New Horizons — Shenzhen pt. I
When I fly out of Vancouver, I always choose a window seat with the hope that our takeoff direction will give me one final look at the North Shore mountains receding into the distance. I study every peak and valley intensely, trying to memorize the image well enough to last until my return. The ritual of packing my bags, saying goodbye to my family and friends, and studying the mountain skyline has become a bittersweet ritual in the past few years. I reflect back on the things I’ll miss, I worry about challenges to come, and my imagination races with the potential of the coming adventure. Every year, the man on that flight changes; but that feeling always remains the same.
Those of you who know me may be surprised to learn that my most recent adventure brings me to Shenzhen, China. Some of you will remember me saying that I was madly in love with Japan, and that I had been studying Japanese on and off for two years. Others will have read the news sometime in the past quarter, and noticed a … complicated … diplomatic relationship between our two countries. Not to mention the incredible urbanization and tight control over public expression. Doesn’t sound like my kind of place, does it?
Well folks, life happened. My close friend from Queen’s offered me a position working for his rapidly growing company in Shenzhen… Which I declined, because I was totally obsessed with Japan, and changing a plan you’ve told dozens of friends and mentors about is frankly quite embarrassing. But shortly thereafter he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, despite all of my political misgivings. He started a new travel apparel company, and needed someone to help build an ethical and environmentally sustainable business model and supply chain. New start-up? Designing travel gear? Setting up a sustainable business from scratch?
How could I say no?
So I booked a one-way flight, memorized the mountain skyline one last time, and here I am living in Shenzhen. If you’ve done any research on Shenzhen, you’ll likely have the mental image I had before I arrived; a sickly looking Max living in a tiny shoebox apartment, lost in the concrete jungle of 13 million people, looking out into a smoggy haze. Well, the internet has failed to maintain a current image of this fishing village that grew to have a GDP larger than Hong Kong’s in three decades. I’m sure the older Cansbridge fellows will be chagrined to hear that my bedroom is actually the largest I have ever had, and I live in the beautiful tree-filled neighborhood of Shekou. My co-worker Jojo lives in the same complex as I do, and she’s a massive foodie, so I’ve been sampling all sorts of incredible food — and mangos are in season! Every morning we commute together on a hyper-fast subway which costs under a dollar, and she gives me a daily lesson in Mandarin. I’m a slow learner, but I can count to ten and order breakfast pretty dependably after two weeks. Everyone I work with is fluent, and they’re all wonderfully patient with my remarkably bad memory.
The story of how I wound up working in Asia begins in Toronto, in the wee hours of the morning on April 28th. After submitting the final assignment of my undergraduate degree, I was in a taxi on the way to the airport, and my cab driver was delivering a passionate lecture about America’s involvement in Afghanistan. I learned that he had been an undercover policeman in Afghanistan, his home country, but had had to leave after his cover was blown. I leaned forward, hanging on to every passionate word despite the ridiculously early hour. It hit me then, as it had often hit me before and been forgotten just as often, why I had poured so much energy into my time at Queen’s.
In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari quotes Wilhelm von Humbolt as saying that “the aim of existence is a distillation of the widest possible experience into wisdom”. I never thought I’d have anything in common with the man known as the grandfather of modern education, but this idea has been at the root of many of my decisions in the last five years. Upon realizing that my undergrad was an ideal low-risk environment to try crazy things, I began a long string of experiences in order to create the widest possible experience — two degrees, student government, running a café, a student chapter of an NGO, the rowing team… The list goes on. I only had the roughest idea of how they all fit together, but I knew one thing — that I would encounter many closed doors in my life, and that by collecting every possible key I could get my hands on, I would maximize my chances of achieving something worthwhile. Now, with the small amount of experience I have gained, my vision is a little more evolved.
With what I’ve learned, I have extended Humbolt’s idea a little further. The experiences we learn from are remarkable gifts, and with them comes the duty of reciprocity. There was no reason for me to win the ovarian lottery and wind up wealthy, white and healthy at Queen’s University, able to take advantage of all of these opportunities while this intelligent, passionate Afghani man fled his country in the throes of a brutal and senseless war to become a Toronto taxi driver. Any wisdom gained by a life well lived is owed back to the world many times over — these remarkable opportunities I’ve been handed are built on the backs of many others. Knowledge of this unfair reality doesn’t mean I know what to do about it, or how I will pay it back. I’m searching for those answers. But I have realized a fundamental limitation of the education I received in Kingston; nothing in my lived experience can teach me to understand how Afghani refugees, Bolivian quinoa farmers, or Chinese bureaucrats view the world. And because I want to serve humanity, and not just Queen’s students, a certain amount of perspective broadening is required.
