with an abandon that honoured the revolutionary sacrifices of her parents. Mother's high-school was also interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. At the time, my grandfather served as the Communist Party Secretary for a high-school in a neighbouring county, a position of relative authority that was targeted by the the anti-establishment fervour which gripped the entire country. Teenage Red Guards bound and frogmarched grandfather to be locked up at the school, where he would not get to see grandmother for an entire year. The family was ostracised and no one dared to help grandmother take care of my mother's younger brother, who was not allowed to begin attending high-school. So while grandmother continued to work, my eleven-year old uncle had to spend the entire year home alone, feeding himself by dipping unleavened bread in baking powder. My mother was fourteen and furious. Grandfather's status meant she was rejected from joining the Red Guards. Eventually, she forced her way in and marched with her compatriot teenagers 300 kilometres by foot to Tiananmen Square just in time for Chairman Mao's eighth and last greeting of the Red Guards.

Infancy

When normalcy resumed, my mother attended university in Tangshan. On a term away, she barely missed the historic earthquake that destroyed Tangshan and killed one quarter of its inhabitants. After graduating with honours, my mother was allowed to stay and work at the university for three years. She was then selected to pursued a two-year graduate program in Zunyi Prefecture of Guizhou province in southern China in a class of nine students. One of her classmates, the only other northerner in the program, her lab partner, and competitor for top marks in all exams, was my father, who had joined the program after finishing his undergraduate studies. All of my mother's classmates back home were eager to see who their sharp and fiery friend had finally settled for. Marriage soon followed. An unexpected pregnancy meant my mother would not return to Tangshan, but would instead join my father at his alma mater, Weifang Medical School, as members of the faculty.

I was born in Qinhuangdao and would spend my childhood shuttling between my maternal grandparents there and my parents in Weifang. Life as a baby began with my parents in Weifang. During the holidays, we would make an arduous ten-hour, 650 kilometres journey by local trains to visit Qinhuangdao. On one such winter journey, they put me under the seats of the standing-room only train, wrapped in multiple layers for fear of the cold. Upon arrival, they unwrapped me to find the diaper completely dry, apparently they had wrapped me too tightly and I had sweated it all out. Hence, it was decided that my parents were to focus on their academic work and I was left to spend my infancy with my grandparents, who now worked at the Qinhuangdao Water Utility School, a leafy campus on the water's edge a short walk from the loading cranes of the nearby coal port. We lived within the school grounds, in one of a row of mud houses with an enclosed square yard and a separate communal outhouse. With us were my mother's two younger brothers who would soon start their own families and produce cousins for me to play with, along with the cats and chickens that roamed our yard.

Elementary School

School age and the hukou system reunited me with my parents in Weifang for elementary school. We lived on the campus of Weifang Medical School, in a grey concrete four-floor walk-up apartment building just inside the school grounds. Our top-floor unit, one of four on the floor, was a one-bedroom with its own bathroom and a balcony facing towards the interior of the campus, looking down the main path in between a dozen other similar buildings. Our kitchen was across the hallway in a separate room that overlooked the busy road outside the walls of the campus below. The bare concrete staircase descended alongside the garbage chute to a dark cavernous lobby on the first floor filled with the bicycles of the inhabitants and a rickety front door that did not lock. Outside the building was a long flat storage building of red bricks and green metal doors. The rest of the large campus was filled with a monolithic administrative building, academic departments, dorms, and a dusty soccer field by the river that snaked along the edge of the campus where kites were flown and outdoor movies were shown. My parents taught courses, conducted research and hosted colleagues and students. I walked to attend the nearby elementary school: a box of concrete surrounded by a dirt field and farmland where the students took turns lighting the heating stoves in the winter.

On weekends, my father would carry mother and I on his bicycle and to visit the families of uncle five and uncle six. They were army veterans who established comfortable working class families in Weifang. Altogether, their families had four older cousins who took care of me just as my uncles took care of my parents. My paternal grandparents took turns staying with uncles five and six, but mostly they stayed with uncle three in Beijing as he was the oldest and had adult children. We only ever got one turn to have them stay with us. My parents put them up in the single bedroom and we moved into the living room. It must have been a rather short stay as all my uncles were fierce competitors for fulfilling their filial duties. Shamefully, my sharpest recollection of the stay was grandfather coughing in the morning and father wiping away the yellow sputum on the floor. Luckily, my parents did not shirk their duties. Being the youngest and the most educated, they helped family and friends with diagnoses, medicine, and hospital appointments. Most of their friends were medical school classmates, colleagues, or visiting scholars. The most popular visitors on campus were two young researchers from Canada who made up for their lack of ability to speak Chinese with enthusiasm for Chinese culture. The young women stayed in a first-floor unit of our apartment building and were warmly welcomed at a time when foreigners were a rare sight. Despite barely being able to communicate with each other, they became friends with my parents and would welcome us to Canada years later.

From very early on, I carried on my parent's academic track record and maintained near perfect scores on the two core subjects of Chinese and Math. It was a given that homework was done before anything else each and every school day. Elementary school and the university had coinciding semi-annual summer and winter holidays. These periods brought extensive homework assignments, but they were also a time of adventure. Almost every holiday, my parents and I would continue to make the pilgrimage to visit Qinhuangdao. Now I was old enough to get my own seat and would be invariably drawn to the large open windows of the green carriages, watching the rural landscape rush by and pointing out villages, farm animals, burial mounds, and onlookers stopped at the train crossings. By this time, my grandparents had been assigned their permanent residence inside the city in a first-floor two-bedroom apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen overlooking the large courtyard the row of apartment buildings shared with the Water Utility administrative building. Waking up late the day after the long train ride on a spring futon in the living room to the curious faces of my cousins would be the beginning of a long and very enjoyable vacation of playing, visiting family, and making trips to the nearby resort at the mouth of the Great Wall. The holiday homework would have been finished before the festivities, of course.

I am the youngest among cousins on my father's side of the family, uncle three is more than twenty years my father's senior and he had three adult sons who each already had a son, making me an uncle before I was ten years old. My set of four cousins from uncle five and six in Weifang were also half a dozen years older than me. So I was the baby in the extended family and was appropriately pampered by all. Things were even better in Qinhuangdao. My two closest cousins there, the son and daughter of my mother's younger brothers, were two and four years younger than me, a perfect difference in age for me to play ringleader all vacation long. My maternal grandmother also had an older sister with a large family in the city, including three aunts who all had children: more cousins to help keep my holidays fulfilled.

Emigration

Life continued apace, my parents as professors and medical researchers and I as a coddled child with no siblings but a bounty of cousins across two cities. My parents conducted research side by side in the same laboratory, just as they had done since graduate school in the south. My father's stellar scholarship brought him a chance to attend more post-graduate studies at the Capital Medical School in Beijing, a prestigious experience that gave him the chance to visit uncle three and his growing family in the capital. Their steady work ethic and continued achievement eventually made my parents the target of a jealous colleague who conspired to split them into different research labs to keep their careers in check. Grated by the petty politics of the small town campus and wanting to stretch his wings further, my father applied for research positions overseas. Despite never having officially studied English, he was surprised by two responses and an invitation by a Professor in Canada.

On the eve of my father's departure for Canada, we gathered at uncle six's apartment near the Weifang train station. As usual, uncle six had pulled strings with his old army pals at the local station so we could bypass the check-in and walk straight onto the platform later that night. I tried to stay awake staring at Robocop playing on TV late into the night as we waited for the red-eye sleeper to Beijing, where uncle three, my three adult cousins and my infant nephews waited to host us. In Beijing, we spent the day prior to the flight sight-seeing and traversing a Tianamen Square that was filled tents and demonstrating students. My father left on an Air Canada flight the next day and mother and I returned to Weifang by train. The day after, all subsequent flights were cancelled and the airport was shut down as the army moved in to clear the students. It was June fourth, 1989. Later, when my mother took the film of our Beijing trip to be developed, some of the photos were confiscated. We would never see our smiling faces among the tents of Tiananmen Square.

My mother joined my father in Vancouver two years later, again to work in the same research lab as the kind Professor extended an invitation for her to reunite with my father. It would be a year before they felt settled enough to bring me to Canada. So I spent the interim attending school in Qinhuangdao, in a temporary, hukou-busting setup arranged by my youngest aunt who taught at the elementary school. My academic track record kept pace under the disciplined watch of my grandparents, and I was made academic student representative in the class of seventy with the opportunity to help the teachers grade exams. For this I got to wear a badge of two horizontal red bars on my sleeve to go with the red handkerchief all students wore around their necks. I would never have the chance to get the three red bars for class president, as my own trip to the airport neared. It was a day I had long daydreamed about in school, that my parents would swoop into class to take me away on a grand adventure, going further than all the wonderful train rides of my life so far. My grandparents, for all their Communist Party history, were happy to see my parents try to build a life in Canada, which my grandfather jokingly translated phonetically as "a country too big too be picked up by hand or by chopsticks". The day finally came in the spring of 1992 and I embarked on the twelve-hour flight in style after a flight attendant inconspicuously moved me into first class. At the Vancouver airport, customs confiscated the apples uncle three had packed and released me to my waiting parents. A colleague from my parent's research lab drove us home to the University of British Columbia, on the western shore of Canada, directly across the Pacific Ocean from Qinhuangdao, a place my parents would call home for the next twenty-five years, where they would dedicate the prime of their lives to building a new life for our reunited family.

The turmoil of Tiananmen Square led Canada to open her arms to Chinese refugees and skilled immigrant workers alike, and our family of three would become Canadian citizens. But that would take place a few years later. For now, the ten year old who didn't speak a word of English had more pressing things to deal with in his new life in Canada, such as the serious dearth of uncles, aunts, and cousins.

Transition

The second section, youth-hood, covers the next fifteen years of my self-defining adventures in the free world. Within five years of landing in Vancouver, Canada, I would complete my primary education through an accelerated program and attend university at age fifteen.

Campus Brat

In Canada, my parents and I would live on yet another university campus, that of the University of British Columbia, in a family-friendly rental community for graduate students. Acadia Park was a collection of row houses clustered into distinct neighbourhoods, entwined with stony paths, mingled with generous greenery, and spread out over a large corner of the leafy campus. Our home on Tennis Crescent was a townhouse that packed a living room, kitchen, and dining room on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second. I slept in the den inside my parent's bedroom and the second bedroom would be covertly and perpetually rented to Chinese graduate student couples. Our intimate backyard grew veggies year-round and its low-slung wooden fence opened onto a grassy knoll housing a sandy playground that was protected on the other side by an identical row of townhouses. Each neighbourhood in Acadia Park had a small parking lot for the residents, where we would eventually park a beat-up stick shift Toyota Tercel with a rusted door, but most of the cobblestone pathways weaving through the sleepy community restricted car access and were ideal for the many strollers and kids. The vast majority of the Acadia Park housing was reserved for married graduate students with children on a wait-list and rotating basis, so we would eventually move to three different units within the Park, but I didn't mind. Each and every single townhouse or condo had at least one school age child and Halloween was a shoulder-to-shoulder affair among the cobblestones as we fought over candy bits in homemade costumes toting plastic grocery bags and orange UNICEF coin boxes. Acadia Park was the most idyllic, safe, and exciting place possible for me to become a family with my parents again and for us to make Vancouver our home.

I joined school during March in the English As a Second Language (ESL) program at Emily Carr Elementary. On the first day, my father accompanied me on the 20-minute bus ride into the city, dropped me off in class, and was reprimanded for trying to help me move my desk. The teacher wanted me to be independent from the get-go, regardless of my language ability. We took the hint. From the next day, I would make the trip to school on my own by bus or by bicycle. On one early assignment, we were asked to describe what we ate for lunch. The teacher drew a big happy face next to where I described in Chinese that I had a sandwich, which phonetically sounded like the word three, so he thought I ate three sandwiches. By the next school-year that September, I was reassigned to a school closer to home, Bayview Elementary, for a full year of ESL in a class filled with new immigrants from all over the world but few from China. Having to converse in English in order to play with my classmates was a great thing, and I made cheerful progress, once being reprimanded by the elderly teacher for whistling as I walked down the hallway. The teacher was as effective as she was strict and I graduated from ESL to join a regular class for the final year of elementary school. Switching for the third time, I finally enrolled in my neighbourhood school, University Hill Elementary, only a short bike ride from home. The pedestrian commute made me exceedingly familiar with the university campus and I would fall in with a pack of Chinese immigrant kids and as we made every corner of Acadia Park our private playground.

We would roam the car-less cobblestone paths of Acadia Park by bike and roller-blade, jumping curbs and hurdling railings to hit up the playgrounds of the various neighbourhoods and daycares. For water and pee-breaks, we would invariably converge onto the Commons Block community centre that was the nexus of the Park. It had two rectangular fields with nothing but sparse lumpy grass surrounded by a low chain-link fence that even a preteen could boost themself over to collect an errant ball. The fields were for soccer and air-baseball, where scroungy tennis balls were caught with bare-hands or well-worn hand-me-downs and thrown over unmarked bases to count as an out. The nearby concrete basketball half-court with the perpetually barren hoop was for H-O-R-S-E and two-ball bump. The cobblestones and parking lots were for tennis-ball roller hockey. Commons Block was for everything else. When its gym and activity rooms were not formally employed with art classes, ping-pong tables, or movie nights, we filled them with extravagant hide-and-seek operations. Anywhere inside the building as well as the immediate porous perimeter was allowed. The games would begin with keeping quiet cover in the blue recycling bins, among the folding chairs tucked away under the stage of the gym, or lurking about a corner with good sight lines, and would invariably erupt into taunts and loud pursuit. The front desk was staffed by graduate students who kept a wary eye, so the running and hollering would dramatically turn into tight-lipped speed-walking when we came into view, but these house-rules quickly broke down when the staff went on breaks, were out of sight, or were less vigilant than usual. If there was too much heat, we would slink away to the cavernous men's bathroom, shut the lights, and play hide-and-seek tag in the pitch-black. The unfortunate "it" had to grope around for those ducking under the sink, riding the top of stall dividers, or standing dead-still next to the urinals. The silence would be punctuated by the deafening roar of a flushing toilet, strategically timed to mask the sounds of scampering for new hiding places. The goal was to shift undetected into a position that had already been canvased, as the odds of a careful reexamination was low, particularly around the urinals, since any thorough inspection required the inexact science of measuring space in the dark with outstretched hands. The game would crash to a a halt if an adult, god-forbid, came in, opening the door and flooding light over the still figures in the dark. Luckily, this annoyance was few and far in between and not too many awkward questions were asked as we would immediately attend to official bathroom business. When communication with adults became unavoidable, as the oldest and the one with the most ticklish sense of justice, I was usually self-designated to enter into verbal combat to protect our bathrooms, parking lots and tennis courts from wayward adults, cars, and couples on dates. Childhood at Acadia Park was rounded out playing board games at one of our houses or immersing in text-heavy Japanese video games, which quickly shaped my English to fluency.

Canadian Dream

My father had originally come to the University of British Columbia as a visiting scientist. Admiring his work ethic and hoping to keep him longer, the professor invited him to pursue a doctorate degree. Despite already having two masters degrees from China, my father began again as a graduate student at the tender age of 34. For the first year of his Canadian life he lived out of a basement rental suite, ate the cheapest food he could find, which were chicken necks by the pound, and worked evenings as a dishwasher. My mother soon joined him in Canada when the professor extended her a research position as well. Despite being mid-career academics in China, the professor could not anticipate that the husband-and-wife duo would happily work as lab assistants for a meagre $500 per month for years. The professor eventually prompted my mother to seek an acceptable paycheck elsewhere and she would be the first to enter the Canadian job market proper. She found a part-time position as a laboratory technician at the university-affiliated research complex at Vancouver General Hospital and for the first time in their adult lives, my parents began to work apart. As she waited for a full-time position to become available, my mother also studied at the Vancouver Community College to become a registered nursing assistant. Her graduation coincided with her laboratory position blossoming into full-time status, so the medical professor from China found herself embarking on two full-time Canadian technical careers at the same time. Her research technician position on university payroll was eligible for generous benefits and retirement pension and was her day-job, while her nursing assistant work involved being on-call for evenings and weekends shifts which others with more seniority did not want. Finding her a willing taker of even the most obnoxious time slots, the local hospitals would persistently call her in for 4-, 8-, and even 12-hour shifts that began at 7 pm or 11 pm or spanned weekends. For the next decade, my mother would alternate between work and sleep, seven days a week. My father would be on meal-preparation and pickup duty, and sometimes I would hide in the back seat of the car to surprise my mother when we picked her up at the end of her earlier shifts.

My father eventually graduated with his PhD. Upon receiving his cap and gown, he looked southwards to extend his ambitions. Like many friends and acquaintances who had immigrated from China, many saw Canada as a step along the path towards the American Dream and worked to get re-licensed as medical doctors south of the border. My father applied for and received an offer to work full-time as a research scientist at the National Institute of Health in North Carolina. At the time, my mother had finally acquired two stable jobs and I was about to graduate from elementary school, so she did not want to move again. They agreed that my father would try on the American career for size by himself and he took the flight south alone. He missed home quickly. In a foreshadowing of my own life to come, my father would give up his American career and come home before even receiving his first paycheck at the end of the month. The UBC professor quickly let him come back to his lab as a post-doctorate researcher, and my father would soon join my mother in the university research system and stay there for more than 20 years. My mother would eventually retire from the nursing assistant job while continuing to work as a researcher for almost 30 years. By the time my parents become eligible for retirement from UBC, they would have had devoted the majority of their working lives to these stable careers. Their work ethic and frugality would help our family become mortgage-free home-owners with permanent roots in Vancouver. Even as many left Canada for greener pastures down south, my parents stayed on to nurture an ever growing extended family in the realization of our collective Canadian dream.

Transition

I graduated from my neighbourhood elementary school, University Hill Elementary, to attend high-school at University Hill Secondary, which was even closer to home within Acadia Park. I had long roamed its soccer field and tennis courts and had even biked to the school for advanced math lessons during my year at U-hill Elementary. U-hill Secondary was just beginning to introduce a specialized program of accelerated education for gifted children. My extra-curricular math lessons were provided by this program and I was invited to apply to join it full-time. The IQ test and rigorous interview determined I was capable and interested in accelerated education and I was admitted to the Transition Program. Transition's outright goal was to provided gifted children a friendly environment of like-minded peers and the chance to finish five years of high-school in two years for early admission to UBC. The Program is sanctioned by UBC, run by the Vancouver school board at U-hill Secondary, and funded by the Provincial Ministry of Education. As such, only half the children admitted could be from the City of Vancouver, the other half had to be from other cities. Thus, some of my classmates had to endure two-hour daily commutes, while I could wake up at 7:50 am and be on time for the 8 am class across the street. The first year's cohort was made up of twenty children, which burn-out and a perceived lack of social life reduced down to nine boys for the second year. We would cover the core subjects of grades eight to ten in the first year and prepare for the university provincial exams of grades eleven and twelve in the second year. The program had a few dedicated teachers for some subjects, such as social studies with Mr. Cooper, while we took many classes mixed up with "regular" high-school students, though we would invariable spend lunchtimes among ourselves, eating while playing card games. In the first year, most of us managed to get A's, though Physical Education was difficult for many. It wasn't so bad for me as the main determinant of the grade was a timed "milk-run" around the forests of Acadia Park, which had been my stomping ground for years. For the second-year, English was the most difficult subject for me, though I managed to scrape by under the tutelage of a wonderfully strict grey-haired Mr Olsen, whose final mark for me, an A-, was identical to what I would receive on the standardized provincial exam. Our wonky math teacher, Maggie, squeezed in our French language requirement over a few frantic summer weeks. She did not like vacuum-packing our academic life this way and made us promise to pursue a well-rounded education down the road. Our eventual graduation was to some acclaim and made the local news as this group of geeky prepubescent boys attended graduation with the hulking grade twelves who were visibly more eager to embrace the freedoms of adulthood. The best gift of the Transition Program for me was a group of friends who would stick together more or less in each others' orbits for the rest of our lives.

