I left BMGF (the Gates Foundation) at the end of 2020, after a 5+ year stretch there.
The departure is indirectly related to COVID-19. Rolling backward a few years, in 2016 we moved to Beijing with three young children (all under 6 then) for my role at BMGF China. In the same year my husband and I started ETU school in Beijing. He has been running it full time since then while I’ve been the voice of it in many ways, as I write about my views on education outside of the BMGF capacity. Yes, I’ve been blogging (and I know this word dates me) on “non-work related stuff” since McKinsey days.
At the end of 2019, we took the kids back to the US for New Year break. Then COVID started in Wuhan, then the whistle blower Dr. Li WenLiang died, then my very short writing commemorating him on our WeChat blog 奴隶社会 went viral and was promptly censored. Then our return flight was cancelled, then visas expired……one thing leading to another, I decided not to return to Beijing and leave BMGF at the end of 2020.
This was not planned, and not easy – as is true for all whose lives were impacted by the pandemic.
While I worked remotely for a large part of 2020 (so was everybody else I know), my husband went back to Beijing and continued to run the school there (online and offline with little predictability). The school has ~400 kids in Beijing and Guangzhou, and that is ~400 families. Therefore, despite all the difficulties, financially and many other unspeakable ones, we decided to keep running the school (while mostly my husband and team “run” it). Leaving BMGF is tough for me too, especially leaving my team – I keep dearly the album they sent me with pictures over the 5 years.
What has happened since then?
I didn’t start another “job”, as I know too well being a mother of 3 is more than a full-time job on its own, especially as the only parent now. So, for the first time in 20 years, I decided to take a break, and follow the flow of life.
Where did the flow take you? You may ask.
A random walk leading to this write up you are reading, I guess.
First, I was able to do a lot of random reading, a luxury I seldomly enjoyed before. One of the branches of reading is history. Reading the history of the world and China, especially the stretch since the 1900s explained many seemingly bizarre things happening today. History repeats itself, and it is way too painful when you really understand what this sentence means.
Then I was able to write a bit.
CITIC Press, one of the leading publishers in China published a book on ETU school in 2020. I then wrote and published the book Sources of our Strength (力量从哪里来)。Although writing book provides negligible income for non-authors like myself, it did reach a good number of people, especially women, and they found it useful at times, so it’s not a complete waste of public attention . The book will also be published in Traditional Chinese in Taiwan soon, and I consider this a great honor. As, despite the many challenges it faces, Taiwan holds a deep sense of hope for people like myself in many ways.
Promoting the book pushed me to the realm of live casting, a bizaar world where tens of thousands of people watch you talk to your phone. This is one of the “silver lining industries” post COVID I guess, people are forced to get used to doing many things online, this being one of them.
Live casting led to the flourishing of Nuoyan Community – which we started as an online readers community in 2017 and now have ~20K members worldwide. For people in China, if you have wifi (and don’t talk about “unsafe topics”), it seems easier to connect with another person across the globe than with your “locked down” neighbors nearby.
In the community and livestreams, I was asked many “meaningless” questions:
– What to do when I feel stuck?
– What to do when I feel busy but feel lost at the same time?
– How do I deal with restlessness and anxiety? And for a lot of Chinese, anger?
I have these questions myself. To be honest, watching the world and China unfold in the past few years dragged me in an overwhelming sense of anger and sadness.
How to be with my anger, and how to “unstuck” and flow again?
Having asked myself these questions for a good decade, I understand that to get to any meaningful answer, the only path is to look inward. I started reading Thich Nhat Hanh again, including the small pocket book “How to fight”.
I was also able to interview Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, dabbed as the “Happiest Man on Earth”, and Paul MacGowa, the director who made the remarkable documentary following Mingyur Rinpoche’s 4+ year journey as a wandering Yogi (feeding himself through begging). If you have a chance to watch it, you will know that although these stories seem so remote, at a deep level they are powerfully relevant to the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.
I started a youtube channel to put my interviews there.
In July I was able to visit and interview Michael Singer – thanks to the rare opportunity he provided, as I learned the last person he said Yes to an interview is Oprah Winfrey! My write-up after reading his book Surrender Experiment led to the publishing of the book’s Chinese translation in 2019. And I hope I can help promote his new book when the translation is done. It’s a remarkable gift to whoever reads it.
All these experiences led me to look back at the many struggles I used to face in workplace and in life in the past 20+ years through a different lens. And I know I’m not alone, because everywhere I “go” – book talks, livestreams, education groups, I receive questions of similar nature.
