I was born in Toronto to a pair of Chinese-Canadian immigrants who worked hard and had great expectations. At the age of ten I asked my mom for swimming lessons. She dropped me off at the pool, and after two hours of swimming, I realised my mom hadn’t signed me up for recreational fun, but competitive swimming. The next three years of my life were devoted to waking at 5am and competing in the pool for two hours everyday. It wasn’t enough to swim, you had to train to be the best at it. On top of this I was sent to extracurricular math classes (Top Class AND Kumon) and piano lessons. I did not like this, at all. But I’ve come to appreciate that it was a disciplined love that kept my two older sisters and I out of trouble. It gave us high standards and we each went on to higher education to pursue respectable professions because of it (two lawyers and a chartered accountant). Though in my case, there was a twist. My parents have always been supportive of what I do, which has given me the leeway to follow my dreams.

In my adolescence I had varied interests. I dabbled in a life of television as a child actor and singer. In academia, I was drawn towards philosophy, psychology, ancient history and law. A clever way to combine these interests, I thought, would be journalism. Specifically, broadcast journalism was an amalgamation between performance and investigative story-telling that appealed to me. Following in the footsteps of New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and CNN’s international correspondent Michael Ware, I figured I would get a top notch legal education (satisfy the parents) and then pursue my dreams (become a broadcast journalist). After all, both professions are interchangeable. They “require superior research and writing skills, critical thinking, and knowledge of government and the legal system.”

I fast-tracked high school and undergrad, took the LSAT at the tender age of nineteen, and became one of the youngest students admitted into Canada’s top law school, Osgoode Hall Law School. I received a world class education from professors who wrote the book on Canadian constitutional law. My peers elected me into student government where I served as vice-president of the Legal and Literature Society for two years. Travel opportunities came in the form of exchanges to Hamburg, a French language study at La Sorbonne in Paris, and a scholarship to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a summer.

While living abroad I spent my weekends travelling. Visiting distant worlds soon became second nature. In the Middle East I hitchhiked through the West Bank, scaled the red rose city of Petra, scuba dived in the Red Sea, and kissed the sphinx of Giza. During my school breaks, I took extended trips to Africa, Asia and South America. I hiked the Rongai route up Mount Kilimanjaro, slept to the lullaby of hyenas surrounding my tent in the Serengeti (no leaving for the bathroom on those nights), bungee jumped into the Nile River and witnessed the Nairobi election riots of 2007; ask me one day about dancing in a Peruvian village, sleeping in a reed hut without electricity or running water, tracing the lines of Nazca or hiking the Andes to the see the sunrise over Manchu Picchu; or let me galvanize you with tales of falling off the Great Wall of China, climbing the temples of Angkor Wat, and making road kill of a kangaroo in the outback (natives confiscated the jack for dinner). The only continent missing so far is Antarctica…

Then I graduated, completed my articles in a real estate law firm and became a lawyer admitted to the bar of Upper Canada in 2007.

Yet something was missing. People evolve and that dream to pursue journalism was churning in the back of my mind. The question wasn’t if, but when. Sitting in my office at a boutique corporate law firm, I stumbled upon a brochure for a broadcast journalism program at Seneca College. It was starting in a couple of weeks. No better time than now, I thought. I left my stable job and steady income for a shot at my dream.

At Seneca I learned from a roster of broadcast news veterans all the ins and outs of shooting video, linear editing, camera angles, interviewing, script writing, and focussed story-telling. When I completed the program, I accepted a prestigious internship with the Associated Press Television Network in Paris, France. It was my first taste of real journalism. It was invigorating. I did up to three stories a day, attending press conferences at Palais de l’Élysées in the morning, interviewing the French Minister of Finance Christine LaGarde and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner in the afternoon and reporting on France’s reaction to the 2008 US presidential elections at night. I covered strikes and demonstrations, Chanel fashion events and movie stars, and interviewed directors and policy advisors at the OECD and World Bank. I absolutely loved it and it entirely confirmed my desire to pursue journalism as a career. I followed up my internship with another one at WHDH-TV NBC 7 in Boston, MA.

Soon I was offered a job at Metro Networks as a radio news anchor and traffic producer/reporter in Boston. That’s where I am today, busy producing traffic reports for WCVB-TV ABC 5, broadcasting traffic to Sirius Satellite and Cape Watch Traffic, training to do airborne traffic reports, as well as writing and anchoring the news for three stations across New England.

The path continues…