UBC

For the next five years, I would make what had been my parent's university campus completely my own, graduating a literal poster-child: with top marks, horizon-expanding internships in Japan and America, and academic research that opened the door to graduate studies at MIT.

Freshman

After years of enjoying campus life with my parents, I would finally walk the malls of UBC as a fifteen year old university student. I was admitted on an academic scholarship that was automatically distributed to students with above average grades and joined another specialized program. Science One was a one-year interdisciplinary science camp for about seventy students. Unlike most first-years who faced large anonymous lecture halls of shifting classmates and professors, we had our own space, dedicated professors, and customized field trips. The group of future doctors and astrophysicists were eighteen-year-old valedictorians who accept me gracefully, but I was acutely aware of my age and did not make any lasting friends. I also found that my well-tested rote learning abilities could not help me keep up with difficult university-level English and real academic academic rigor. I barely managed an A- for the entire program, which handed out a single mixed assessment to encourage the development of curious scientific minds without the need for excessive worry about grades. My true ability was reflected in the Arts electives taken with the freshman populace at large, where I was punished with low Bs for first-year English and Philosophy. The summer after the end of Science One presented the first opportunity of my academic life to set my own schedule. I made two choices that would mould my experience for years to come. I enrolled in a Computer Science course and I joined a youth theater group outside of the university.

I earned a perfect 100% in the introductory Computer Science course. The subject matter, computer programming, was decidedly deterministic, free of abstract theory, natural language, and nuance. It was a perfect fit for the undergraduate me. I quickly declared Computer Science as my major and plunged into its academic tree, going deep down the branches to collect the easy credits towards graduation. During the summer after first-year, I also joined the Vancouver Youth Theatre, where a caring artistic director guided a disparate collection of youths from different high-schools across the city to stage an uplifting musical about teenage life. We socialized, rehearsed, and ultimately performed the piece in high-schools around the city. Here, unlike at UBC, I was among the oldest kids and I was eager to fit in. I pretended that I was two-years younger than I actually was and that I still attended U-Hill Secondary. After a year, I stepped out of the shadow of my lie and found a place among the group of outgoing and supportive Drama kids, a social circle of "normal" teenagers who accepted me for who I was. My inaugural theater experience beefed up the teenage social life I had skimmed on during Transition and performing with these close friends in front of high-school crowds gave me an outlet for my dramatic streak as well as a strong footing for finding myself. I brought the burgeoning sense of self-assurance with me back to my university life as I pushed to round out my emerging academic success.

In the Computer Science Department, I joined the Co-op program, which lengthened our undergraduate studies from four to five years by inserting three internships into our studies. This gave students a chance to experience working life and boosted our employment prospects after graduation. For me, it was an ideal way to grow up, fast. Applying for and finding the more prestigious internships was competitive, with real interviews by real companies. My first internship, at the end of second-year, was at a research lab in the Computer Science Department itself. For these four-months, I would earn a salary from the university, just like my parents. The E-GEMS Research lab, or Electronic Games for Education in Math and Sciences, developed educational games for children, and conducted research around these games. The lab was run by a fearsome Computer Science professor who also served as the powerful Dean of Science. Unbeknown to me at the time, she was the mother of a Transition classmate and she had chosen me for the position because she understood my background. So, for the entire working summer, life was not very different than it had been as a Computer Science student, I still rode my bike to the department everyday. But now I had a research lab to call home, where we would program during the day and listen to music and play computer games late into the night. We ended up programming parts of a suite of math games in the high-level computer language of Java, but we did not yet do much research. Over the next few years, E-GEMS would become my lair within the university as I would return during my studies to essentially run the lab with my undergraduate compatriots. Around the same time, my Transition Program friends had gathered around and taken over the Math Club, where they socialized and played games. I was the only one among us who was the proud owner of a real academic research lab itself, and my friends would often end up here for naps, video games, or just to hangout between classes.

Family

By this time, my parents had saved enough money for down-payment on a starter home and began looking around Vancouver. They recognized that I would be spending at least the next five years at UBC, and settled on a townhouse on campus itself. At the time, UBC was beginning to tap into its abundant land for commercial development. My parents purchased a unit in the first such development at Hampton Place, which was technically a 99-year leasehold since UBC could not outright sell its provincially-endowed land. Hampton Place was literally on edge of Acadia Park and was still a short bike ride or roller-blade trip to the Computer Science Department. Our immigrant family has never felt more at home in Canada among the now exceedingly familiar environs as first-time home-owners. Around the same time, my parents began assisting interested members of our extended family in China come to Canada. They found research positions in the university system for two of my older cousins who were students of medicine and housed them in our living room. It was clear our family was growing ever deeper roots in Vancouver, but for the most part, I was oblivious. I did not go to open houses with my parents, and did not even set eyes on the Hampton Place townhouse until my parents had bought the place and moved all the furniture, so all I had to do was to show up one day and sleep there. My father saw driving as an important life-skill, however, and, at his insistence, he taught me how to drive at the earliest legally-allowed age of sixteen. But we only had one car and he still needed to pick up my mother from her hospital shifts, so my father continued to chauffeur me to East Vancouver for theater rehearsals, a thankless job among many others he performed for his family without complaint.

My days were packed with university, theater, and research at E-GEMS. Weekends melted into the week as I found myself in the Computer Science department everyday, heading home for food, showers, and sleep only late at night. It was a schedule I could pull off only with the sustained support of my parents, who chose to live on campus, washed my clothes, and bagged my lunches. Invariably my cold sandwiches would become soggy from the tomato slices and often remained uneaten as I joined friends for fast-food at the university village. My parents would not know whether I would be home for dinner on any given day and would leave my portion in the kitchen in case I showed up hungry after they had already gone to bed. At the beginning of every term, my father would help me find, photocopy, hole-punch, and bind the textbooks for each class so we could return the originals to the overpriced bookstore. Through the five years, I maintained the A average required to keep my academic scholarship, saving $12,000 in tuition every year. Living with my parents, eating their meals, and photocopying textbooks meant I did incur living expenses either. Additionally, I earned a salary from E-GEMS. I did not help my parents with their mortgage payments, but my undergraduate days were not a drain on family resources. We would live through these fruitful times heads-down and fulfilled with little time for contemplation, a blissful period built upon the solid foundation of our family ties.

Japan

When it was time to apply for my second internship during my third-year, I was bursting with confidence. I joined the Co-op Japan program, which matched companies in Japan with students seeking foreign work experience. I was accepted to the program and paired with a research job at Panasonic. I did not land the most prestigious positions with Sony in Tokyo which took a cohort of a dozen students each year. Instead, I was the only one to join Panasonic in Osaka, a traditional company in the secondary city. We were supposed to spend the month prior to departure living in a dorm with the fifty or so other Co-op Japan participants from all over Canada, learning Japanese and developing the social network we would rely on for the eight months of life overseas. But my theater group was performing at the time, so I ended up not spending a single night at the language camp. The organizers, in typical Japanese fashion, were too polite to reprimand me, and I was allowed to set sail with the rest of the group across the Pacific, to live on my own for the first time my life as an eighteen year-old with decidedly sub-par Japanese. My parents, eager for me to expand the life experience of a cloistered Transition graduate, gingerly let me go. Our entire cohort landed at Tokyo airport together, where the big-city students disembarked. A half dozen of us continued to Osaka by bullet train where we said our goodbyes. Alone, I headed for the Panasonic dormitories a few transfer stations away. Each room in the four-story building had space enough only for a bed and a desk, while each floor had a common bathroom, and the entire dormitory shared a communal bath and cafeteria-style kitchen on the main floor. Women were not allowed in the building under any circumstances, and friends were rarely allowed inside. I quickly discovered that my place of work was very, very far away. My daily commute of two-hours each way was an adventure in its own right, filled with excitement, loneliness, noise, and quiet. Because I made the trip alone and my command of the Japanese language was juvenile, there was no one I could talk to. My visual and aural senses were heightened as a result, and, in order to cope, I either took everything in or shut everything out. It was a draining journey and I would end each day famished and exhausted. But the sights, smells, sounds, and occasional points of social contact that highlighted these trips seared the impression of Japanese landscape and society forever into my memory. For this Chinese-Canadian foreigner, anime scenes of the dinging of urban train crossings and the buzzing of cicadas along country rice fields would invariably elicit fond nostalgia for Japan.

I departed the dormitory in the urban city of Moriguchi each morning to embark on the twenty-minute walk to the local train station. Later on, I acquired a commuter bicycle with curved handles, a flat backseat, and a kickstand that I rode and parked at the permanently crowded bike storage area under the station platform. Once, I left the bike in a pedestrian walkway where it disappeared upon my return. In the age before smart phones and search engines, I was somehow able to use rudimentary Japanese to determine that it was confiscated by the police for improper parking and to retrieve it. At Moriguchi station, I would take an urban train that joined the Osaka loop line at a large transfer station. Kyobashi, like most substantial train stations in Japan, was a metropolis wrapped around invisible train tracks, with tall office buildings striding an expanse of low-rise department stores, specialty shops, and an infinite array of restaurants. The complex was filled to the brim with commuters, students, and street performers. In the dense urban core where space was at a premium and trains were packed like sardine cans, everyone managed to carry on with a deeply ingrained culture of social grace. The platforms had uniformed workers who wore white gloves while performing the unenviable task of shoving passengers tightly into the trains so that the doors could close. Simply walking through the labyrinthine network of escalators and incandescent walkways through unending crowds took undivided attention for an outsider like myself. Yet in this anonymous rush of faces, it was readily apparent that everyone maintained discreet expressions of individuality. Office workers in stuffy suits would have the latest thousand-page manga serial tucked under their arm while students in pristine school uniforms would be huddled together with headphones connected to minidisc players in their pockets. Street performers everywhere left no space unused and honed their craft in public. Japan was a wonderful mix of rigid cultural norms and the bubbling energy of self expression. Everyone carried the same type of outsized brick-like flip phones made by the same Japanese companies, but each would be adorned with an individualized keychain, and the music on the universal minidisc players were almost certainly chosen with care. City life in Japan was very expensive, but all the money spent on personal goods improved the quality of life within the limited personal space available and were shown off in public with pride. The loneliness amidst the noise led to my assertion of my identity as well, though I did not successfully manage the Japaneese boundary between social decorum and acceptable flair. I filled my time on the trains by drawing in a sketchbook and listening to a few albums on repeat on my own Toshiba minidisc player. To the dismay of fellow passengers, I would sometimes draw them, a pose here, a gesture there, while sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the end, I would carry home some of my own prized possessions: a bum-washing toilet seat cover, a wooden katana sword, and a sketchbook filled with doodles and favourite pages ripped from mangas. My well-worn minidisc collection had grown to a dozen albums of music introduced to me while in Japan: Mr. Children, The Lion King, Michael Jackson, Dream Theater, Santana, Wang Faye, and the Cranberries. These were the soundtracks of my life for hours each day, instilling lasting effect. I would regret not being able to bring home a Japanese cell phone, either the familiar brick or a newer curved chocolate-bar one, because their interfaces were in Japanese and they did not work in Canada.

My place of work was the Panasonic Research Laboratory on the border of the vast Osaka Prefecture. At Kyobashi station, I transferred to a commuter train that took me eastward into the countryside. The JR Rail trains all looked endearingly similar and were operated by gloved train conductors at the very front cabin who performed an elaborate system of hand signals to no one in particular, pointing upwards and then forward whenever they took the train through a crossing. The crowds would thin out as my hour-long ride rumbled through the cityscape and burst into rural Japan, where multi-layered fortress-like stations turned into simple concrete platforms with steps that melded into country roads. Everywhere was a sense of safety, serenity, and home. My destination in the middle of nowhere had a bus station which took me on another twenty-minute ride to a suburban science park where the major corporations all had similarly anonymous research buildings. Our sprawling Panasonic complex had half a dozen floors with neighboring sports fields and tennis courts. The work areas had open floor plans with cubicles except for management. My colleagues were mid-career research scientists who were friendly, polite, and dressed in company shirts. Each mid-morning at the exact same time, the overhead speakers would ring out a tune, cueing everyone to line up along the wall to sing the company song. I would stand mute with them and try to hide my amusement. Lunch was a delicious social affair in the company cafeteria. Everyone was amiable but I had no way to carry on a deep conversation even though most of the research was written up in English. As a foreigner intern, I was given wide latitude for my increasing sloppiness, with a penchant for lateness, unruly hair, casual dress, and a habit of catching up on sleep in the bathroom or exercise studio. At the end of the day I embarked on the long trip home through the clutch of increasing crowds and the tantalizing smell of barbecued meat on my weary trod back to the dormitory. On such lonely trips, even the familiar sight of a malnourished dog at a house near Moriguchi station was a welcome relief. Back at the dormitory, I would eat unagi donburi at the cafeteria and make small talk with the motherly lunch ladies who I would stay in touch with by letter for a year after returning to Canada. When the urge struck me, I would stop by the local supermarket on the way home to make spaghetti with tomato paste and mushrooms on a hot plate in the cafeteria. I did not know how to cook meat, and the lunch ladies often took pity at my elaborate efforts by giving me free boiling-hot miso soup. I spent evenings doing things I never had time for at home, such as reading the new Harry Potter books, washing my clothes, or trying to figure out a way to clean my sneakers, which were filthy from the long summer treks. Or, I would pick up discarded manga from the piles that accumulated next to the dorm trash cans and try to copy what I liked in the sketchbook that never left my side. I did not have any friends until two other foreign students began their internships at the research lab. Unbelievably, they were also housed in the same dormitory as myself two hours away from work. It would turn out that Panasonic had a major manufacturing plant in Moriguchi which we would eventually get to tour, and the dormitory was situated close to the plant as most inhabitants worked there. The new interns would join me on the wayward commute and we would become fast friends. One was wizened graduate student from the top engineering school in India who was a strict vegetarian. We would enjoy the challenge of trying to find food fit for a vegan in the Japanese culinary landscape together, and he often had to settle for picking out unsoiled noodles out of delicious yakisoba. He introduced me to the sublime instrumental music of Santana and Dream Theater. The other intern was a Brazilian student from MIT who was born to a Japanese mother. As we traveled together, strangers would invariably address the group by speaking to me, only to have the foreign-looking Brazilian answer in flawless Japanese. My social life expanded with new friends. A group of longer-tenured dormitory residents were English-speaking manufacturing interns from Singapore with decent Japanese and local friends. I would join them on the hour-long bike-ride into Osaka proper to enjoy desserts at cafes or to hang out with their friends, a group of Japanese students who DJ'ed on the side. It was an eclectic circle that I could never have found on my own and I was grateful. Once, I hosted a theater friend from Vancouver who illicitly stayed in the dorm with me. It was fun to show off a Canadian white kid to the Japanese DJ group and vice-versa. We even made the trip out to Tokyo and spent hours at dusk looking for a cheap place to stay, only to experience capsule hotels where beds were literally stacked coffins. Once in a while, the Co-op Japan students from Canada got together for more far-flung trips across the country. As the trains went everywhere, travel was easy through an endless set of connections. On one such trip, we tried to spend the night at a remote hostel in the countryside and walked past countless rice paddies far from our last tiny train station. As darkness fell and fear began to set in that we were in the middle of nowhere chasing a dot on the map, a distinctly Japanese hostel magically materialized in front of our eyes as we crested a wooded hillside. My stay in Japan brought me to some well-known destinations like the Kyoto shrines, the Hiroshima atomic memorial, and The Lion King musical from the literal worst seat in the house. Surprisingly, it was the regular travel through typical Japanese landscape that would remain the most enchantingly ingrained in my memory.

My entire internship felt like a paid-for summer camp whose sole purpose was to give me independent life experience overseas. For actual research, I worked alone on a project of my own choosing, with the only deliverable at the end of the eight months being a demonstration of what I had done. Inline with the general research taking place at the lab, I pursued the study of a language-independent speaker verification system. I searched for and consumed relevant reading materials on digital signal processing and Hidden Markov Models which would be needed in order to analyze and store the distinct characteristics of a person's voice. I had difficulty with the advanced mathematics involved but managed to follow the gist of the theory and mashed together components that others had published elsewhere in order to create a workable demo. In the end, I presented the system to the managers and we tested it out live. A couple of my colleagues first trained their voice on the system by reading some prepared text and having the computer build a database of their vocal characteristics. They then tested the system by speaking freely in either Japanese or English and having it try to identify the speaker among the participants. To my surprise, the system worked for the small group and the couple of trials we performed. It was nice to see the higher-ups somewhat pleased that the dishevelled foreign intern with no respect for the dress code had conducted a little bit of real research with his time, or maybe they were just secretly glad that my tenure was at an end. By then, my nerves were frayed by the daily bombardment of noise among the crowds and I was thoroughly ready to head home. My mother's first reaction upon seeing me was remarking on how thin I had gotten, and my own response was overwhelming relief that I would never have to do my own laundry or clean my own sneakers again. At eighteen years of age, I had gotten my first taste of life as an independent adult-child in a fantastic foreign country, albeit in a protected environment, sheltered by a modern society that afforded much social status to English-speaking foreigners. Now at home with practiced self-exhibitionism, I was ready to take on the rustic world of UBC.

Academia

Back at the university, I donned what would become an iconic pair of orange sweatpants, clipped orange shades onto my glasses, and ran in the election to become the Computer Science representative in the Science Undergraduate Society, winning with a total of three dozen votes. With this, I earned the privilege of attending council meetings and peeking into the inner workings of the Computer Science faculty. I continued to excel in coursework and rejoined E-GEMS at the same time to make use of the more advanced computer programming concepts we were learning. We decided to redesign and rebuild from scratch one of the games using C++, a much more complex computer language than the entry-level Java we had previously used. PrimeClimb was a collaborative math game for two elementary-school-aged players. Each player controlled a digital avatar sitting at the bottom of a mountain of tiles containing numbers. The two players had to climb to the top by traversing a sequence of numbers while avoiding ones with shared common factors to the number their partner was sitting on. The point of the game was to encourage the children to talk about math and to cooperate on their climb, as their fates were literally tied together. If one player moved to a number that shared a common factor with that of their partner, the avatar would slip, fall, and dangle by a rope that tied them together, leading to squeals of delight as the child tried to claw back onto a safe number. I worked on the game state and the networking components of the game, and managed to use the project to fulfill lab credits for the advanced computer networking class. We finished the months-long project with dedication and finesse and used it to conduct real academic research. We took the game to Vancouver elementary schools and video-taped the sessions, we then analyzed the interactions of the children and wrote papers on how the different elements of the game were used to encourage their collaboration in the mathematical context. Surprisingly, our papers were accepted to conferences focusing on the burgeoning field of human-computer interactions. I talked the head of the Computer Science department into funding our attendance. And so, we went on these extravagant trips to exotic places such as Los Angeles and San Antonio. It turned out the Computer Science department was only too eager to support a passionate group of undergraduate students doing research, especially a group headed and guided by the powerful Dean of Science. By this time, we were running the E-GEMS lab as much as the graduate students who leveraged our experiments to conduct their own research. With complete academic freedom, we read up on the relevant social science literature on collaborative learning and aimed higher and deeper, culminating in an Abstract published in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH, the cutting-edge computer graphics conference where rich corporate sponsors threw big parties for attendees. The best trip, and one I would only take in graduate school, would be to Bergen, Norway, where we continued to plug away at the research under a midnight sun while staying at a youth hostel on the Nordic coast.