So in Spring 2022 I created a 6-week online experience, intertwining an external theme – understanding the broader history and social context for the workplace culture and ethnic/racial challenges in America, espeically for immigrants like myself, and an internal theme – understanding truth about ourselves- our internal barriers and how authentic growth takes place. In addition to my live sessions over the 6 weeks, I invited 4 remarkable individuals as guest speakers.
This workshop is an interesting fruit of my past experience in leadership roles and the random walks I’ve taken, and the response from the 100+ participants was overwhelming and humbling. After its conclusion, there is a strong collective urge to go “deeper” – therefore I created a Level II workshop in the summer of 2022. And after that, the momentum pushed us to create the Abundance Circle, a community where people can support each others’ continued growth with monthly and weekly activities. I’m immersed in this circle as well.
Although all the above may seem wonderful, as a working and practically “single” parent, the truth of life is, the majority of my time is spent on — surprise surprise — being a mother! My kids are aged 8, 10 and 12 now, and I was quite taken back one day when I realize that I spend 5+ hours every day driving them around. And this is not counting other unpaid work all mothers do. I have my mother’s help too so we are talking about two unpaid women here! On this big topic, I did an interview with Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women. It’s a fascinating book and the interview will be posted on my youtube when we finish editing.
So… with everything going on, I have the capacity to only do two 6-week workshops a year. The next and final one is coming up on Oct 29th. And yes you can be with me “live” for 6 weeks. More than two hundred people have joined my workshops in its first run and found it life changing. If you are intrigued by my experience and insights back to authentic workplace success and life journey, I invite you to join me. If you are looking for an opportunity to reset your trajectory from inside out, this is possibily the time.
Details of the workshop curriculum can be found in the link above, and same as last time, I invited 4 distinctive guest speakers, and they are:
Professor Deborah Davis.
Dr. Davis joined the Yale Department of Sociology as a lecturer in 1978 and retired as Full Professor in 2018 during which time she held fellowships from the National Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Aging, Luce Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the ACLS. During her forty years on the Yale faculty Davis served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Center for Study of Globalization , Chair of the Department of Sociology, and Co-Chair of the Women Faculty Forum. Since 2016 she has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and on faculty of the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. She also serves on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly and The China Review and is a Trustee of the Yale China Association. Currently she is working with Professors Pierre Landry (CUHK) and Chen Juan (HKPU) on the social consequence of uneven urbanization for residents of Chinese cities and with Professor Tian Feng at Fudan University on marriage and housing arrangements among the 80后 generation in Shanghai.
Dr. Liu Yu 刘瑜 is a Chinese writer and political scientist. She is an associate professor of political science at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in political science from Renmin University of China in BeiJing’s Haidian District in 1996 and 1999 respectively. From 2000 to 2007, she lived in the United States, where she obtained a PhD in political science from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.From 2007 to 2010, she was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Water Level of Ideology and Details of Democracy.
Patrick Campiani is the founder of Performance to Potential . With a broad business background in consulting, entrepreneurship and general management, Patrick consults for leaders and organizations around the world. He has a degree in Industrial Engineering and two decades of practice in the fields of Leadership, Organizational Culture and L&D. He is the executive coach for YINUO for years.
Sally Piao started working for Oracle Corporation in 1993 as an application developer and rose to the rank of Vice President of development in 2011. She built and managed an international team of ~200 engineers across many locations in the US, India, China and Ireland. In her team’s own words, she brought on outstanding vision, inspiration, leadership, and commitment to excellence. Sally joined Intel’s silicon Design Engineering Group as a Vice President and General Manager in 2018. The HW architecture and SW solutions her team produces are key foundational elements of Intel’s product execution and delivery. Sally holds MSEE from the California Institute of Technology and BSEE from the University of Science and Technology of China.
You may wonder why I invited sociologists and political scientists as guest speakers to a “career” workshop. Well, because, as tested true in my earlier workshops, only when we have a broader picture of the situation we are in, we can learn the true nature of the challenges we face, and hence develop wisdom from deep inside to go beyond them.
For people who grew up in a suppressive culture like my own, there are lot of history that impact us consciously and unconsciously. But if we draw on these to understand how our self-perceptions are shaped, transformation will start. So, I want to share with you this:
Authentic growth is a science, not a myth.
History is a mirror, not tales.
Flourishing of life starts with understanding and connecting with our past, both personal and collective, while letting go of them at the same time.
If you want to give yourself this opportunity understand the science, to use the mirror, and to embark on path to go beyond ourselves, I will meet you on Oct 29th in my workshop.