My Afghani taxi driver dropped me off, and I boarded a plane to San Francisco to meet my new friends and idols — the 2019 Cansbridge Fellowship cohort. The coming week would take us all over the Bay area, meeting incredible entrepreneurs and the companies they built. Soon afterward, we were meant to fly off to Asia to take up various jobs we had found for the summer. My new best friends flew off to Singapore, Jakarta, Tokyo, and just about any other Asian city you can name.
Ever the contrarian, I flew to Vancouver, and bought my first home instead. In a rare moment of honestly acknowledging my limits, I received permission to defer my Cansbridge internship to the fall. I needed to spend the summer overcoming the brick wall of burnout I’d run into sometime between flight AC106 and my “A Christmas Carol” taxi ride. I didn’t know it at the time, but that summer I would also struggle with an unfamiliar form of (what I think was) depression, that sapped my motivation to zero for nearly three months.
But that came later. First I bought a home — a beautiful white 2017 Ford Transit, a cargo van with a roof so high I could stand up in it and balance a fishbowl on my head. If I wanted to — which I don’t. It’s very difficult to get water out of the new insulation, much less a goldfish. I had been dreaming about layouts and adventures for months, and in the spirit of the previous year I had decided that this new chapter of my life couldn’t wait. Before you say it, yes, I know it would have made far more financial sense to wait until I returned from Asia. But sometimes financial sense doesn’t factor very highly in my list of priorities. Sorry, mom!
A big part of my motivation to buy the van and build an entire tiny home from scratch was one lesson I wanted to teach myself; or rather, a habit I wanted to unlearn. Engineering school gives you a wonderful series of opportunities to plan projects, but actually executing on them is a rarity. I recognized that I had become so much of a dreamer that I had outstripped my ability to actually execute on my dreams. I needed a difficult, hands on project which would require me to learn a host of skills, from electrical installation to plumbing. Hence, the van.
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t learn electrical installation or plumbing, unfortunately. It turns out 5 years of conditioning is pretty difficult to unlearn, particularly while struggling with your mental health. After some severely delayed insulation shipments and several sweaty nights trying to figure out how the hell carpentry worked, I found myself with a mostly empty van two months after buying it. But even with the very basic facilities of a mattress, a cooler, and a propane camp stove, I still got a sense for how incredible of a lifestyle awaits me upon my return to Canada. Trips down to the Olympic Peninsula, up the Sea to Sky corridor countless times, and out to Tofino via Denman Island all centred around a wonderful feeling of community with my travel partners. Adventures in a tiny home force you into a type of closeness which is hard to come by in our normal lives. And all that time spent with all of those wonderful people, especially my family, finally pushed me up over that insurmountable wall of burnout and despondency — just in time for the end of the summer, and my flight to China.
The question of how I want to uphold my duty to society still guides my plans for the future, but for now my sight is focused sharply on the next four months. I’ve adopted the simple mantra of “work hard and be kind”. Humble goals I don’t always fulfill; but I am reveling in the ability to focus all of my efforts on one project, rather than bouncing around between a half dozen as I did throughout my undergrad. For my first real 9–5, this ain’t so bad. We’re building a Kickstarter campaign for an awesome pair of travel pants as our flagship product, which subtly integrates art from Peng Benhao, a wonderful Chinese artist/rockstar, into the design. My colleagues have blown me away with their receptivity to even my most radical sustainability pitches. Like, how often does someone pay you to figure out how to create a circular economy business model for a pair of pants?
Of course, I won’t pretend there aren’t challenges. Every step I take is captured by three security cameras, and more than one attempted conversation about the unrest across the water has ended with a glassy-eyed response along the lines of “there is no war in Ba Sing Se”. I have much to say about that, but two weeks is not long enough to formulate thoughts and opinions worthy of your time. More to follow in subsequent posts though, of course — and you can always send me a private message to hear my take in a less public locale.
I can say one thing of the tiny corner of China I have seen so far: I love it here. I feel energized and revitalized by the relentless pace of this city. I can’t believe the trail of good luck which has lead me here — and I am so grateful for my family, my friends, and to the Cansbridge community for getting me on yet another flight away from my treasured skyline, and into a distinctly new one.
Edit: September 23rd. I think I’ll keep putting these posts out — you can expect to hear from me two or three more times by the end of the year. If you’re interested in hearing from me when they come out, you can sign up here!
This is Part I of a series covering my experience as a Cansbridge fellow in Shenzhen. Part II is about the environmental considerations of overseas travel, and how I’m dealing with those on this trip. Part III walks you through my day-to-day life and how the first three months looked. Thanks for following me on this adventure!