Industry

For my final internship in my penultimate year, I was well-equipped to compete for the best on offer. I told a visiting Microsoft manager that it would be their company's loss if they did not hire me as an intern, and my reckless bravado and steadfast resume won them over. I landed a coveted role as a Program Manager Intern with their brand new Xbox video game division in Redmond, Washington: a top placement with the top employer of the day. Microsoft provided suburban corporate townhouses for the entire four months and the hundreds of summer interns were feted by Bill Gates at his lake-side estate. It took dozens of buses to bring us all to the compound, where we descended on a long indoor escalator down the gallery adorned with digital paintings towards the water's edge. Instead of joining the undulating human doughnut which enveloped Mr. Gates the entire afternoon, I took a leisure stroll along his private marina, watching people on passing boats peek at us. The interns had come from colleges from all over North America and my first American experience gave me an intimate view on what the best and brightest coveted and how they competed. My office mate was an older Harvard MBA on a business internship, he had dropped out of medical school to work for the management consulting firm McKinsey and was using Harvard to transition to a career in finance. My regular hangout crew included a young college student working at Microsoft Research who was apparently paid by Microsoft simply to read the endless supply of thick mathematics textbooks cradled under his arms. The lanky geek from Princeton liked to try to learn how to skateboard along the river trail after work, and he would go on to be a tenured professor at Harvard before the age of thirty. Another streetwise student had a chip on his shoulder for having come from a state college and not being well off. He set about surpassing the privileged Ivy League interns and taught me how our performance reviews would dictate our career potential at Microsoft. He would go on to earn a ridiculous LSAT score and gain entry into Harvard Law. Rather than mindlessly borrowing the tuition and attending Harvard, he would use his acceptance letter to barter for an investment banking job with Goldman Sachs, launching a lucrative Wall Street career. In the summer of Microsoft, most of us set out to compete for the elusive out-perform performance reviews. We worked days and nights, our productivity disintegrating after dinner into coffee runs and unencumbered sightseeing tours through the now-vacant office buildings of the vast corporate campus, each with kitchens stocked full of free caffeinated drinks and carelessly accessible with our blue employee badges. Our escapades through the senior executive building brought us face-to-face with the only security guard we ever saw, leading us to speculate that the hallways around Mr. Gates must have had carpet sensors. To my fellow interns who worked on the unglamorous but powerful teams like Microsoft Windows or Office, I showed off prototypes of the unreleased console, games in development, and the Xbox buildings, highlighting the empty office of the Russian full-timer who invented but did not profit from the classic video game Tetris. To my friends who visited from Vancouver, I showed off the entire campus, its caches of free drinks, and the city of Seattle. I worked on the first basketball Xbox game as a Program Manager, an amorphous project management role coordinating the design and development of software by artists and programmers. I helped the full-time Program Manager organize usability tests with play-testers and planned non-gameplay camera sequences to simulate real basketball games. My internship ended before the console or my game officially launched, but I would earn a decent performance review and was able to credit the first big-name experience to my resume. I had seen first hand the enticing corporate wonders of free-flowing soda and the chance to work on products that millions of people would use. More importantly, I had seen that these were the types of lucrative careers smart American college students craved, and I believed I could compete with them for the best.

Graduation

Returning to UBC for my final year, I was convinced I could do anything, and I did. I took introductory courses in everything from Economics, Music Theory, Acting, Art History, and Studio Fine Arts, and I aced them all. The only blemish on my academic record was my lowest mark of 72% earned in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry during my second year. These courses were prerequisites for medical school and I had taken them to keep my options open. The courses were amongst the largest at UBC, filling a lecture hall with almost 500 students. Competition among the med-school wannabes was so strong that some would take multiple copies of class handouts so others would not get them. Growing up in China with medical professors, I had spent many afternoons waiting for my parents while they dissected shrieking animals in terrifying laboratories filled with formaldehyde-laden jars of giant exotic human parasites. My parents were naturals, happily skewing small rabbits for research and then taking them home for meals, but I passed on even the simple high-school biology class dissections, leaving the dead frogs untouched as I guessed the answers of what I would have found inside. I would never seriously consider a medical career again. In my final year, I discovered my liberal arts self. It was during a yoga session in acting class that we learned of the news of the Twin Towers falling in New York on September 11, 2011. This class led to a role in an off-campus student production where I finally got my first experience performing for a mature audience. I had finally become comfortable among my university-aged peers. I especially enjoyed Art History, where the hippy professor used the study of impressionist paintings to teach us about the social context of their creation in a time of turmoil and revolution. At the behest of the head of the E-GEMS lab, who by now was my reliable mentor and powerful backer, I would apply to graduate schools that focused on the boundary between computing the social world at large. With her reference letter, I was accepted to the MIT Media Lab for a Masters degree, where I would continue to study human-computer interactions at one of the most well-known research labs in the world. It was the culmination of a stellar undergraduate career. A chance meeting during the end-of-term exhibit of my Studio Fine Arts class with the Dean of Student Life led to an article in the UBC newspaper's graduation issue highlighting my academic achievements and admission to MIT. My father's professor saw my picture on the cover and proudly dropped off a stack of two dozen copies of the newspaper on my father's desk. I had made my parent's university campus my own. Other accolades piled on, including a business group scholarship and a student leadership award from the Computer Science Department. It would be the pinnacle of my academic life and the glittering success hid the fact that my would-be scientific journey was at an end, not the beginning, as I was ill-equipped for sustained deep academic study in what was to be a political and "soft" research area. But for now it was a time of celebration, for the immigrant child had managed within ten years of landing in Canada of achieving entry to MIT. And these three glowing letters would hide much with their radiant halo.

MIT

For the next two years, I would have my proverbial undergraduate experience as an under-aged graduate student: living in dorms, immersing in school life, and graduating with a prize for the arts.

The Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab was the brainchild of an industry-minded professor who convinced the institute and the Department of Architecture to carve out a piece of MIT to allow corporations to fund cutting-edge computing research, in exchange for open access to the Lab and non-exclusive rights to the intellectual property produced. The Labbers needed constant ability to demonstrate their ideas and works-in-progress in hectic demo-days: open houses where executives and researchers from the corporate sponsors toured the premises and saw first-hand the goods their money helped to create. Journalists and celebrities often joined the fun for good measure. The Lab was extensively lauded in the media and was flush with cash, making it was one of the most financially generously corners of graduate research at MIT. We received a research stipend on top of our MIT tuition being fully paid for. I also applied for a Canadian federal scholarship for students studying overseas, resulting in two income streams to cover living expenses. My adventures in academia would again be a lucrative one. My mother, despite her frugal organic lifestyle of never eating out, suggested that buying food was never a waste, so I never thought twice about my bank account, so long as it was in the black, and I spent everything I made to enrich my student experience in Boston.

The Lab was essentially a collection of a dozen research groups, each headed by a professor working in disparate areas in the loosely defined field of human-computer interactions. The professors had sole discretion in admitting students, and I joined a group which used computational linguistics in the building of storytelling avatars to encourage language-development in children, a wonderful fit for my background in computer science and theater. The professor in charge knew my well-established UBC mentor, opening the way for my acceptance after I flew to Boston for the interview. My two other reference letters were from my computer networking professor, who was impressed with my independent work on PrimeClimb, and my Studio Fine Arts professor, who professed to exaggerating my artistic talents on the application when I gave him flowers in appreciation of my admittance. Each Media Lab group was run as an independent fiefdom with the professor firmly in control, so the Lab did not have a uniform graduate school experience. We had to support our own group's specific research mandate towards the development of a thesis, while completing a certain number of course credits for graduation. With the professor's guidance, the courses could be flexibly chosen from the Media Lab, MIT in general, and even nearby Harvard by cross registration. Harvard!

Living

I arrived by myself in Boston in June, one semester early, to get acclimated before the start of the September academic year. Unlike UBC's cobblestoned Acadia Park, MIT had various uninspired condominium buildings available as graduate student housing. As an alternative, there were independent living groups with more socially cohesive arrangements. I joined the hippie collective called pika. Years ago, pika had left the Hellenic fraternity system to become an independent co-ed group of about three dozen students sharing a mansion in the residential suburbs of Cambridge. At pika house, everyone lived two or three to a room and shared communal meals while taking turns with cooking and cleaning duties. The house was accessible by a free shuttle bus from campus that looped around Cambridge, but it was just as reachable by a long walk or brisk roller-blade trip. I shared a bunk-bed with an Economics exchange student from the other Cambridge in England. As a new student, communal living seemed an attractive way to get introduced to campus, but as my schedule filled up, I began to chafe at the shared space and house chores. I skipped most dinners and the weekly meetings, coming back late on the final shuttle bus to steam-wash dishes for thirty people which left me drenched in midnight sweat. My brief stay at pika gave me a short but intimate experience with MIT geekdom. Everything around the house, including the working fire-pole, was built by student residents over the years. Squatting in the grimy bathroom introduced me an endless supply of wrinkled Calvin and Hobbs comics and raiding the basement soda fridges led to the discovery of the house library where I spent a few memorable nights pouring through Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories. My room had a bare light-bulb that served as the reading light. One night, to dim the glaring light, I covered the bulb with my favourite white T-shirt emblazoned with the red logo of the student DJ group from Japan I had hung out with. The heat from the light-bulb quickly seared through the shirt, leaving it with a couple of conspicuous burnt holes which were rather cool looking and strategically located over my heart and my right shoulder blade. I would wear my long-sleeved blue UBC Science shirt under the burnt white T-shirt as my unique uniform for many of my days at MIT.

I applied for more conventional housing and found one with the perfect balance of historical inspiration and modern amenity. I spent the rest of my time in Ashdown House: a medieval castle in the heart of campus on the bank of the Charles River. It was an architectural landmark with stone walls and lofty spires sheltering dorm rooms across four floors. The first floor had over-sized common space for parties, laundry, and secret nooks for dark TV rooms and dusty libraries. There were key-card access, a front-desk, and no household chores. When my parents visited for graduation, I booked the visitor room so they got to stay at in the building for the full MIT experience. Ashdown, named for an old housemaster from decades ago, was much too central and cool for graduate students and would eventually be taken over by undergraduates years later. I began in a double room on the second floor that had nothing but a roommate, two beds, and two desks. But for the second year, we managed to secure an ornate suite on the first floor which housed four people in two bedrooms. Situated in the prominent corner spire of the building, it was endowed with a full kitchen and a spacious living room with a ten-foot wide round table that easily sat a dozen people. Upon moving in, we hand painted some modern art, strewn them across the walls and began to host weekly dinner parties. The head of the leadership of Ashdown was an Indian-American who had a brother at MIT also active in student government. A few months after he graciously assigned us the royal suite, news of his suicide shook the community, and his memorial service at the student center was the first I had ever attended. The undergraduate student body likened their studies at MIT to drinking from a fire-hose, as academic pressure combined with the pursuit of extracurricular experience in order to live college life to the fullest left many sleep deprived and a little unstable. This was the ivory tower where I would spend two years with a distinctly undergraduate flavored experience.

Ashdown House was on the west end of campus, immediately across Massachusetts Avenue from the majestic steps and towering stone columns leading to MIT's main Gothic structure, the infinite corridor, with its iconic domed roof at the central lobby and sprawling galleries bracketing a rectangular lawn where the annual graduations took place. The MIT Media Lab was a modern white rectangular building at the opposite end of the mile-long corridor, where other academic buildings congregated on east campus. Near Ashdown in the west were student housing, recreational buildings, and the student union building. I spent my days in classes and the time in between at the Media Lab. Lunch would be purchased from one of the many high-cholesterol food trucks that congregated in the parking lots, and for dinner, usually late in the evening when the crowds had dispersed, I would traverse the infinite on my very Canadian roller-blades to the student union building for a steak sub, chips, and caffeinated drinks. Roller-blades were such an uncommon sight that MIT did not even seem to have rules forbidding their use indoors, and silently gliding along the waxed surface of the infinite was a surreal experience. I found a well-lit corridor near the library where I would park my roller-blades, blast music from my Apple laptop's tinny speakers that reverberated down the empty gallery, and sit on the ground to do my homework. To let off steam, I enjoyed intramural ice hockey, tennis, and soccer. Or I would simply play roller hockey on the side street in front of Ashdown, aiming to hit the stop sign or its pole with a hard red ball, the loud bangs and pings much to the annoyance of passing cars and tired students walking back to their dorms. Most of all, I would spend my extracurricular time at MIT performing in Kresge Auditorium next door to Ashdown, as my theater pursuits expanded to take up a significant chunk of my calendar.

Theater

Within days of landing in Boston, checking into my research group at the Media Lab and getting my paperwork sorted out, I looked for student theater groups, landing a supporting role in the summer production of A Comedy of Errors by the Shakespeare Ensemble. Weeks later, we performed in Kresge Auditorium for a paying public audience, with a review of the play showing up in the campus daily The Tech. The experience introduced me to MIT theater and I would steadily expand my role in the community. My lingering Chinese accent did not stop me from tackling Shakespeare's difficult iambic pentameter with the Ensemble and Dramashop, as a moon-dancing Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night and as one of eight Hamlets in an adapted version of the classic text. My lack of dance training did not stop me from joining the Dance Theater Ensemble, enthusiastically making it up as I went along next to those with earnest background. And my lack of music training did not stop me from joining the musical She Loves Me, with a second act solo as Arpad that I somehow powered through. By the end, I played the leading role in the Dramashop's production of Leo Tolstoy's Power of Darkness and directed the Arabic fable, The Elephant, Your Majesty, produced by the Muslim Student Association, which we made an audience participation piece by situating it in the infinite corridor. From the early days, I continued my participation in student government and joined the Graduate Student Council. There, I was a part of the inaugural five-member Ring Committee which designed a class ring for MIT graduate students. It was an adult version of the classic Brass Rat, the undergraduate class ring, featuring the MIT mascot, the beaver, along with commemorative events of the year. We called it the Grad Rat and customized each ring based on the graduate's degree and department. The tradition of graduate student ring continues today, with a complete redesign once every five years as opposed to the annual updates of the Brass Rat. I also applied for a student life grant to buy a camera and began to dabble in making music videos. I made a video on graduate student life and submitted it to satisfy my grant, then I kept the camera and made videos of all the theater performances I was a part of. Theater was such a big part in my life that I even talked my way into auditing undergraduate acting classes. My favourite was a speech class, where I would fall in and out of sleep while doing the breathing exercises lying on the floor. I landed on the radar of the MIT Arts Council and was made a member of the MIT Arts Scholars, where my brushes with fame included meeting Michel Gondry the music video and filmmaker who came to MIT to research the science of sleep and having lunch with Margaret Atwood on her tour for Oryx and Crake. By the end, I knew all of the Theater professors and was nominated for a Convocation Student Art award, the Wiesner Prize, which I won for my body of work in theater, design, and video. It is an award typically reserved for undergraduate students who have more time to get into trouble, but I got it and would graduate once again with acclaim. The credits I gathered in the theater would ultimately eclipse the accomplishments of my day-job, that of the academic researcher.

Academia

The focus of my research group at the Media Lab was on using computational linguistics to create better software agents for interacting with children and promoting language development. The professor leading the group had a Linguistics rather than Computer Science background. So for my very first courses she recommended I cover some background with a Language Development in Children class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Computational Linguistics class at the Harvard Department of Computer Science. Harvard! Taking the subway to Harvard square and walking onto its historic campus to take a class was probably the biggest ego boost of my academic career, but the thrill as short-lived. I did so-so in the classes, not understanding the theory but scraping by with hard work, and I would never delve further into the deep subjects. Instead, I rounded out the rest of my academic calendar with softer Media Lab classes like Lifelong Kindergarten, Society and the Self, and Tangible Media, which were paper-reading affairs where A's where handed out by default and the real focus was on academic publishing. In this respect, I was already in the game with my papers published while at UBC and I quickly joined the research activity of my group. My colleagues ranged from undergraduate interns and one-year Masters students looking to get the letters and get out to greying PhD students bitter from half a decade of service with no thesis in sight. We conducted studies with our existing storytelling software in elementary schools around Cambridge, much as I had done at E-GEMS. The more interesting aspect was learning about my colleagues and seeing how they worked and lived. One undergrad intern was from a wealthy family in Hong Kong. He had been sent at an early age to boarding school in England and spoke with a heavy British accent. Though he was a member of a fraternity, he drove a Jeep and lived in a rented apartment with his sister, who was also an MIT student, and threw lavish parties there with beer-filled ice sculptures. He would graduate, get a Harvard MBA, and inherit the family business back in Hong Kong. Another masters student had attended MIT as an undergrad, and was now simultaneously tackling the Media Lab graduate degree and an MIT MBA degree. He would go on to a stellar career at Google before climbing high up the ranks of Facebook in Silicon Valley. The PhD students had on average spent over five-years under the professor's tutelage in an increasingly strained relationship. They thought the professor was selfish and did not groom them for their own academic success, instead, she milked them for research production and lived the high life of tenured faculty: staying in five-star hotels in Africa while ostensibly spending grant money to interview third-world children. It would seem that the exalted Academy had its fair share of power, privilege, and politics. I was infected by the group's long simmering sense of injustice and we confronted the professor to complain about her heavy-handed way of governing. She walked out of the meeting and no changes were made. Some members of the group were able to make up with her individually afterwards, but was among those who did not do so, and I quit from her group before having published a single paper with them. Perhaps it had long been in the works, but the professor shortly left MIT for a prestigious deanship at a different university, and I went on the search for a new permanent home within the Media Lab.

The professor who took me in was a computer scientist as well as an award-winning designer and who would eventually go on to head the Rhode Island School of Design. His group was more design workshop than publishing powerhouse, and all I had to do was support its creative efforts, show them off in demo days, and write a thesis. The experience was fun and friendly from beginning to end, though it would also surely mark the demise of my academic career since no paper writing was involved and most graduates of the group continued on to the creative fields. The students of the group were an artistic bunch who accepted me as one of their own as I began to make my mark in MIT theater. Early on, the professor took us on a bonding trip to New York's art museums. Grateful for having found such a supportive landing place, I worked hard and made the group's space my home. We finger painted murals and spent late nights preparing for demo days to make our professor look good. Appreciative of my efforts and my expanding credits in the MIT arts community, the professor sent me in his stead to attend a UNESCO conference in New Delhi, India, where I spent a week in the strange foreign land in workshops with media researchers from around the world at the United Nations funded event. At a time when the Internet was only beginning to take off, our group developed online tools for digital creation and collaboration. I helped built this networked creative studio and its tools for creating and editing pictures, sounds, and slideshows. My thesis was a keyword-based image search system based on this work and some ideas that floated around the Lab at the time. If one was to search for "oranges" and the system did not have any pictures tagged with such a word, then a common sense database analysis would reveal that "oranges" were "fruits" and so were "apples" so images tagged with the word "apple" would be retrieved. Never mind that one was looking for oranges. It was a mixed-bag of ideas and workable demonstration that was enough to garner a pass as a Masters thesis. Combined with my eclectic collection of Media Lab, Harvard, and undergraduate Theater courses, I had met the requirements of graduation with another A average. Not all the research at the MIT Media Lab were as soft and superficial as mine. Some of the graduate students were true geniuses and inventors, winning prizes for inventing devices to cheaply purify water in Africa while I was earning decent reviews for student theater productions. I had aspirations to tap the engineering spirit of MIT and to build a true scientist's skill set and thought hard about registering for a course at Harvard, Physics 123, which promised a laboratory setting for learning the basic toolkit of electronics engineering, but it did not ultimately fit my schedule.

Graduation

Graduation was eminent, and with it the end of my academic career. I did not have a solid track record to try to extend my studies to a doctorate degree and decided to compete for lucrative corporate employment in the dynamic campus recruiting which took place at MIT. I applied to all the prestigious names I had learned about during my internship at Microsoft: finance firms such as Goldman Sachs, management consulting firms such as McKinsey, and up-and-coming technology darlings such as Google. I did not get very far with any of them. Dissatisfied with the Google interviewer's subjective questioning, I emailed the founders of the then small company to complain when I was rejected and was ignored. In the end, with my thesis have been nominally associated with Internet search, I received an offer from Microsoft, to return as a full-time Program Manager in the MSN Search group that was building a copy-cat competitor to Google. The job offer came in an enticing package that read "Opportunity Knocks" on the front, revealing a $75,000 annual salary and generous benefits. After having treated MIT as an extended arts camp, the offer vindicated my experience and bolstered my sense of self worth. I accepted. I flew my parents to Boston for graduation week to tour the city and to attend graduation, taking them on an ocean themed day of whale-watching, watching Finding Nemo, and sushi dinner. Much as my end at UBC, it was a victory lap with my mind was at ease having secured my next position.

With my graduation from MIT and the addition of these three letters forever to my resume, I had been exposed to the best in the world. The best at studying, the best at achieving, and the best at competing. From far-and-wide, the students came to Boston, each with perfect grades as buy-in, and each with other interests they pursued with passion in addition to the crushing course load. There were the twenty-something professors, the concert pianists, the circus-performers, the army recruits, the Olympians, and the future politicians. It didn't matter what one did, as long as one strove to be the best at it at MIT, and by extension, the world. On the plus side, having seen a place such as MIT, I could claim to have seen it all, to know the fluff in the pudding and to be less fazed by fame. On the down side, the world-famous place, in conjunction with my theater training on unleashing impulse for dramatic performance gave voice to some of my worst traits of impatience and arrogance. I had performed academic suicide by burning bridges with the Professor in charge of my career. It was a reasonable decision that appealed to my strong sense of justice, but it was certainly not a well reasoned. Having committed this cardinal sin, I was able to salvage my Masters Degree from MIT, but it would be the end of my academic career as my distaste for academic politics overcame my desire for scientific discovery. This would only be the first of many more such emotional decisions and career ending resignations to come on the long road ahead as I grappled towards a finding fulfilling station in life.

Turbulence

The subsequent job search would bring me across the country to a lucrative position with Microsoft. I would quit Microsoft after only 18 months to return to Vancouver to pursue a career in acting. I would quit acting after only twelve months to dedicate myself to a career in finance.

Microsoft

I left MIT on a high, brimming with self assuredness, and confident that the next Microsoft chapter of my life would be just as fun and fulfilling. The way Microsoft treated me certainly helped reinforce my arrogance and belief in my destiny for great things. For my interview, I was flown to Redmond to face a gauntlet of employees throughout the day. Some asked traditional questions and a few asked brain teasers. I mustered enthusiasm from my theater training to conquer my nerves and to convince them that I was smart, ready, and excited to join the team. My lunchtime interviewer was more interested in her food than in talking, so I told her to enjoy her meal while I ignored mine and gave her a 15-minute monologue on why Microsoft and I were the perfect fit. By the time afternoon rolled around, I was scoring high marks, and the end of the day turned into a meet-and-greet with a higher-up whose job was to convince me of Microsoft's desirability. My acting skills helped me ace what was known to be a difficult day, where anyone could have vetoed my progress. I joined the brand new MSN Search team, a lavishly funded effort to use Microsoft's dominance in the internet browser and operating system markets to steal a piece of Google's fast growing search engine pie. I was once again in the role of a Program Manager focused on coordinating software development by analyzing market data and creating specifications to satisfy consumer demand. Microsoft spared no expense in going after Google, the search team quickly scaled up to a few hundred strong and we had access to third-party vendors to help us probe for Google's weaknesses. I did not work on the core search product, which was an engineering and mathematics exercise. Instead, I worked on consumer facing verticals and traveled to industry conferences to demonstrate our technology. I worked on features like instant answers for weather and movie time queries, as well as on the Chinese version of the page. For the China project, I got the chance to travel to Beijing to work with the large Microsoft research center there. The work wasn't glorious, it mainly involved creating a list of blocked keywords so that MSN Search stayed within the good graces of the Chinese censors, but the travel was. I flew first-class to Beijing and stayed at the five-star Hilton next door to Tiananmen Square, the same Square that was filled with tents as my father left for Canada. This time, I was returned as a highly paid short-term expat, and I eagerly invited my third uncle and his family to come visit for the view, spacious hot shower, and hotel trinkets. As a keen volunteer for travel, I also helped staff the MSN Search booths at industry shows in Las Vegas, Time Square, and London. When not holed up in five-star hotels around the world, my treatment at headquarters was no less privileged. Microsoft gathered a few dozen new graduate recruits out of the annual class of over 700 into a talented group and groomed us for success. We were treated to team building events, leadership training, and networking with senior executives and mentors. I even traveled back to MIT to attend recruiting events and helped interview new graduates, all expenses paid, of course. The Microsoft experience made me feel very valued and distorted my sense of corporate entitlement.

Home Ownership

By this time, my parents had upgraded from the UBC townhouse to a run-down 1920s house on the westside of Vancouver just outside the bounds of the university campus in the residential Dunbar neighborhood. The house was so old that it was priced only for its land and was basically sold as a an unlivable tear-down. But my parents would spend a decade living there, judiciously paying off the mortgage and fully renting out the basement all the while hosting my two cousins and my maternal grandmother whom they invited to visit Canada after my grandfather had passed away. I began to contribute some of my ludicrous earnings to help my parents with their mortgage, and they encouraged me to become a homeowner in Seattle, believing it to be another essential life-skill and a better bargain in the long run, assuming that I stayed at Microsoft for three years or more. So even before the corporate transition housing expired, we looked around and purchased a $250,000 bungalow in northern Redmond, near rural farmland. As a typical first-time home-owner and young person, I had a "vision" for the bungalow and would drag my parents through an epic effort to realize it. They would drive straight from work on Friday afternoons, lugging a car full of lumber, tiles, and building materials two hundred and fifty kilometers to Redmond, renovate non-stop, and then drive early Monday morning directly back to work in Vancouver. Even today, they still marvel at how they were allowed to cross the border with an open trunk full of heavy supplies weighing down the back of the second-hand Toyota Corolla, and reminisce about the three-hour drive along the mountainous route, often through blinding rain in the pitch dark. We did the entire renovation ourselves to save money. It helped that my father, being the son of a carpenter jack-of-all-trades, was extremely handy and could do anything. We gutted the kitchen and knocked down a non-weight bearing wall to open it up to the living room. We painstakingly scraped the popcorn ceiling to smooth it out. We tore out the shaggy carpet and installed laminate flooring on our knees. We added a second bathroom to the master bedroom so I could rent out the two spare bedrooms to help with the mortgage, a herculean effort that required my father to enter the rat-feces laden crawl space to add a split into the main drainage system. We added a large wooden deck in the rectangular yard. Finally, we repainted everything and put purple theatrical curtains around a projector in the living room. The whole project took months to complete, and the product was literally born out of the blood and sweat of my parents, who poured their hearts out for their son so that I could have a comfortable start to adult life. Little did we know at the time that my Microsoft experience would not bear out even two years.

Living

I spent my days in an office building on the Microsoft campus in the outskirts of Seattle. Microsoft had essentially built a city in rural Redmond, including over 50 corporate buildings and conference centers and even the highway exists. A fleet of free corporate shuttles ran around the clock to ferry people among the buildings. Lunch was deeply subsidized and snacks and drinks were completely free. Microsoft was a corporate behemoth, but still a tech company at heart, so I could carry on a very loose and casual dress code of sweatpants and t-shirts. Unlike smaller start-ups where work could overtake the rest of life, Microsoft was a bluechip that truly valued work-life balance for its professional employees, I worked hard but still had to decide how to spend an abundance of free time. I approached adult life with clinical methodicalness and made a check-list of things I ought to have been able to optimize and then forget about. Top of the list were health, nutrition, and personal finance. I borrowed a beauty products bible and flipped through its hundreds of pages to identify the highest rated organic moisturizer and hair products that I would stock enough to last a year. I learned a few easy dishes from my mother that I could make and brown-bag a week worth of lunches at a time. I read heavily into personal finance management, and learned about the casino nature of the stock market and the prudence of passive ETF investing. So I quickly arranged my corporate 401k and Roth IRA retirement portfolios to be passive buy-and-holds. The leadership training afforded me by Microsoft exposed me to the big ideas in corporate and personal time management. I dug deeper and read books like The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and put them to work, further shaving minutes off my day and gradually learning to say "no" to protect my schedule. All of these habits would serve me well into the future, and I would only get better at exercising a combination of impatience and prudence to reject superfluous commitment while becoming more tenacious in the objectives I chose to pursue and more attuned to the purposefulness of my days.

I spent some of my free time initially among a close-knit group of colleagues who were also new graduates. We were all in our twenties without families, so we would explore Seattle together, spending our large paycheques eating out in Chinatown and drinking bubble-tea at the University of Washington. Soon, I filled my calendar with my regular extracurricular pursuits, joining the local hockey leagues and broadening my theater experience. On my trips to China, I visited the electronics district to load up on boxes of pirated DVDs, eventually amassing hundreds of esoteric movies that I stealthily brought back to North America. On my week-long stay in London for a Search Engine conference, I put in the minimum hours required and then disappeared to the museums and the theaters, enjoying the day-of-performance standing tickets to the National Theater's Henry VIII and an adaptation of His Dark Materials. Back in Seattle, I enrolled in acting classes, scoured the local audition boards, and performed in a Chinese opera, a Christmas pantomime, and a student short film. I even got work as a model for a stock photo shoot. I volunteered at the Seattle International Film Festival, where I saw the North American release of what would become one of my favourite movies, the South Korean revenge film of Shakespearean scope, Oldboy. I also helped to chauffeur a Chinese director from the airport to the screening of his film, and used my by-now broken Chinese to translate his responses in the Q&A session afterward. Getting and staying busy was not an antidote for a creeping sense of loneliness. I became an MIT Educational Counselor, helped interview local high-school students for admission, and attended MIT events in the area, only to feel a growing gulf between my carefree university days and the barrenness of working life. So on the weekdays, I sought refuge in nostalgia where I could, buying the latest video games but finding that I could not enjoy them as much as I had as a child without a sense of wasting my time. On the weekends, I would organize visits by my Vancouver friends or I would make regular trips to visit them, making the arduous three-hour drive across the border to sleep in my parent's cozy attic and to enjoy their presence.

The one thing I could not escape from with life in Seattle were the highways. If life in Japan was an endless kaleidoscope of train stations, life in Seattle was always seen from behind the steering wheel of a car. My trips to hockey games easily took me on hundred-mile journeys to the north and south at night from one empty suburban arena to another. My rehearsals brought me from Redmond in the east to downtown Seattle in the west, through one of two floating bridges and the myriad of expressways that strangled the city. The worst were the long drives to Vancouver, an increasing necessity to make my corporate week seem worth while. The journeys were made bearable only with audiobooks of Harry Potter, Value Investing, or something else, anything else. If I was not distracted while driving, the driving would distract me. The interstate carried break-neck speeds that required constant alertness, and the myriad of clover-leafs and on-off ramps meant split second mistakes led to winding wastes of time through suburban no-where. It made Vancouver all the more endearing for having refused to let the scourge of freeways enter its city limits. But Seattle was not so, and it was an anxiety inducing part of each and everyday, much worse than than train-centric life of Japan, where one could at least periodically relax with closed eyes and some good music. I was pretty sure, probability-wise, that if my American tenure had not ended soon, my frequent road trips were going to end badly as I began to treat driving as a game to see how many cars I could pass to shave meaningless seconds off each trip. So I guess I could say that audiobooks saved me. That, and my increasing restlessness at Microsoft and Seattle.

Resignation

Unlike my internship at Microsoft, which by design was a short transition experience, my full-time job was supposed to be an end in itself and the start to my adult life. Despite the corporate perks, owning my house, and attempting to keep a busy schedule, something was amiss. I found that I did not have the mental fortitude and emotional stability to succeed at work. By the time I was ready to resign, I had been at Microsoft for barely a year and a half. I rationalized it in three main thrusts of narrative. First, I had lost, or I had never really possessed, passion for the work. I had convinced myself through the interviews that I wanted to bleed Microsoft like I had during my internship and to make an impact by creating products that millions of people used around the world, but my idealism faded in the face of even minor office bureaucracy. My superior treatment by Microsoft pumped my arrogance and sapped my resilience. I thought I was better than my colleagues and should have been promoted in short order. I could not withstand a slow and steady accumulation of work and life experience necessary for a meaningful career. I wanted instant gratification to match my ego and looked for visible trappings of success such as job titles and promotions, and when these were not forthcoming quickly enough, I became jaded at my circumstance and yearned for change. Secondly, my sense of justice was provoked by my status in America as I discovered that I was literally a second class citizen. My work permit at Microsoft was the H1-B visa for engineering professionals which bound me to a single employer, Microsoft, and forbade me from moonlighting at McDonalds or getting paid for acting. And if I wanted to become visa-free, I would have to earn a green card, a process which could only happen if I stayed with my current employer for upwards of a decade. The green card processing time was based on nation of birth, not nation of citizenship. Since I was born in China, my wait time would be many years, as compared to the quick process for natural-born Canadians. Differing treatment based on birth, for which one did not have a choice, rather than citizenship, for which one did have a choice, seemed to me to be the definition of discrimination, so I felt unwelcome and indignant. Finally, after numerous trips to family and friends in Vancouver through the spaghetti of highways to reach islands of sanity in a sea of road rage, I missed a sense of home that would buttress my life, and home was where my parents were.

I decided two things, that I would quit Microsoft to return to Vancouver to be with my parents, and that I would pursue acting full-time. I had found that times of crises and change were great conduits for soul-searching and lucidity, and this time was no exception. Returning home to Vancouver was a no-brainer, for what my experience in Japan and Seattle had taught me was that unless I was anchored to my parents, there was always an end of the road, no matter how enticing the adventure. Family was beginning to look a lot like the ends to my means, and if I were to have the resolve to build a solid career in anything, it would have to be upon the close and concrete foundation of my family. This period of transition also gave me the chance to give my dream of acting a real shot, either to make it, or to put my mind at ease forever. My parents had just dedicated months of their lives to making a bungalow in a foreign land livable for their son, who now wanted to give up an easy salary that was already more than theirs combined to come home to be a bum actor. Their friends were aghast and told them I was making a vain mistake, my friends thought it was a joke, but my parents were steadfast. They quickly saw the silver-lining that I would be coming home rather than setting roots afar, just like my father had done years ago, abandoning America after only a one-month trial. In these past few years, I had demonstrated to them an ability to go hard and deep into new experiences and this tenacity is what they hoped would carry me forward in life. They wished my search would end in happiness and they welcomed me back into their embrace. Once our decision was made, the act of resigning was effortless. Minutes after sending an email stating my intentions to my boss, with whom I had begun butting heads, I found that my access card had been cancelled and my personal goods boxed and left with my colleague, but I did not care. I worked to quickly unwind all ties to America. I cashed out my retirement plans, exported the recently imported Toyota Corolla, and cancelled my corporate American Express, but not before using the accrued credits to buy a Panasonic digital video camera. By this time, the US housing bubble was at its peak and our bungalow was worth almost $450,000 on paper. We listed it for this asking price, only to see the subprime mortgage crisis immediately explode and freeze the market. It would be two years of renting it out before markets thawed and we were finally able sell it for exactly what we bought it at: $250,000. So my parents' endless efforts in renovations resulted in no financial gain, but it was an extreme bonding experience and it would cement our family philosophy towards home ownership.

Over time, I came to see life as a exercise of elimination, of checking off the list of things I no longer wanted to do. My inner compass became better attuned to when something had crossed the invisible threshold to being a waste of my time. My resignation from my initial group at MIT was an emotional trigger that would lead to a series of quick-fire life experiments over the next few years. A turbulent period that would ultimately pay dividends as I crystalized my values and chose my own path. When I was younger, I recalled telling people that life in North America as compared to China was made difficult by the presence of too much freedom. Instead, if choice were taken out of the equation and I were to be assigned a station in life by Central Planning with no room for debate, such as that of an avocado farmer, I would certainly have become excellent at it. As my life and my many interests had borne out so far, it was apparent that I was not becoming the Einstein of avocado farming simply because I had too many other things I wanted to do.

Vancouver

I moved into the attic of the old Dunbar tear-down. My parents lived in one of the bedrooms on the main floor, and my maternal grandmother, who by now was my only surviving grandparent, lived in the other. She would immigrate to Canada and remain a permanent member of our family. My childhood was spent visiting her on all my holidays, and I had stayed with her for a year while my parents landed in Canada. I have nothing but fond childhood memories of the kindly old lady and being able to spend each and every day with her substantiated my decision to return home. A combined living area and small kitchen rounded out our main floor. The ground-level basement suite was continuously rented out as a mortgage helper. My father had applied his craftsmanship lovingly the 80-year old house, building the garage, a balcony, and an additional bedroom under the balcony. The neighbours were relieved the eyesore of the block that was decrepit from being a perpetual rental was finally presentable and somewhat homely with a fresh coat of yellow paint. The attic was reached by a precipitous spiral step-ladder tucked behind the cupboard. It was basically the dug-out roof of the house with exposed insulation and did not fit much beyond a mattress on scattered pieces of carpet. Even my small frame could only walk down the middle of the triangular space without banging my head on the sloped ceiling. The summers were unbearably hot as the sun seemed to burn straight through the plywood roof, while the winters were freezing as the insulation in the walls had long ago shrunken to uselessness. But we did not mind, it was our home and we treasured it. I filled the attic with my memorabilia, from Japan, MIT, Microsoft, and the hundreds of movie DVDs from China. I installed video game emulators on my laptop and used my open schedule to indulge in some childhood nostalgia. This time, in the comfortable confines of my parents' home, I found that I could really enjoy them. When inspiration struck, I even looked up recipes and made chai tea for the family. For breaks, I would rollerblade with a hockey stick to Lord Byng Secondary nearby, to hit a ball around in the tennis court. From consistent practice, I had gotten very good at juggling the hard red ball with my stick, and could even toss it high into the air and catch it with the flat side of the stick by cushioning its fall. On weekends, I would join my Transition and childhood friends for board games and poker. It was good to be home. In short order I set about living the dream.

The Dream

I approached the actor's life with well-practiced clinical methodicalness and was determined to live it as fully as possible. On the performance side, I continued to build my acting resume, getting professional headshots, finding agents, signing up for auditions boards, and showing up for any and all student, festival, community, and professional theater productions. I moved the purple curtains from the Seattle bungalow into the garage, set up my fancy Panasonic camera, rehearsed my audition pieces and taped my own demo reels. My resume began to expand with Vancouver credits. For an amateur play produced by a couple of idealistic twenty-something hippies, we rehearsed in their living room and a rented exercise room in sketchy Downtown Eastside, to finally perform for a few dozen people in a makeshift space at a coffee shop. I joined a theater festival showcasing local playwrights and played the lead in a short play as a mad young scientist who cracks the atom in order to get revenge on a high-school bully. For a UBC student festival, I played a statue of the philosopher Confucius come to life to preach to university students. While rehearsing for this role, I joined the feature film Night at the Museum as a background extra. The movie agent was looking for Chinese actors, and those willing to shave their heads would be paid an additional $6 per hour. I agreed to shave it, and wound up a member of a group of toy-sized pigtail wearing Chinese rice farmers tying down a giant Ben Stiller in a scene from Gulliver's Travels. I would use the shaved head for the UBC Confucius role, and won whispered plaudits from the audience for such dedication to a student production. As the performance was at the UBC Theater, my parents and grandmother even came to my performance. Once my hair grew back, I one-upped myself by going naked in an innocuous shower scene on stage in the baseball play Take Me Out, produced by a local gay group. This one was rehearsed at the director's hair salon in downtown, but at least the material was off Broadway, the other actors were respectable adults, and the performance was in a real theater. Naturally, I invited all my friends to view my craft before I made it big. By now, I had a solid repertoire of well-practiced audition pieces at my disposal. For a modern piece, I stuck with my madman scientist monologue, exuberant at discovering how to split the atom. For a more classical piece, I chose Madam Butterfly, about the cross-dressing Chinese spy who pretends to be a woman to seduce a British officer, it was as awkward as it sounds. I also had a Shakespeare piece, it might have been Hamlet, that I rehearsed to no end and became proficient, if not professional, at. I even delved deeply into one audition for a rap-artist role, studying up on the latest tunes and ending up with a decent Eminem impression and an appreciation for the lyrical craft.

In addition to auditioning, rehearsing, and performing, I filled the rest of my day with related activities. I was a regular volunteer at the Vancity Theatre, the host of the Vancouver International Film Festival, where I would sell popcorn before the films and join the audience in large red plush seats for the screenings. I also donated spare time to the Pacific Cinematheque, a film buff society that celebrated classic international films and no-name auteurs like Krzysztof Kieslowski. Vancouver had a reputation as Hollywood North, as tax incentives and a vibrant local industry supported year-round feature film and TV productions in the city. I worked to get closer to the action, signing up for a film acting class and watching with envy as a classmate landed a role in a TV commercial for a local tire company. The only roles I landed was a gig jumping around like a ninja for a TV commercial peddling Naruto toys and a supporting role in a student short film as another ninja, this time a gay one. I never got closer to a substantive part than that of the shaved-head Chinese rice farmer tying up a green-screened Ben Stiller. I networked my way to the production side of the business and got consistent calls for work as a Production Assistant on location at movie shoots around the city. For my very first shift, I worked a 15-hour day in the pouring rain in Queen Elizabeth park, standing outside and directing non-existent traffic, the closest I got to seeing how the sausage was made was eating with the extras at the frequent meals in the delicious food tents. After a few more similar stints at distant locales and awkward times, I spent one shift directing pedestrian traffic at West King Edward and Granville while squatting on the ground to hide from the blistering sun with a clownish winter tuque on my bald head. I don't think I looked very happy or professional, and I wasn't called back much after that. So I turned some of my attention to the theory of storytelling. As many filmmaking how-to books and filmmaker biographies attested, being in charge with my own script was the surest way into the director's chair for making a calling-card first film to jumpstart the Hollywood career.

Story Charts

I borrowed books widely and read deeply into how to write stories and I was particularly influenced by Robert McKee's book Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting. McKee put the narrative structure of movies under the microscope and illustrated how the different elements of a story interacted to produce meaning and elicit emotion. McKee's crisp analysis of the classic film, Casablanca, was very convincing, and the movie become another one of my all time favourites. McKee broke down Casablanca thusly. Casablanca took place in French-controlled Morocco during the Second World War, where the proprietor of a popular nightspot, Rick, had kept his business humming by staying neutral in the struggle between the resistance movement and the Nazi occupiers. Rick had once been a freedom fighter himself, but had given up that part of his life with a broken heart when the love of his live, Ilsa, abandoned him in their escape from Paris as the Nazis moved in. McKee teases apart the narrative into three interacting strands. The first plot is the struggle of the resistance movement, embodied by the attempt of the resistance leader, Victor Laslo, to escape from Casablanca to the new world. The second plot is the love story between Rick and Ilsa, as Ilsa shatters Rick's world when she shows up at his cafe with her husband, Victor Laslo. Rick had never known Ilsa was married. The third plot is Rick's patriotism, whether he would risk his own well-being to help the resistance again. McKee introduces the key idea of story values that represent the movement of these plots towards their ultimate irreversible success or failure. The plots progress through scenes containing turning points that shift story values positively or negatively. For example, Rick refusing to help Ilsa and her husband Victor was a turning point in all three plots concurrently, as Victor's chances of escape were lowered, Rick's chance to rekindle a relationship with Ilsa was dashed, and Rick flatly refused to join the cause. At the end of Casablanca, the turning points had escalated in scale and reached irreversible conclusions. Rick has permanently given up the chance to be with Ilsa (a failure in the love plot), in order to help Victor and Ilsa escape Casablanca (a success in the escape plot), while cementing his role in the resistance by shooting the Nazi officer giving chase (a success in the patriot plot). McKee pointed out that the resolution of the story illuminates its central idea, in this case, the idea that true love leads to living responsibly. The central idea of a story is a theory about a fundamental truth in human life. The story's setting and interlocking turning points are carefully chosen by the writer to prove this theory, and its successful execution would persuade the audience that given the circumstances and how convincingly it played out, yes indeed, love leads to living responsibly for Rick of Casablanca.

I began to use the McKee system of thought to analyze movies. I used Adobe Illustrator to graphically put turning points on a two-dimensional graph, grouping them into their respective plots and showing their upward and downward movement as time went on towards their ultimate resolution. I joined a screenwriter's workshop where we analysed scripts-in-progress, and I would include these graphical story value charts in my discussion of the strengths of the stories. I called them Story Charts. I thought they were a very visual way of dissecting the backbone of a story to illuminate its central idea, and even wrote up a proposal for McKee's publisher in New York to write a book about it. I dropped it off at the publisher's apartment building on a trip to New York, but she did not return my calls. The screenwriting workshop introduced me to a young local producer and his director friend, neither of whom had attended university, but both determined to make it in the movie business. We teamed up to work weekly at a coffee shop for a few months and I turned one of their ideas into a feature-length movie script. The director went on to be a finalist in a Hollywood reality show for aspiring professionals and would become a legitimate director, but our script would remain unmade and I would have long since moved onto other endeavours. However, Story Charts would remain with me as a tangible gem of my adventures in acting, a true melding of my science and theater experiences. I created a website for my Story Charts and consistently updated it throughout my adult life, deepening its content and sophistication. Today, Story Charts are a living memento of my dedication to the storytelling dream for this audience of one.

Actor's Equity

As my Vancouver experience expanded, I became much more selective in the roles I would accept. I landed a leading role in a musical produced by a suburban community center that had a brand new performance facility, but I rejected it because it was too far and the production refused to pay a salary. Instead, I focused on more professional opportunities. I applied to Masters of Fine Arts degrees far and wide, at Yale and Juilliard on America's east coast, and at London's LAMDA. This time, my auditions and the reference letters from my university days did not get me very far. While on a family trip to China, I even visited the Beijing Film Academy and a similar institution in Shanghai, dragging my father to tour the schools and to view student productions with me. In Vancouver, I focused primarily on equity roles, meaning roles that would make me eligible for membership in the professional actor's union, the Canadian Actor's Equity Association, which came with mandated salary levels and benefits. I did not gain entry into the regular seasons of Vancouver's established commercial theaters, but I did land a leading equity role with a non-for-profit youth theater organization. The gig was a touring production about hockey, where we would visit elementary schools all over the province to perform in their gymnasiums. It was to be a 200-show season and an epic adventure as a professional actor. The show was about a my journey as a young hockey player learning life lessons through sport. Our group of four actors and one stage manager would be an all-in-one cast and crew. The theater had built a wooden skeleton of an oval ice rink that could be torn apart and stuffed in a white van, along with our group of five. Every day, we would drive the van hundreds of kilometers to put on shows at two different schools. We rehearsed in Vancouver, at the cultural heartbeat of the city at Granville Island, and performed a dress rehearsal which my family attended in an outdoor basketball court to prepare our vocal cords for the cavernous school gyms. We began the tour in the comfort of the Greater Vancouver area, where we could go home at the end of the day. We were booked by public schools, private schools, religious schools, and independent schools. We even performed at the three elementary schools I had attended as a child. Everywhere we went we would setup our oval ice rink, put on our roller blades, and wait for the hundreds of curious children to pack the gym before trying to keep their attention for an hour with our little play. It was a blast. If I was ever shy before, I certainly wasn't anymore. As the tour wore on, we would leave Vancouver on week-long trips into the remote interior of the province, travelling as far north as the Alaskan border and as far east as the Rockies near Alberta. One especially memorable performance was at a rural community school that was a single mixed facility combining students from elementary and high schools. After the 800 children packed the seating in front of us, it was clear we were going to have a hard time keeping the attention of the older teenagers. The audience sat on tiered stadium seats with good sightlines, and it felt like we could see every one of them distinctly. At the beginning of the show, we had some hockey tricks with which to try to win the their attention, I would pick up a puck on my hockey stick, and like I had done so many times before at MIT and Dunbar, I would toss it into the air, trying to catch it on my stick as it fell. This was pretty difficult and the children knew it, as the flat puck would spin and I could only catch it by luck and skill if the face of the puck was cushioned by the fat part of my stick, a fairly rare occurrence. For this performance, the gym was open and airy and had extremely high ceilings, so I tossed the puck as hard as I could, with 800 pairs of eyes following its trajectory as it flew 30 feet up into the air before falling back to earth. I caught it. There was dead silence. It was a moment of magic that garnered their attention for the duration of the show, and that instant was to be the pinnacle of my acting career.

Resignation

The performance mixed theater with some real hockey, and parts of the blocking saw me being frequently body checked from behind by my castmate who was a solid head taller than me. To add theatrical flair, I exaggerated the impact by throwing my weight into the check. Over time, it turned out I was giving myself whiplash and I developed concussion-like symptoms of lightheadedness, nausea, and a slight unfocus of the eyes. I would spend some afternoons after performances holed up on the floor of our shared motel rooms, recuperating. To save money, I had brought all my meals from Vancouver, consisting of vacuum-packed udon noodles, ham, and veggies which I microwaved with water for all of my lunches and dinners. I would shower and eat my noodles to try to regain my footing, but the symptoms turned chronic. By now, the constant travel, tight quarters, and paltry pay had made me increasingly unhappy. I was living the life of a professional actor and it was not satisfactory. I got lippy with the stage manager who reported me to the director back in Vancouver. After being reprimanded, I felt isolated and my concussion symptoms ignored, so I gave the director my two-week notice. They hurriedly hired a replacement actor in the short time available and I quit from the tour after 99 schools. Shortly after I left, I heard the van slipped down a snowy highway and turned over, sending the group to the hospital with light injuries and effectively ending the tour. I came home to my parents as a card-carrying professional actor, completing the goal I had set out for myself when I returned to Vancouver from Microsoft. But the experience had been bittersweet. Through a bilateral agreement with the United States, I was now technically eligible for work down south, where the industry was deeper and roles more aplenty. I did a last ditch scan for equity roles in New York and Hollywood, thought hard about whether I would truly consider leaving home to continue living the dream, and gave up.

Again, once the decision was made, the execution was painless as I moved to ruthlessly sever all ties to life as an artist. I cashed out the $435 in my union retirement plan that had accrued over the 3-month tour and sold the Panasonic camera to a dreamer who had researched all of its specs just as I had, who couldn't believe the deal he was getting to jumpstart his Hollywood career. I closed all of my audition profiles, cleaned out the garage, and drew the curtains closed on my year-long experiment. I would never claim worker's compensation over my concussion symptoms, vague and ill-defined as they were real and chronic, but they would leave me with a frail head for the rest of my life. For years afterwards, even a slight, one-fingered tap on my head would immediately result in slight nausea for hours at a time. I had exercised extreme care ever since, as I would go on to pursue much more financially lucrative careers which would depend upon my intellect. Today I seem to be better, though even my toddler knows not to play with daddy's head. My parents were relieved that I was moving on from this chapter in my life, and I wonder if I would be as generous and understanding as they had been if my child ever caught the acting bug.

Tenacity

The third section, adulthood, covers the next ten years as I attempt to gain lucrative employment. I was determined to stay with my parents and to build a career in finance. I would prepare with an iron will and a laser focus to break into an investment banking job after only nine months.

Finance

Enough was enough with the acting dream, it was time to cash in what had once been a stellar resume for a real job. I immediately zoomed in on a career in finance. I had been exposed to investment banking lore through campus gossip at both Microsoft and MIT. It was suggested that for a young unattached person chasing monetary gratification, there was no better way to trade smarts and work-life balance for a fat paycheck and a fast-tracked path to senior management. Forget about the Silicon Valley ideals of changing the world through technology, I only wanted to be paid well for my time. Family would be the ends for my means and I would no longer look for higher-calling validation through my vocation. If the stars aligned, perhaps one day I would return to storytelling as a hobby, unencumbered by the need to making a living from it, and thereby able to enjoy the art for its own sake without the taint of commercial industry. I updated my resume, artificially extended my tenure at Microsoft to the present, and erased all traces of artistic aspiration. I downloaded books on investment banking careers and planned the ideal career path: a few years of grinding out all-nighters in investment banking, where the deal cycles were short and exposure wide and varied, to graduate to a few years of buy-side private equity, where investment cycles were longer and less time-intensive, finally to retire to a job in portfolio management, where taking a percentage cut of funds managed while guiding a mostly passive asset allocation to track the market was leisurely yet lucrative. My parents agreed that the long-term career prospects of finance were better than that of computer science. Here, one did not have to stare at a computer screen late into life and to constantly compete with new graduates by learning the latest programming languages. A career goal of ending up managing the endowment of some large entity like UBC seemed like a reasonable and comfortable target. My parents were mostly concerned about my long-term health, rather than my ability to making loads of money, and were happy simply with the fact that I was determined to stay in Vancouver with them.

Vancouver, as it turned out, was a very small watering hole for finance, so I began by submitting applications far and wide to gain practice with the notoriously difficult interviews. I used the MIT alumni job board and found interviews with finance-related firms across the United States in big markets with lots of opportunities. I attended a series of interviews with hedge funds in New York, driven around in a beat-up and lived-in sedan by a shady head hunter who would continue for years afterwards to try to land me a job in the big apple so he could get a cut. The interviews were brainy and analytical, and I did not make it very far with my rusty mathematics. Another interview for a management consulting job brought me to gleaming downtown Los Angeles, and yet another with a fund in Houston, Texas, where the portfolio manager chatted with me for fifteen minutes, sussing out whether I had insider tips while his eyes remained glued to a Bloomberg monitor. I was invited to a large interview event with the world's biggest hedge fund in rural Connecticut. I spent the night before in a roadside motel as remote and dumpy as the establishments I had stayed in during my acting tour. The next day I was driven to the corporate campus hidden deep in the woods, joined by a few hundred other young graduates, including some brandishing the MIT GradRat I had designed on their fingers. The firm was apparently famous for its confrontational culture that prized truth-seeking over collegiality. The interviews were group affairs where we had to fight for our turn to speak, and we were asked outrageous brainteasers such as designing world-denting products on the fly and defending the idea from endless critique. By the afternoon, I looked around at the rat race and decided to stay quiet for the rest of the day. There was no conceivable way I was going to uproot myself to try to set up life in this particular middle-of-nowhere, to be attacked on a daily basis with no family to fall back to. It did not matter how much the job paid. I had crossed off another item off my list of life. The overall interview experience in America reaffirmed my dedication to remain in Vancouver and to make a life around my family.

CFA

Up to this point, I had never taken a finance course in my life, beyond a long-forgotten introductory Economics class at UBC. It began to dawn on me that unlike my university days when the Department of Science was the most difficult to get into, modern students had clued into the political realities of capitalistic society and competed to get into the Department of Commerce, making a business degree the most sought after and inflating its entrance GPA to a lofty 90%. If I were a student today, my marks may not have earned me a spot on the roster for what seemed like an ephemeral degree that tried to teach life experience in a classroom setting. Nevertheless, these were the new graduates I would be compared to for the very few entry-level finance jobs in Vancouver. To be competitive, I began with the end goal in mind and worked backwards, identifying what a prestigious finance firm looked for in candidates. My Microsoft internship office mate had been a medical school graduate before leaping into a job at the prestigious management consulting firm McKinsey, so I knew such firms were not necessarily looking for an academic background in business. In fact, it was widely whispered that the only metrics they assessed were smarts and dedication. They were rumoured to particularly like science and engineering recruits because these backgrounds had quantitative rigor and the recruits were smart enough to be taught what finance they needed in speedy boot-camps. My background matched these requirements on paper, the only thing I needed to demonstrate was dedication to the financial industry, given my conspicuous short tenures in academia and industry. To do this, I signed up for the Chartered Financial Analyst program. The CFA charter is an industry certification meant to provide a common way to assess a standardized set of fundamental finance knowledge. The scope of the CFA program was extremely wide and deep, making it an arduous accreditation to earn and a solid testament for those who earn it. Many finance undergraduate students join the program in their senior year while their schooling was still fresh, to help them bridge academic theory to industry practice as they began the job search. For me, the CFA program was the chance to both learn the requisite body of knowledge and demonstrate my commitment to building a career in finance. For many like myself, seeking to make the early-career transition from afar to business, the CFA was essentially a cheap, difficult, self-studied MBA degree. It was not for the faint of heart. The program was composed of three levels, each culminating in a grueling six-hour exam with pass rates of around 50%. The second and third level exams were available in cities around the world on the same day only once a year, while the first level was available twice a year. One had to pass the levels in order, meaning it took a minimum of two-and-a-half years to pass all three levels, provided one passed each exam on the first try. The difficulty of the program was reflected in the failure rate of around 50% even for the third exam, meaning half of the practiced hands who had passed the the first two levels still failed the final hurdle, and would have to wait an entire year before trying again. Once I paid my $1,000 for the level 1 exam three months away, I received a package of six textbooks in the mail. The books stacked together were one foot tall and covered foreign sounding topics including Ethics, Financial Statement Analysis, Corporate Finance, Portfolio Management, Risk and Return Analysis, and Derivatives. My English ability had vastly improved in the intervening years since UBC, but the technical terminology mixed with the esoteric concepts pushed my exam-busting DNA to the maximum. Since I had chosen this pursuit with eyes wide open after crossing Microsoft and acting off my list of life, I dove in with maniacal zeal and made up for my lack of exposure and experience with resolute hard work. I wrote notes for each of the six books, condensed the notes into my own summaries of about a dozen pages, and crystallized the ideas of the entire curriculum of thousands of pages into a single hand-written page, filling both sides of the page with tiny writing and leaving no white space unused. The act of repetition and distillation helped me load the vast amount of material into my short term memory, I may not have understood the concepts as fluently or as deeply compared to commerce students, but my sheer pattern recognition ability and clinical question answering methodology made me an exam-writing machine, and the pass-or-fail mark was all that mattered here. In the month before the exam, I shifted my focus from material digestion to exam performance. I organized all the sample exams I could find and grouped them by subject area, practicing each one to gain maximum exposure to the types and distribution of questions. Then I saved a few complete six-hour exams packages and wrote them in simulated real world conditions of exam day, removing as much distraction and variability as I could, right down to choosing the clothes I would wear on exam day.

The day before go-time, I drove to the Pacific Colloquium, a sports stadium that was the site of the Vancouver test for its 1,200 candidates, to plan my route. On the big day, I brought a plastic bag with the only things allowed inside the stadium: government-issued photo ID, HB pencils, erasers, a standard-issue calculator with no memory capabilities, ear plugs, a watch, a bottle of water and no phones, wallets, or memory aids of any kind. Rows of tables and chairs were laid out in grids on the floor of the giant sports stadium, with a few feet separating each candidate in all directions, and aisles across the assembly for constant patrolling by serious-faced exam invigilators. After the exams were handed out, I put on my well-worn ear-plugs and plunged into the multiple choice questions. The questions were long and convoluted, often employing double negatives and had similarly precise choices for answers, but it was the pacing that was brutal. Though the exam was six-hours long, only about a minute-and-a-half could be allocated to each of the hundreds of questions. Every question required scribbling notes to work out the answer or eliminating choices towards a reasonable guess, and then carefully marking the choice on an answer sheet. The answer sheet was a form filled with rows and rows of tiny oval bubbles. Each answer had to be marked on the correct row, by using the pencil to completely fill in a round bubble. The minute-and-a-half had to also account for double- and triple-checking both the answer itself and that the correct bubble had been filled in, as time ticked by and vision began to blur from staring at the sea of tiny bubbles whose pattern of markings would determine one's ultimate fate. The answer sheet would be machine-read, and no marks were given for partial answers or scribbled works-in-progress. The exam was a vicious test of time-management, forcing one to triage questions by punting difficult ones to the end by immediately recognizing the subject area being tested and the type of work required to derive a sensible answer. The inevitable trip to the bathroom for the three-hour morning session had to be carefully planned as the walk from the stadium floor to the foyer was a good few hundred feet. It was best to go towards the end of the exam, after all the questions had been given the once-over, so one could recharge during the trip to come back to review the answers and tackle the difficult ones that had been left behind. But everyone wanted to go around that time and there were not enough invigilators to accommodate, so one had to also plan around the crowd. Once the morning three-hour session was over, we were let out for a ninety-minute break. I would ignore the lineups for people waiting to retrieve their superfluous jackets and backpacks, briskly walk to my car in silence, and eat my prepacked lunch of sandwich, fruit, and yogurt, the same meal I have had for all my practice exam trial runs. I would then take a 25 minute power nap to rest and recover before heading back to the line for getting back into the stadium. The afternoon was an identical three hours that strained the body and mind. After treating the exam with reverence and putting in over 700 hours of cumulative preparation in three months, I passed the level 1 exam with flying colors, scoring 75% or higher on all subject areas. Relieved and happy, I immediately signed up to repeat the ordeal six month later, for the level 2 exam taking place at the end of the year.

Toehold

I conducted my job search while studying for the CFA exam and applied the same cold clinical process of working backwards from my ultimate goal of a stable, lucrative finance job in Vancouver. The first point of contact between myself and employers was my resume. The objective here was one that would garner an interview, so I continuously refined mine in both form and content. I had saved what my old Microsoft office-mate had given me: a digital copy the resumes for his entire Harvard MBA class, all 250 of them. It was a treasured possession with a clear and concise format that I meticulously copied: a single double-spaced page highlighting education and experience with never more than three bullet points for each item. I carefully trimmed my resume, pruning superfluous words and highlighting distinct experiences by managing the negative white space such that a quick scan down the page would invite the eye to linger at the keywords that begged further study: "MIT", "Microsoft", "Japan". After copying the template of this gold standard for resumes, I filled it in with similar content to what had gotten its owners to Harvard: "CFA Level 1 Candidate", "4.0 GPA", "Leadership Award". All that was missing was an entry-level finance job that would make mine indistinguishable from theirs. For job leads, I scoured the internet for Greater Vancouver job boards, ranging from the general, to the institutional, to the highly specific. I bookmarked the dozens of pages and noted when I had last checked them, so that I would not miss a single relevant entry. The general pages had a large variety of mostly entry-level jobs that had nothing to do with finance. The institutional pages of the universities, municipalities, and banks were annoying to deal with as they each had convoluted forms that had to be manually filled out for each and every position. The highly specific pages, such as the job board of the local CFA society, were the real gems, with each being a highly relevant entry-level finance position, but these were few and far in between. Each year about 1,200 candidates wrote the CFA exams in Vancouver, yet the local society would have no more than two or three postings per month. I sought to increase my odds at gaining interviews by applying to any that had even a remote connection to finance. I calculated that out of about 50 submissions, I received a handful of responses for interviews, so I saw this as a numbers game and sought to turn the tables to my favor by widening the net and chasing all leads. I was very proud of my methodical approach to the job hunt, both in constructing my resume and in submitting hundreds of applications, so much so that I created a weblog called Greed Is Good, where I posted the library of links I had gathered. Later in time when I was well on my way to a finance career, I would credit my tenacious approach with my early success.

I landed my entry-level job before I even wrote the level 1 CFA exam, barely three months after I gave up acting. The opportunity was through a referral by a Transition Program classmate to the father of a friend of his. My exhaustive canvassing left me well attuned to the local job market and I knew this was exactly the type of job I was looking for. My constant practice helped me nail the interview. The gentleman I was referred to was the sole employee of the Vancouver-arm of a Hong Kong commercial real estate investment company. The company had a sizable presence in Hong Kong and China but owned only a single commercial building in downtown Vancouver. They were looking to expand their presence in Canada and I was to be paid $50,000 a year to help the manager perform due diligence on Canadian real estate for sale. Though the company was tiny, I knew from my research that I could spin the work I would be doing as solid financial analysis which would unlock my resume and make me very competitive for the more established finance firms in the city. The manager was a Chartered Accountant by training, he had become the trusted Vancouver consigliere to the family of the Hong Kong owners over decades of loyal service and friendship. Though he told me he was not paid outrageously, he had no supervisor and could come and go as he pleased, overseeing some of his own real estate investments on the side. We shared our small office on the top floor of the four-story building with a self-employed lawyer and the rest of the building was taken up by a restaurant and shops on the retail level and an English-language school on the lower floors. My boss hired building managers and custodians to maintain and operate the building, and did the day-to-day cash management and accounting by himself. He was extremely proud that the building was located on the Robson Strip: a few blocks of tourist-trap that was known to carry the highest per square foot retail rent in all of Canada. I put on a suit and tie and took the bus from Dunbar to downtown to begin my professional career in Vancouver, feeling the buzz of the crowd as I walked to and from the building my employer owned on the busiest retail street of Vancouver.

Before I began work and after I had passed the level 1 CFA exam, my parents and I vacationed in China. We made this trip once every two years or so, whenever the opportunity presented itself to visit our large extended family. On this particular trip, I was invited to see some of the projects my new employer in Shanghai. There, I met the eldest son of the Hong Kong family, essentially the boss of my boss. He was younger than my manager yet treated both of us with great respect whenever he visited Vancouver. He had a degree in architecture and boasted that he carried around five hard drives of the sketches for all the projects he had been involved in. He said he was a Director on the Board of the HSBC Bank of China and was very serious about good corporate governance, even though his company was family-owned. He had five young sons, and told a story about how he brought them to visit the Haagen-Dazs store in the large mall complex the family had built in Shanghai. He ordered half a tub of ice cream and was dismayed at how it was served. The server had used a knife to cut a carton of ice cream in half, and put one half, paper container still attached, on a plate. The boss eagerly showed me a picture of the half-carton of chocolate ice cream his young sons had to deal with, and happily said he had sent the same picture to Haagen-Dazs headquarters in Europe to complain, so they could work to improve their corporate culture. I shown around by a different ex-pat who also worked in Shanghai. He was an MBA classmate of the boss and had begun to regret uprooting his young family to China. He did not enjoy the level of access to and support from the boss that he felt he was promised and was not sure whether to tough it out or go back to his old pre-MBA job. He showed me around the mall complex, where a multi-floor supermarket had daily foot-traffic in the ten-thousands. It was very impressive but also difficult to tell what the company had actually done, though I surmised that they had secured and developed the land by financing it with partners and then sold the resulting retail, office, and mall spaces to others to recoup their investment. The MBA grad also showed me a smaller project of some residential houses with courtyards in Shanghai's old diplomatic quarters, and suggested that these free-standing houses were rare in China and the project were to be luxury units for use by government officials, hinting that the company's ability to secure this project was a sign that it was well-connected. I did not understand much, but after having been a bum actor, it was nice being shown around while wearing a short-sleeve dress-shirt in the summer sun, nodding and listening to real business talk. I dutifully collected the man's business card and deemed him to be now a part of my new business network.

I began to work in the tiny office downtown, sitting at a desk in the common area, with the two enclosed offices used by my supervisor and the lawyer sub-tenant. A shared conference room for meetings rounded out our small and cozy space. My manager frequently hosted real estate investment professionals and brokers who brought with them industry chatter and fancy brochures describing buildings for sale. We took all meetings, hoping to stay abreast of the deal flow, and met some colorful characters. One was a tall clean-cut Asian man in a spotless suit with polished shoes who talked about the Venture Capital fund he worked for in Silicon Valley, and how our company could become an investor. Another was a local real estate agent who boasted about having attended the boss's boss's wedding in Hong Kong, and how told the company patriarch he should buy an entire apartment building in Metrotown as it would make a nice inheritance gift for one of the grandkids. We eventually took a serious look at one project for sale, a package of commercial and industrial lands and buildings being sold by a large conglomerate. As part of the due diligence work, I visited all the sites that were in Greater Vancouver, read up on the sites that were in Alberta, and created detailed cash flow projections for each property using Microsoft Excel. The projections were very specific, but they were based on very broad assumptions about overall economic growth which would impact the vacancy rates of the buildings. It was largely a case of "garbage in, garbage out", but I did the work anyway, continuously refining my spreadsheet templates to be as clear and flexible as possible. My boss also hired lawyers to perform the legal due diligence on the properties. Again, these were people who boasted of their ties to the bosses back in Hong Kong and were eager to please. The target company created a physical data room of all the documents for the properties for sale, the legal associates went through the title documents and while I focused on the numbers. It was my first exposure to deal professionals in Vancouver, and I overheard their chatter about taking boats out to English Bay for the summer fireworks. In the end, my boss's boss came over from China to review our work, and decided not to pull the trigger. He of the Haagen-Dazs complaints asked me whether I had any feedback on the overall process. I told him I was aghast that we had spent $50,000 on legal fees for the months-long process, and that the legal work could have waited until we were sure of our numbers. He told me it was all apart of doing business, that paying the brokers in town would keep them bringing us deals, and one day they may show us an obvious slam-dunk. I could not comprehend how wasting my annual salary on legal fees was a slam-dunk, but years after I had moved on, I saw that the company had purchased two more buildings in downtown Vancouver, so maybe greasing the wheels had paid off.

Touchdown

The close shared quarters and my constant agitation for more fulfilling work began to get on my manager's nerves. I distracted myself by studying for the CFA Level 2 exam, listening to Economist magazine audio articles on my iPod, and building ever-more elaborate Excel cashflow models. I constantly fidgeted with my resume, updating it was with I was learning and doing as I kept an eye on the local CFA society job site. My dream job appeared about six months into my tenure, and this time, my resume and I were both ready for it. The posting was by a mid-tier financial services company, publicly-listed in the US with offices all over North America. The opportunity was with the small elite Vancouver investment banking team of The Firm, to work as an entry-level analyst across all of their deals. This was as legitimate a capital markets finance job as it got in Vancouver, as many of the larger retail banks had their finance operations out east in Toronto. I added the six-months experience as a private equity analyst to my resume, coupled it with a sharp cover letter, and submitted my application to the position I had been preparing my machinery for. I received the call for a phone interview, a sign that the resume that I had so methodically crafted had passed muster. I would later find out that I was one of about a dozen applicants out of a total of eighty who landed a phone interview. Given my level of preparation, I knew my odds for landing the job vastly increased with each step further along the application process. The resume was my entry ticket to the game, but it also laid the ground rules for how the rest of the game was to be won. Just as I had designed the negative white space on my resume to highlight certain keywords, "MIT", "Microsoft", "Japan", it was now clear that these key ideas had evoked a strong connection with the hiring manager, so the phone interview was a chance to amplify these impressions to gain entry to the next step. On the phone with a lower level vice president who had the job of screening the dozen candidates down to about half, I professionally and passionately elaborated how my MIT and Microsoft experience led my wanting to get closer to the business side of the world and dedicating myself to pursue a career in finance by passing the CFA Level 1 exam and finding a job as a private equity analyst. My foreign experience in the US and Japan led me to decide unequivocally that Vancouver is the best place in the world and I was set to deepen my roots here, surrounded by family and friends. I received the invitation for the next round of face-to-face interviews.

The offices of The Firm were in a premier AAA building at the busiest business intersection downtown, next door to the fancy Hotel Vancouver and the grassy lawns of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The building was called Cathedral Place because it shared the block with a church, had a greenish facade with perched stone beasts, and was topped by tall diamond-shaped spires. The investment banking group occupied the spire-adorned penthouse. I was to have a series of interviews, one with each of the managing directors and another with the group of three vice presidents together. Before facing the interview gauntlet, I came up with a plan to insulate myself from the eventual outcome by maximizing what I would get out of the process itself. My plan was to think from their perspective and identify the attributes they were most likely looking for in this position, and then to use the interviews to align myself with these attributes as best I could. This way, if my understanding of the essence of the position was correct, and I managed to convince them that I embodied this essence, then I should have as good shot as anyone of getting the job. Even if I did not ultimately win the position, because someone else better aligned themselves with the position, or because of uncontrollable vagaries of social preference, the exercise of identification and performance would be an invaluable skill that I could continue to hone with successive interviews until the dream job became an inevitability. This exercise had actually already begun at the resume and cover letter stage, in which my application package was constructed to highlight the attributes key to the position, but now in the face-to-face interviews, the stakes were raised, but so were the tools available at my disposal.

The key attributes I identified were ability, dedication, and Vancouver-roots. Ability and dedication were obvious choices given the nature of the job. There was a common local inferiority complex which regarded Vancouver as a backwater and feeder market for Toronto, and the attribute of Vancouver-roots was an additional way to demonstrate not just my commitment to finance in general, but also to finance in Vancouver and by extension to this position in particular. For me, this job was not a stepping-stone, it was my end-goal, my dream vocation, and I was going to let them know it. This was something I could speak passionately to because it was true. I had indeed abandoned a lucrative career at Microsoft to come home to be with my family and friends, so that I could build a career in Vancouver from the ground up, and I had already laid the foundation with my current position. With these three attributes clearly in mind, I approached the interviews with an agenda and I was not to be deterred: not by the limited time, not by inept questions, and certainly not by nerves. I would cut through anxiety by focusing on a simple task: how to use every ounce of my being and every interaction with them to convince them I was the singular embodiment of ability, dedication, and Vancouver-roots. In my scoring system, a passive candidate's direct response to a single question may score a single point towards one attribute. My active agenda-seeking encouraged me to score multiple points across all the attributes in one go. For example, straight off a greeting of "So, how do you like Vancouver?" which threatens to waste valuable interview time, a conservative face-value answer of "I like it well." barely scores a single point in the Vancouver-roots category. Whereas my answer would be an animated "I love it! I grew up here, left to attend MIT and to work for Microsoft, but came back home to build a career in finance in Vancouver because I wanted to be near my family and friends and nowhere else." By my metric, I would have scored multiple points for each category of ability, dedication, and Vancouver-roots, as conveyed through body language, delivery, and content, all packed into a single response that is succinct and natural enough that is unlikely to make the interviewer feel like I was speech-making. Assuming the interviewer had intelligently designed a set of questions to adequately assess the attributes that would be key to the job, if I scored multiple hits with each of my interactions, I would theoretically end the game with a better than 100% correspondence with the attributes. Of course, most interviewers were not proficient at interviewing, because it is not their main job, so I could use the scattershot framework of their questions to paint the exact picture I wanted, so that even ill-prepared interviewers could not stop me from delivering my message. In fact, if the they allowed it, I could take my queue off the first hello and deliver an entire monologue for the entire session, repeating these themes over and over again by pulling different concrete examples from my resume and life experience, telling them a story of how a life lived to this point was as a perfect match with the opportunity on offer. Of course, to be convincing, the monologue could not be memorized word-for-word, because the key to the game is both delivering a message, and ensuring it is well received. Here is where my winding road through the theater really paid off. Actors are trained to live in the moment and measure success of their actions by the reaction of the intended recipients. If the interviewer was clearly agitated with long-winded answers, then I would give a quick "yes/no" and wait the chance to expand that will inevitably come with more rapport. Building a human connection would allow me to deliver expansive answers and have it gladly received. By this point in the game, I had many tools to build rapport. The channels of communication had expanded beyond the page and phone receiver to include body language, posture, intonation, facial expression, and eye-to-eye contact. The shared points of contact had also expanded from the job posting and application to the previous interviews themselves. I could lean-in to questions with "That's a great question! As I chatted with so-and-so on phone last week, I told him ...". I could refer to the conversation I just had with the preceding interviewer as an excuse to engage and elaborate and demonstrate consistency, empathy, and rapport. The group interview with the three vice presidents was the easiest forum for my preparation. Here, each of them were limited in the number of questions they could ask, had to be polite listeners as they were in the presence of colleagues, and often sought to align their impressions to avoid standing out. They were under duress as well, because they could not hide behind general impressions for their ultimate individual verdict, instead they were receiving the same information, so had to ground their decisions in the specificity of my answers. This made the group eager note-takers and much more susceptible to my subtle influence. I only had to repeat what had worked in the individual sessions and not step out of bounds, as the only thing that could automatically eject me was a definitively strike-out against one of the attributes I had identified. Factual near misses were even non-consequential, I flatly did not know the answer to a finance question and admitted so, but suggested a reasonable guess. I was told it was wrong but it was likely because I had not been in the industry for long. It was like they wanted me to succeed! Which I think is true from the interviewer's perspective. Everyone wants to find the perfect candidate quickly and move on from the anxious process, so there is much confirmation bias. Ever since receiving my resume, they likely would have assumed I was strong numerically, given my subtle highlighting of "MIT" and "Microsoft". So my main focus was deflecting other weaknesses associated with this generic stereotype. I had already prepared my shield against the most likely stereotype, that I may be good with numbers, but not with people, in the cover letter I submitted. In it, I admitted that so far in life, my academic rigor had made me successful at MIT and Microsoft. But in examining the career of investor Warren Buffett, I felt the numbers were responsible for half of his success, the other half was the ability to establish rapport and social connections with individuals and groups. This had an even greater impact on his success. I wanted to join the team at The Firm because I wanted to contribute my numeric skills to help the group succeed, at the same time I wanted to learn to become a better builder of a deep and meaningful social network in Vancouver. This story easily deflected the tricky but inevitable question of "What is your biggest weakness?". It is a trick answer to a trick question, by self-identifying the vague and universal weakness to which no one is immune, I had nullified it, while at the same time cementing the assumption that my numerical skills are beyond question. I had also done it in such a way that is grounded in the specific job at hand, a non-too-subtle compliment that again demonstrates my steadfast commitment to this position. The final and potentially the most risky question is always "Do you have any questions for us?" Often stated rhetorically almost as a good-bye. I viewed this as dangerous because a quick "no" would instantly erase many points scored for dedication demonstrated so far. How can someone so passionate about the job not have anything else they want to know about it? My go-to answer was an excited "Yes! I had been dying to learn more about the group and how the day-to-day is like!", inviting the interviewer to talk freely. This subtly turn the tables on them so they are put in a position to convince me of the merits of the job. The more they talk up the workplace, the more likely they are to associate the happy emotions they are describing with the person they are trying to convince: me. People project, it is basic human nature, and people love being listened to. If I could get someone to talk about themselves for 30 straight minutes while being an avid listener, I guarantee in their unpreparedness they will begin to reference and confirm the points I made about the position through my performance, further entrenching into fact that I am a great match the attributes needed for this job and ending on a glorious high note.

I began strongly and got better as the day progressed and my points of reference with the group expanded. I had executed my plan with scientific precision that was grounded in the theater arts. I had been well-trained for the highly structured framework of the interview performance, and I had come exceedingly well prepared. I would joke years later that if the group knew how rebellious I would become later in my tenure, they would never had let me in the door. One insightful question that I artfully expanded into my point system was "Won't you be bored with the work of an investment banking analyst?". I answered that I saw the job as a key part of the team. Making sure the nuts and bolts of the numbers were correct was essential to win the trust and loyalty of our clients. It turned out that the question was right on, as I would get bored in about two years. But then again, perhaps the interviewers knew that bright candidates would all eventually get to that point, and they were happy to get the two years of solid service. I would also boast later that I had so systematized the interview process, that I could trounce the vaunted medical school panel interviews should I ever change my mind about medicine. The final round of the process were reference checks. Here, my UBC E-GEMS mentor made one last contribution to my career by taking the call from her new perch of academic power in the United States and speaking well about our shared experience from almost five years ago. It also helped that a colleague of my father at UBC was now a member of The Firm in a different team, and he gave confirmatory evidence to my life story, including my glittering graduation from UBC. I gave my two-week notice to my toehold job, and, nine-months after giving up the acting dream to build a career in finance in the small pond of Vancouver, I became an investment banking analyst working above the clouds at the heart of the city. I was to be paid a $50,000 base salary, with a bonus of about the same amount annually. So I had finally returned to the high watermark of earnings from my Microsoft days, but now, I had the solid foundation of my family and friends around me, the ends for my means, and the sky was the limit.

Employment

I would enjoy quiet employment for three years before rebelling and quitting to work for a wealthy Chinese investor.

The Firm

I took the same bus to downtown, except this time, I arrived in a full suit and tie at Cathedral Place, swiped my keycard in the elevator, and rode up to the penthouse. I worked in the common area, initially in the inner bowels under a low overhang, and soon at a secluded desk next to the window under the soaring thirty-foot high steeple, an iconic and highly visible station that I would eagerly point out to others from the streets below. On weekends I would bring family and friends for a tour, grab a drink from the fully stocked pantry before walking down a flight of majestic mahogany stairs to the reception area below to admire the unencumbered view of downtown from the opulent board room. This level also had the trading floor with its myriad of Bloomberg terminals and omnipresent screens, just like in the movies. Here was the majestic sky palace where I began life as an investment banking analyst. The Firm had two main business units, one for retail investment management and one for serving the institutional capital markets. The retail side had an army of investment managers who handled money for thousands of individuals. They, along with operations and IT, occupied half of the lower floors in the building. The capital markets side, with its smaller team of finance professionals, took up the top two floors. Capital markets was divided into three divisions: research, sales and trading, and investment banking. The first two served large institutional clients who managed significant amounts of money, such as pension funds and university endowments. The research team used analytic methods such as those taught in the CFA program to evaluate publicly-traded companies and future prospects for their share prices. The sales and trading team used the research reports and the associated recommendations to solicit the buying and selling of these stocks from the fund managers. These two groups served what was called the "buy-side" of the market, while investment banking serviced the "sell-side", the listed companies themselves. Investment bankers sought to help public companies raise money from the capital markets, or to perform strategic transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions, taking a cut by commission if successful. The commission was usually determined as a percentage of the size of the deal. With public company transactions easily surpassing millions of dollars and the commission being shared by a small elite team of hard-working professionals, investment banking could be very lucrative if deal-flow was sustained. But the business of advising significant corporate transactions was extremely competitive and unpredictable, so team sizes were kept small to survive the boom-and-bust cycles of the financial markets and salaries kept to a minimum, with all of the upside being made up of the bonus pool of transaction commissions that were disbursed quarterly. It was a feast-or-famine industry where long-term careers were difficult to sustain. But the two-year apprenticeship as an investment banking analyst was prized for its training and exposure to a wide variety of significant business transactions which left candidates well-prepared to join the corporate world in the executive suite. Why two-years? Because at the largest and most prestigious firms, that is about how long a young person could last without suffering chronic ill-health from sleep deprivation and overwork. After the apprenticeship, candidates at the most cut-throat firms were pushed "up or out": either promoted or pushed out to make room for fresh blood. The reporting hierarchy in investment banking was rigid and stratified. At the top were the managing directors, each with absolute purview of the industries and companies they served, or "covered". Their jobs were to build and maintain relationships with the powers-that-be at the client companies, to convince them to use our services when the need arose, or to manufacture such need whenever possible. They were people-persons, the rainmakers. Below them were vice presidents, who hoped to retire into the managing director's shoes eventually, while establishing their own relationships and project managing deal execution. Below them still were the associates and analysts, who performed the actual numerical analysis and the presentation preparations which the rainmakers used to pitch services. Pitches were a constant feature of life, as we had to continuously recommend courses of strategic action to the companies to stay in the game, hoping they would reward us with a piece of the commission pie when an actual deal took place. The three parts of the capital markets division worked closely together. The pitches investment banking made often highlighted how strong our research with regards to the client company was and how much trading of their stock was performed through our Firm. So, if the need arose for raising more money by selling shares, we would argue that we were the logical choice to help them do it, since we already had the buy-side relationships with funds owning their stock.

My team at The Firm was made up of a roster of stable members with low turn-over; they largely ignored the two-year up-or-out rule. The team had developed a stable deal-flow that gave everyone a decent work-life balance. I was fully expecting to pull all-nighters when required, but the opportunity only came once, during a fire-drill for a long-term client near the beginning of my tenure. Shortly after I began work, the housing bubble in the United States burst, resulting in a major financial crisis and a freeze of the capital markets. I was told business was slower than usual and it was a gentle way to be introduced to the industry. I watched in awe as the seasoned managing directors spent the day scooping up beat-up shares in their personal accounts, calmly assured of the inevitable return to normalcy. This was the period through which my family took two-and-a-half years to sell our Seattle bungalow. I may have been fortunate to have gotten a job before the crash, but I do not think it mattered for the analyst positions with entry-level pay. Managing directors controlled the distribution of the bonus pool, giving enough to maintain morale among the troops and keeping the rest for themselves. For the analysts roles at the bottom of the food chain with relatively little pay and abundant work, the hiring decision was mostly based on finding those who understood the bargain and were willing to perform their role with ability, dedication, and loyalty. Ironically, moving up in the up-or-out in the investment banking career ladder required a radically different set of attributes that were diametrically opposed to those valued in analysts. The grunts of the army were sought out for their numerical ability and sadistic tolerance of repetitive error-free pitch-book creation. In contrast, the managing directors needed to be relationship monsters, employing the human touch to get CEOs to "yes". The gap between these two job types was unbridgeable for many who would leave, either willingly or pushed out by the system. Even managing directors had to maintain their financial chops, and were hired for their experience in the industry through years of deal exposure. Everyone in the hierarchy was well-educated and carried full CFA charters, and I would soon get mine. I continued with my exam regiment and passed the level 2 and level 3 exams on the first try, committing even more time for the last one, up to 1,000 hours of dedicated study, to avoid having to go through the process again. Meanwhile, I diligently executed my half of the arrangement with The Firm, working on pitch-books and financial analyses for the entire team without complaint. The work turned out to be not particularly deep or difficult, and the full academic rigor of CFA studies were rarely meaningfully applied for smaller public companies with thinly traded stocks. Instead, I found myself tapping my artistic background, devoting as much effort towards the design of the presentations for clarity and cleanliness as towards the numbers themselves, as these I soon automated with expensive industry software The Firm paid for. At the end of two years, I was promoted to an associate position, continuing with the same work since I was the only one below the vice-presidents on the team, but handed a salary and morale boost. My experience at The Firm had surpassed those at MIT, Microsoft, and acting to become my longest professional tenure to date. By now, I had been to countless client meetings at offices all around downtown with my superiors, gotten used to the quirky closing dinners and commemorative deal plaques, and proudly carried my office-issued Blackberry phone which I custom-ordered to have a distinctive red face-plate. I grew into the role of the professional junior banker, with the perpetual suit-and-tie and happily attending industry events or even giving talks to university finance clubs about the banking career.

Family

During my employment at The Firm, I steadily filled my retirement accounts and helped my parents pay down their mortgage. For the last twenty-years, UBC explored developing its vast campus to enrich its endowment. As the land was provincially-endowed and could not be sold, UBC turned some it it into 99-year lease developments, beginning with the prototype residential complex at Hampton Place. My parents had sold their Hampton Place townhouse and moved to Dunbar when I left for MIT as my father was worried about leaky roofs and the leasehold ownership. Emboldened by the success of Hampton Place, UBC unveiled plans for a comprehensive greenfield development next to Hampton Place that was to be a full-fledged community, with housing, schools, and shops. To kick-start the master plan, UBC advertised that it would co-develop the first low-rise condominium. The price offered by UBC was a 20% discount to market, eligible only to UBC staff, with the restriction that the units could not be sold for five years after completion. By now, my parents were mortgage-free and were a weary of living in the badly insulated house, where the wind hissed through the 90-year old bedroom walls in the winter. So my father thought it would be a good idea to invest in the UBC condo, live there once it was completed until the five-year restriction was lifted, then use the 20% savings to help finance the tearing-down and rebuilding of the house in Dunbar. The UBC condo project generated significant interest and my father lined up all night in his car to get first choice of units. He picked the cheapest and most efficiently laid-out three-bedroom. My parents, my grandmother, and myself would move into unit 306 after its completion, and we would watch an entire community spring up around us. UBC had proven its vision and commercial developers joined the fray, leasing land and raising building after building. The shopping amenities, a retirement home, and student rental housing soon followed, with plenty of parks and playgrounds that enticed families to live in the academic setting. It was not as pedestrian-friendly as my childhood Acadia Park, but it was well designed and expensively maintained, especially the abundant streams and ponds loved by children. Eventually, the 20% became almost a rounding error as the value of the condo more than doubled at the end of the five years.

During these years, the west-side public high-schools like University Hill of UBC and Lord Byng of Dunbar had consistently ranked as the best in the province. After the successful winter Olympics games raised Vancouver's global profile, a wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the city. Seeking good school districts, the immigrants significantly bid up land prices in Dunbar and beyond. Those who did not buy rented. After moving to the UBC condo, my parents leased the Dunbar house to a single-mother whose child used the address to attend Lord Byng. They lived upstairs, where my family used to be, and sublet the basement suite to a rotating roster of Chinese international students attending UBC. One of these students would ultimately become my wife. She would join me on weekends at board game parties hosted by my Transition classmates. During the Olympics, I spent $1,000 on the secondary market for my parents to see the Chinese figure skating pair win gold at the Pacific Coliseum, where I had written my CFA exams. I also took my whole family and significant other to watch the China-Canada women's curling match. Through my work at The Firm, my vocabulary and oratorical skill in English had vastly improved, while my Chinese ability consistently declined from years of low use. With the arrival of a critical mass of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver, including my significant other, that was about to irreversibly change, along with my career projection.

China

The global economic recovery and China's insatiable appetite for natural resources to fuel its development led to a commodity markets boom. Money flowed out of China, seeking to secure assets from around the world to feed the need. Canada, with its large landmass and stable jurisdiction, had always had a large natural resources economy and became a favourite target. The Firm and its wizened managing directors had seen its share of fads before and were not moved to spend effort on soliciting this business, but eventually we would be unwittingly pulled into its orbit. A lawyer recommended The Firm to help a wealthy Chinese individual look for resource investments, and we acquiesced. From the get-go, the meetings were awkwardly conducted with English-Chinese translations which were eventually performed by me and my halting Chinese. I tapped my acting training and would come to translate intent rather than language to maintain the energy and flow of the meetings, though my Chinese steadily improved as well. The Chinese investor had an entourage of friends and informal advisers who attended all meetings and site visits with him. Feeling empowered by my new-found speaking-role in client meetings, I supported the Chinese group as best I could with valuation concepts and how the capital markets worked in Canada. I adopted a service attitude and ingratiated myself by holding doors open, pouring tea at meals, and even taking a keener on a trip to Warren Buffett's annual shareholder meeting in the United States. Initially, I was simply the messenger, passing requests and responses back and forth between the group and my superiors. Over time, as the correspondence became too numerous, I increasingly tried to handle what I could on my own, "covering" them as a managing director would, brokering services from The Firm to meet their investment needs.

The Chinese gentleman's first substantial investment was in a mining project in the prairies. For this, I joined the group on numerous trips to the site, holding their bags and delivering water to their motel rooms along the way. The trip began with a five-hour flight eastward, followed by another one-hour long flight north, and ended with a further two-hour drive into the Canadian wilderness. At the mine site, we stayed in the trailer camp that could house fifty, ate at the canteen, and made the trek to the mine face 300-meters below the surface. There were two ways to get there. We took the vertical shaft for personnel on a rapid descent to the working level, toured the large storage and equipment caverns dug out of hard rock, and examined the workers in giant digging equipment working at brightly-lit nodes. Then we rode trucks in the pitch dark through wide winding tunnels that spiralled back to the surface. With the help of The Firm, the investor successfully took over the public corporate entity and poured millions of dollars into its operations before tumbling commodity prices put the project on hold indefinitely. The Firm began to treasure the gentleman, reported to own a billion-dollar enterprise in China, as a valuable asset. My managing directors introduced him to numerous other projects that were headquartered in Vancouver with the assets flung far across the world. He was beginning to develop a lumber business in China and was convinced to invest millions more into a Canadian forestry company. My affection for the investor became personal when he accepted my significant other as the third employee of his local Vancouver office, allowing the two of us to work together downtown and to attend many social functions as a couple. We were invited to the wedding banquet of the his oldest son, where he introduced me to his social circle as his investment banker and a very decent young man. The commission The Firm made from this gentleman became substantial. At year-end, the banking team met to dole out pricey Winter Olympics tickets to clients. Feeling protective of the Chinese group, I insisted they receive some of the best. My team disagreed, viewing them more as one-offs and incomparable to long-term clients who were well established in Vancouver. Undeterred, I spent my own money to send them gifts in The Firm's name, including $10,000 secondary market tickets to the marquee event: the gold-medal hockey game between Canada and the United States, which Canada would win in thrilling fashion. My bosses eventually made me whole through my personal year-end bonus, but it was an act of indiscretion that revealed an emerging divergence of interest between myself and The Firm.

Striking Out

I began to actively court Chinese business in Vancouver by tapping my circle of quickly expanding contacts. I allied with Chinese-Canadian lawyers who were the first point-of-contact for investor immigrants and gave seminars to pitch the services of The Firm, highlighting the work we had already completed for the wealthy Chinese investor. My team did not push back against my outreach efforts, though my ability and tolerance for analyst work declined. It had been three solid years of dedicated service, but the allure of chasing my own deals was a Pandora's box that could not be closed. As I had already been managing the relationship, I wanted official recognition of my expanded role and I wanted a free hand to build a roster of clients. I flew to Calgary to make the case to the head of investment banking in person but my efforts were not well-received either there or at home. The established order was not to be upset. It was only with the covert support of one of the Vancouver managing directors that I was essentially relieved of all analyst duties to focus on China full-time. The group hired two new analysts to take over my old work load and I began to work alone, spending more time with outside contacts than with my teammates at The Firm and I became increasingly viewed with suspicion by the vice presidents who were no longer able to assign me work.

My network brought me in touch with a Chinese furniture manufacturer who wanted to publicly-list a Russian sawmill asset in Canada while raising some money. The Firm thought it was impossible to finance Russian assets in Canada, as there was largely no precedent, but we agreed to manage the listing process while they found Chinese investors to buy the shares. We would gain exposure to the project and be paid a service fee, but the asset and financing both came from Chinese sources. For a largely social due diligence trip, I joined the group on their visit to China and Russia. We first drove from Beijing to Shandong province to visit the furniture factory there, only about an hour by car from Dai Village where my father had grown up. Then we took a midnight flight from from Beijing to Irkutsk, where we squished into a large passenger van for the eight-hour drive to the Siberian forests next to Lake Baikal. There was not enough room in the van so I rode in the elevated rear luggage compartment with no seat or headroom. I laid on my back in the cramped space, holding my sensitive head off the floor by grabbing the handle bars above for the entire bumpy ride through the winter landscape. The sides of the highways had snow piled up and the road itself glistened white, making the trip feel like an Olympic toboggan ride down an icy half-pipe at breakneck speed. The two Russian drivers took turns for the long drive and blasted ear-piercing techno to stay alert. We arrived in the evening and passed the night at the small lumber mill town. The next day, we visited both the mill and the logging operations. The mill office did not have bathroom facilities, so we had to relieve ourselves in a wooden shack outhouse that was just a few wooden panels around a hole dug in the frozen ground. The floor was literally a frozen mound of discoloured ice, and I was glad I did not have to try to squat on the slippery surface. At the logging site, we joked around outside in the minus-forty temperature. I saw a waist-high axe, picked it up and swung it at a the standing log. In my bulky winter gear, I misjudged how heavy the axe was and missed. The axe swung heavily past the log and cut deep into the soft earth between my feet, missing my toes by inches. Foot intact, the trip back was much more leisurely, as we took a scenic route via Lake Baikal. At the edge of the expansive Lake, where we could not see the opposite shore, we marvelled at the cars that drove on its frozen surface. We were told the lake was as deep as it was long and contained three-quarters of Earth's surface fresh water. In its unexplored depths were numerous species of fish, many yet to be discovered. Our lunch was a feast of Baikal fish, one dish after another of more than two dozen that we eventually could only sample with tiny bites as we became luxuriously stuffed by mid-course. The listing was completed and I looked for more projects in China.

One gentleman from the southern city of Nanjing had a tourist real-estate project he wanted to develop into a timeshare, a novel concept in China at the time. There had been a few recent Chinese hotel-chain success stories in which companies in the fast growing industry listed in the United States. I visited the project, helped the gentleman put together a professional presentation, and did research into the institutional funds that had funded the previous Chinese hotel stories, many of which were China-based. To reach these established players, I systematically collected contacts from my existing network and scoured the MIT alumni directory to setup appointments for the project. On a week-long trip, the entrepreneur and I swept through the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, meeting dozens of fund managers. The project did not garner funding, but I ended the trip with three books of business cards, a physical memento for a concerted and professional effort of striking out on my own. While in China, I worked late-nights confirming meetings and sending follow-up materials on my laptop. The Great Firewall of China made my foreign e-mail accounts unreliable, so I tethered my Canadian cell-phone signal to send documents. I returned home to a surprise $30,000 cell-phone roaming bill. The Firm's IT department helped me negotiate the charge down to a fraction and the supportive managing director approved my trip expenses. Crisscrossing the Pacific and roaming China to sniff out leads and build contacts was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. This would be the most socially active period of my business life, when I kept an open-mind and would take any meeting. My career would continue to develop after this, though with an sharply introspective turn.

Resignation

My stable roster of clients did not materialize, and my constant absence from The Firm led to an inevitable good-bye. Towards the end of my tenure, the pressure at work led to chronic back-aches as mental stress manifested itself through physical pain, exacerbated by the hockey injuries of my acting tour. I returned to the breathing and yoga-exercises of my theater training to cope and spent more time at the office of the wealthy Chinese investor than at The Firm. I worked with my significant other to setup the office, enjoying the feeling of control as we build the company's administrative functions from the ground up: setting up computers and getting everyone onto brand new email-enabled Blackberry devices. I talked the Chinese investor into letting me join his group full-time without a detailed discussion of role or compensation. I collected my things from The Firm, told the friendly managing director I was leaving, left my red-plated Blackberry on my desk, and walked out the door. I did not say good-bye to my other teammates and would never speak to any of them again. It was a tumultuous end to yet another career after three-and-a-half years as an investment banker. I had crossed one more item off my list of life, one hard-fought for and passionately ended, but the experience, true to its form, would empower me as I looked down the road ahead, more convinced than ever that family was the only thing worth working for.

Entrenchment

This job would carry me forward for the next six years to the present. I would engage in a series of power struggles before earning an imperial purview of my domain and a very flexible schedule.

Day Job

After three-and-a-half years of working as a investment banker, I re-joined the corporate world as an employee of a tiny start-up. The wealthy Chinese investor was in the initial stages of developing a port facility in northern China dedicated to importing lumber products from all over the world. He sought to complement this long-term strategic project with add-on investments in Canada. The Firm had already helped him make a passive investment in a public forestry company, through which he had no control but received industry insight. The investor also created a Vancouver office to pursue day-to-day business for further market awareness. The office exported lumber from Vancouver to China to keep a finger on the pulse of international trade. I joined this office nominally as a finance manager, eager to exercise my new found freedom in the entrepreneurial world. Together with my significant other and our Chinese-Canadian colleagues, we designed our office-space and our business processes. We purchased lumber locally and sold it to end-user customers in China. Due to the time-zone difference, we often needed to work late evenings to communicate with those in China, and we did so gladly, happy for the camaraderie of our empowered and flexible work employment. Given my background, I focused mostly on the financial aspects of the business. Although I had no training in accounting, I took over the financial reporting processes and tried to create clear and succinct reports on the company's performance. The investor himself largely left the running of the office to us as he spent most of his time in China. On the occasions he was in Vancouver, he would spend more time at social gatherings and on his other business ventures than in our office. To make the most of my exposure to accounting, I signed up for course work towards earning a professional designation. These courses were relatively easy compared to the arduous CFA exams, as the content was broken down into more than two dozen exams and by now I had far more experience with finance. Over the next few years, I would secure the accounting designation to compliment my CFA charter.

At the outset, I yearned to add more value to the Chinese investor's vast enterprise to which I had purview only to the tiny lumber exporting business. The investor was curious about how the capital markets could help his Chinese enterprise, so I tapped my network and introduced him to a China-based fund manager. I chaperoned the fund manager on a tour of the investor's Chinese enterprises and gained a sense of the scale of his operations. Our destination was the city of Tangshan, less than two hours from the port city of Qinhuangdao where I had spent a large part of my childhood with my maternal grandparents. We were driven from Beijing airport directly to Tangshan in the investor's luxurious Maybach for the tour. The effort ultimately did not result in a transaction, but by helping the investor create a professional presentation describing his entire empire, I got a seat inside the tent and strengthened our relationship. In China, the investor sat atop a workforce of thousands and exercised a much more hands-on approach to managing. In Vancouver, we had a free-hand in running our own business, but here, the investor was in the driver's seat and commanded his management team, carrying on in a formal and rigid manner that seemed to be the norm in Chinese business culture. I had a direct relationship and an open line of communication with him, and I came to realize that this level of access was restricted to a very small circle of long-term loyalists in China. Although my tenure in his empire had just begun, my position and relationship was boosted by the aura of my previous affiliation with The Firm, MIT, as well as my foreigner status.

Our small Vancouver operation thought we could leverage our relationship with the investor to expand our presence in China and maybe even build a local office. As we began to make more frequent trips to China, we found that we were unwelcome, as our outsider status and Canadian compensation upset the rigid Chinese hierarchy. We were treated roughly by the locals and the investor did not extend to us the aid we had expected. After one particularly brutal episode of office politics, I felt completely alienated and undervalued. To cope, I locked myself in my decrepit dorm room, blasted loud music, and worked on my Story Charts website to distract myself before quickly returning to Vancouver and vowing never to return. I was jaded, but unlike in previous such encounters, I did not resign immediately. To prove to myself that I still had value, I used my well-practiced job application process to secure an enticing offer. In the end the thought of returning to a strict nine-to-five regiment in order to validate my own sense of self-worth did not appeal to me. It was a blessing to be able to work together with my significant other, just as my parents had done for many years. Plus, in the Vancouver office we had control, a flexible schedule, and could forego the suit-and-tie. So I chose an alternative route to deal with my disappointment and burnout at work. Rather than seek solace in a busy new job, I took it easy and coasted until I recovered. It was a decision that would guide my career for the next six years into the present, a pragmatic choice that would ironically help me insinuate myself into the organization while allowing me to dedicate myself to my family.

Family

Increasing family obligations helped me adjust to the difficulty of treating work as just a day job. After much family discussion and a romantic proposal, my significant other and I were married in our UBC condo by a commissioner in front of my parents and my grandmother. A few months later, my in-laws hosted a large wedding reception for us in China, attended by local family and friends as well as two of my childhood friends who flew around the world to be there. By then, my wife was pregnant. Upon our return to Vancouver, we rented a tiny studio apartment on the west-side of the city. We would spend the evenings eating dinner and playing cards with my parents and grandmother, then return home to walk around the neighbourhood. Having accepted my day job as it came, I channeled my energy elsewhere. I spent my copious spare time in creating a new website for Story Charts. Whereas before I had created images on my computer before uploading them to the internet, now I wanted to make the website an interactive tool for creating charts on the fly. In typical fashion, I approached the project with gusto, creating a clean and powerful product. It had been years since I had programmed, and it was empowering to be able to learn and use the full stack of modern computer languages I needed to build the website from the ground up. I made a concerted effort to broadcast the end-product on social media and scrutinized visitor web traffic from all over the world, having grandiose ambitions of building an audience and eventually making money.

In anticipation of our growing family, including with my in-laws who were planning to retire in China and join us in Canada, we decided to rebuild the Dunbar house. Designing and building our own house was to be the culmination of one aspect of our Canadian Dream, a testament to our permanent roots as foreigners no more. We hired a general contractor for help, but were very hands-on from the very beginning and eventually finished the project by ourselves. To begin with, we hired a cheap architect and worked off an existing floor-plan, making adjustments for livability rather than for flair, as we did not ever plan to sell. Having gotten used to the UBC condo's open floor-plan, we designed the first-floor of the house to have a condominium-like layout, seamlessly merging the kitchen, dining, living, and family areas. We decided to forgo a separate dining room, as these were rarely used and needlessly partitioned the precious space. The family area was designed such that in the future, we could cordon it off to turn it into a bedroom for my grandmother, should one day stairs become too cumbersome for her in old age. We complemented this feature with the bathroom on this floor having a senior-friendly seat shower. Our design choice for the second floor was to shrink all the bedrooms and the master bathroom in order to carve out an open and airy office in the middle of the floor. Once equipped with two side-by-side office desks, it would become one of the most used spaces in the entire house by my parents. Most houses built around the time ended there because contractors generally balked at the extra complexity of more floors, but we chose to add a small triangular shaped attic. The attic had no doors and was one single open space, reminiscent my old nest at the top of the tear-down. The basement was a separate suite that served as guest bedrooms or a mortgage helper and the entire house was rounded out by a yard and a flat garage which could one day have a roof garden. My father and I took over the construction process as it got going, choosing the windows, appliances, and building materials and designing everything down to the location of every single wall-plug and light switch. It was a labour of love that we would get to enjoy for years, unlike the Seattle bungalow we had restored and then unceremoniously sold.

My in-laws were set to move to Canada to join us in retirement as my wife's due-date approached. Their visas were delayed and it appeared that they were going to miss the day by a few weeks. On a last minute whim, we drove across the border to give birth in Bellevue, Washington. It was something we had heard some Chinese-Canadian immigrants did to give their newborns duo citizenship, and we had not seriously considered it until the disruption to my in-laws' visas. But once decided, it seemed like a no-brainer. Our child would be born with American as well as Canadian citizenship, and would have the option of studying or working down south without the restrictions I had faced at Microsoft. A week after the birth of our child, my in-laws had arrived in Vancouver and we returned home to join them, birth certificate in hand. My mother helped us apply for UBC staff rental housing and we landed a unit in the condo building next door to my parents, where we could see each other's balconies from across the small courtyard. By this time, the Dunbar house was well onto the final stages. To save money and ensure quality, my father largely finished the interior with his own hands, aided by my father-in-law, who was quite handy himself. They cut and installed all the interior window frames and crown molding, tiled all the bathrooms and the basement floor, and painted the walls, ceilings, and even the exterior of the house. As the project neared finish, my father ceaselessly worked late nights, even sleeping in the unfinished bedrooms, putting an endless number of invisible touches everywhere. Soon, my parents and my grandmother moved into the new Dunbar house, and we moved into the UBC condo. My wife, our newborn, and my in-laws began to live as a family of five, frequently getting together with my parents and grandmother who were only a short drive away.

Winning

Through child birth, my wife took only one month of maternity leave while I did not take any. Our work schedule was flexible enough to accommodate the pregnancy as well as our house building project and we were grateful. We maintained the stable trade file easily and did not expect much from the day job beyond the paycheck. My laid back attitude towards my career overall did not extend to the actual work itself. In fact, it made me less patient for waste and social connection. Gone were the days where I would take open ended meetings and network for its own sake. In the interest of efficiency and control, I streamlined everything that was necessary and discarded anything that was not, including relationships. In the areas where I had control, I brooked no dissent. I switched banking relationships at the smallest perceived slight, fought for stringent credit terms with the easygoing sales team, and threatened a fist-fight when I deemed a colleague to be pushing make-work onto my wife. As the finance manager and the one voluntarily submitting monthly performance reports to the Chinese investor, I leveraged my role as the self-appointed internal auditor to strengthen my position, all the while finding ways to finish the work day within fewer hours. Eventually, within this small corner of the investor's expansive empire, I came to have dictatorial control and disdained insubordination. I focused my positive energy on communicating up, delivering results, and shielding the investor from unnecessary noise. The relationship blossomed as I took every opportunity to demonstrate my competence and my loyalty. The investor began to call me from China to troubleshoot business issues as well as run personal errands he had in Canada. I always completed these special assignments expeditiously, circling back with succinct reports of symptoms, causes, and recommended treatment. As such, my work days became shorter even as the singular relationship that mattered was strengthened. With practice, I became better at crisis management of complex entanglements, which, combined with my experience in finance and developing political acumen, made me an indispensable problem solver increasingly relied on by the investor. The execution and resolution of these unique assignments compounded my power and fortified my position as his Canadian consigliere.

The investor recruited me to help harvest his investment in a public biotechnology company. He had pursued the investment for many years in Vancouver and had become a significant shareholder. The company hit a homerun in its drug discovery pipeline and monetized it by selling the patents to a global pharmaceutical conglomerate. The investor appointed me join the board of directors of the company. As the chairman of the audit committee, I discovered the management team had paid themselves bonuses related to the asset sale before negotiations with the board had concluded. I quickly engaged in a cat-fight with the officers as I sought to investigate the perceived wrong-doing. It was a painful experience as the chief executive was a shrewd star manager who had made the company a lot of money and had his own personal relationship with the investor. Coincidentally, he was also a family friend of my parents and shamelessly used the connection to press for advantage. I did not back down. My parents refused to engage him on the work issue while I demonstrated to the investor I was even willing to go after a classmate of my father's to protect the company's interest. In the end, our fight allowed the investor to stay above the fray and to mediate, resolving the crisis while strengthening his hand for future negotiations. Out of spite, the chief executive used the company's public company status as a shield and manipulated the board to deny some of the investor's other requests, so I designed a plan to help the investor consolidate control. I organized the distribution of the company's windfall to shareholders, and, once completed, I resigned. Freed from my fiduciary duties to the public company, I turned around and helped the investor use the cash received to launch a bid to take the company private. The remaining board, scared into action by the chief executive, alleged our bid was too low and sued to block the bid rather than letting shareholders vote. I explained this act of corporate betrayal to the investor, then systematically dismantled the lawsuit with my own legal team and completed the takeover. Once the company became private and we were firmly in control, the board and its lawyers were summarily dismissed. The chief executive now had to report directly to the investor. He quickly adopted a humbler persona, though I continued to refuse taking his calls for years afterward. I was designated the chief financial officer of the private company and added its financial control to my purview. The investor rewarded me by revealing another significant Canadian investment he wanted me to trouble-shoot. This was an oil and gas project based in Calgary. The company had spent a lot of money drilling unproductive wells and there had been rumours of malfeasance. I parachuted into the company and quickly learned the business, acquiring an oil and gas production accounting certificate within two months. I was blocked by the chief executive of the company from conducting a proper audit of the company, so I took my work underground. I worked late nights and weekends when the office was empty and used my computer skills to find smoking-gun evidence of wrongdoing deep within the company's servers. The chief executive's computer consultant alerted him to the breach who sent a company wide email threatening to call the police. I had gotten what I needed and jetted back to Vancouver. The investor and the board protected me while my discovery empowered them to demand concessions from the chief executive, eventually leading to his ouster and the launch of litigation against him. I was returned to the company and put in charge as the chief financial officer. I quickly streamlined the business processes such that I was able to oversee the company and the lawsuit from the comfort of Vancouver. My now multi-company portfolio made my work-day even more flexible, as I devoted time only to oversight and put things on autopilot as much as possible.

Fighting

Recognizing my ability to quickly size up a situation and get to the crux of the matter, the investor had me tackle more personal issues as well. The investor had helped a friend try to gain American permanent residence by investing in some Subway restaurants. The investment went sideways and did not produce the requisite American green-card. I made a quick trip to the Subways in Boston and followed up with a few weeks of financial audit to highlight some previously undisclosed expenses and helped them conclude the green-card was not salvageable. The only remedy available was likely a flimsy lawsuit against the immigration consultant for fraud and negligence. I would not get the experience of running an American lawsuit as another lawsuit awaited at home. In Vancouver, the investor and a group of friends had purchased an island off the coast of Vancouver as a shared vacation destination. One of the investors was gruesomely murdered by his brother-in-law and cut into a hundred pieces in a sensational case that captivated the city. This person had died without a will, and soon half a dozen children borne out of wedlock to different women emerged to fight over his estate. The court-appointed trustees targeted the island and sued the other owners to reclaim for the estate. I had the privilege of helping the group lawyer-up in defense. It was yet another multi-year project added to my portfolio.

During my time at The Firm, I had helped a Nanjing-based entrepreneur visit investment funds on a multi-city tour across China. The gentleman was quite kind and had even attended and spoke at our wedding reception. Now he approached me with a personal issue as well. His son, a high-school student, had used social media to engage with, and solicit from, an under-aged girl. The police stepped in and arrested him. I helped the family find criminal defense lawyers and attended the court proceedings and social worker meetings with them. It was a fascinating front row seat to Canadian criminal law. The young man would eventually be rehabilitated through community service, with his records sealed due to his young age. The entrepreneur was able to return to his Nanjing project with a settled peace of mind. However, his family's rough patch was not over. A year later, he called me mysteriously from Hong Kong airport, asking me to help him book flight tickets to Vancouver through New York. When I picked him up from the airport, he walked out of the terminal with wrap-around shades and was visibly shaken. He asked me to take him to a McDonald's, and there, he showed me his bruised eye and he said he was hounded in Nanjing by the mafia who had taken over some loans his company owed. For the next week, he holed up in a hostel and looked for Buddhist temples as long-term hide-outs. Eventually, he decided to go back to China to press charges. I had not heard from him since.

Living

My vicarious experience with litigation and witnessing the turmoil of those in business made me appreciate the stability of the family life my parents had built around them. I had been successful in my efforts to entrench myself at work and developed an enviable position of control and flexibility, but the peremptory manner I often used in order to secure these victories was a liability on the home front. I had to adapt to life with a toddler as well as my in-laws. My tendency was to try to control my living environment to the same degree I had at work, and being a new parent served as a narrative excuse and emotional fuel for fighting to correct perceived inadequacies. I would then feel extremely guilty afterwards, trying to reconcile my family values with my rough actions that caused heartache and pain. For one month, I moved the entire family to be with me in Calgary while I was seconded there. We lived together in a house for the first time. The additional personal space in the spacious living quarters compared to our UBC condo was conducive to a more harmonious atmosphere. Upon our return to Vancouver, we decided to look for a larger permanent home.

By this time, the Vancouver real-estate market was in a froth of speculation. Land prices had risen substantially in the years after the Winter Olympics and even a tear-down lot was priced at millions of dollars. We wanted to be as close to my parents as possible, so we kept an eye on listings within walking distance. The market was so hot that the lower-priced listings were sold immediately with multiple over-the-asking offers competing for them. By now, only subject-free offers were being considered by sellers. This placed the buyer at a severe disadvantage as the offer could not have the traditional financing or inspection conditions attached. Once the offer was accepted and the six-figure deposit was submitted, the buyer was on the hook for consummating the deal, even if they could not find a bank to finance the purchase or discovered a serious deficiency in the house. Only the very cheapest of the listings were affordable to us, and many of these were unlivable 100-year old dwellings. One listing on a larger lot appeared, but we promptly ignored it because it was on residential thoroughfare with more traffic and was west-east facing in the north-south facing neighbourhood. A day later, we took a closer look at the photos and realized that the house was a real gem. The floor-plan had been thoughtfully laid out and the house seemed to have been renovated. It was small, with only one bedroom, but crucially, it had three bathrooms. We decided to go for it. I immediately contacted the listing realtor and asked if he would consider helping us write the offer, meaning he would represent both sides of the deal and would double his commission. He said the open house was a few days away and he would only consider helping us if we offered above the listing price. We agreed immediately. The next day, he said the sellers had accepted our offer and cancelled the open house. We now had weeks to find the money to close. I solicited my parents' help and they mortgaged their house and the UBC condo. Even so, the combined savings and incomes of our entire extended family was just barely able to support the mortgage. We closed the deal and the house was legally ours, but it would be months before we could take our first steps inside, as we agreed to let the elderly couple sellers stay for free while they moved to the condo they were downsizing to. For the next few months, as we waited, we would drive by every evening to peek from the distance at our future home. When we discovered the couple had already finished moving and had been cleaning and re-painting the house for us, I paid them to be able to move in early. They gave us a set of half a dozen well-crafted keys as well as a package containing all the design documents and every single receipt for the 1987 renovation they orchestrated to turn it into their dream retirement home for two. Months after having made the biggest purchase of our collective lives based solely off of photographs, we finally stepped into our new home for the first time. It was a dream come true. The elderly couple had clearly treasured and lovingly cared for it over many years. The gentleman had added many finishing touches with his own hands. The ceiling was high, the basement floor was even, and even a professional inspector found only minor updates required. We co-opted the dining room and the basement office for additional bedrooms and eagerly moved in. The best part of the house was one we did not even consider in its market value. The renovation package revealed the original design of the large garden all around the house, where each plant, tree, and shrub had been carefully chosen and placed. Now, three decades later, the trees and greenery had matured and their foliage surrounded the house. Having only taken furtive peeks through our drive-bys, we walked wide eyed into a lush paradise. Our extended family now had two dream homes within a short walk of each other in Dunbar, we loved the arrangement and decided we would never leave.

Retirement

My familial foundation and stable employment have led to my present state of semi-retirement with room to breathe and a chance to reflect on my total experience.

Map of Life

Character is fate, and I am driven. My ambitious nature has allowed me to explore careers, subjects, and situations quickly and thoroughly, while leaving in its wake a trail of emotional endings and burnt bridges. My self motivation has been the engine of my determination, and with it came an arrogant ego and a strong inclination for deriving a narrative where none may exist. My sensitivity to perceived slights and my spontaneous retaliation to injustice are balanced only by my equally strong sense of guilt when my wrath is unleashed upon those dearest to me. In my emphatic crossing off items from the list of life, I have defiantly closed off unnecessary social circles and tried to shut-out external influence so that I can spend the currency of my life, time, on what truly matters to me. In the capitalistic age where our self-worth is intrinsically tied to economic units of measure, it has been difficult to extricate my aspirations from visible trappings of success, even as scientists have long proven that we humans underrate the role of chance in everything and engage in narrative fallacy to attribute gains to our own merit. In fact, the fewer the data points, the greater the fallacy in the stories I tell myself, and my fertile mind is ever at ease with such narration in my quickness to judge. Randomness prevails. Through the noise of life, I have been blessed to have discovered my love of family and it has become the end for my means. My career serves to strengthen the stability of my family while also satiating my ambitions for power in modern society. A mixture of chance and choice have bestowed upon me stable employment with both control and freedom that suits my character well, granting me plenty of time to nurture my familial ties and to devote myself to meaningful pursuit. As such, I have tried to read widely to gather wisdom from across the age of language to distill the essence of human knowledge in order to discern the next targets on my list of life.

Map of Knowledge

I separate all human knowledge into two types, the Natural and the Social. The Natural are focused on the external physical universe we live in. The Social are focused on the interpersonal and internal lives of humans. Natural knowledge is inter-dependent. Physics is the study of atomic forces that govern the fusion process at the heart of stars. This hydrogen-helium cycle produce heavier elements necessary for more complex structures. Chemistry is the study of molecular interactions of the heavier elements in the formation of planets. The Geosphere is the study of the environmental systems of our particular planet, and Biology is the study of self-propagating living systems that developed on Earth. Natural knowledge also deals with ever-increasing complexity. Even the most rudimentary living things on Earth are more complex than any star and planetary system. Life on Earth is the culmination of complexity in the universe.

Social knowledge focuses on humans as biological beings who have mastered our planet. We captured all of the energy on Earth and dominated the food chain; our only existential threats are extreme cosmic events and ourselves. Politics is how humans apportion the resources of the planet. This includes government, economics and political systems of distribution as well as the science and engineering required to extract energy and refine it for use. The fundamental idea is justice and fairness. Once a society has figured out a relatively stable system of allocation, we turn inward. Psychology is the study of our internal lives and the values we choose to live by. Collective learning has enabled factual knowledge to be passed down through generations, but each human being is born anew with basic instincts to distrust instruction and live by experience. So we grow: together and alone. Once mature, having a calibrated value system and with acceptance by the political system at large, we turn to the existential. Philosophy is reflection on what is means to be alive, on consciousness itself.

The study of consciousness seems to wrap itself around to the natural sciences. Physics suggests our mental state has a physical effect on the natural world, and Philosophy suggests the natural world is a projection of our mental selves. So the quest for living an examined life brings us back to the study of atomic particles. The vast majority of the universe's history was spent in the atomic domain: the birth, death, and resurrection of countless stars and planets. These meaningless cycles have given rise our arrival: the most complex social beings that have ever looked upon the universe, yet trapped in physical bodies as insignificant as specks of sand on the infinite shores of time. The universe beckons us to reconcile our enlightened mental selves to our ephemeral existence, to find meaning in a meaningless world.