A Year Measured in Bottles
I. The Early Hours
At four in the morning, the streets of Calgary are mostly empty. That’s when my grandfather slips out on his bike with two garbage bags and a mental map of alleys. I used to go with him. The air smelled like stale beer and curdled milk; our fingers stung in the cold as we fished bottles from blue bins and loaded them into a shopping cart we’d commandeered from the Safeway. We made about $250 a week that way. I was eight.
He still goes. I’ve tried to stop him. If I take the chain off his bike, he simply goes on foot. Some rhythms run deeper than reason.
II. The Immigrant Equation
I was born in 2002 to Chinese immigrants who came to Canada for a beginning they couldn’t find at home. My father survived Tiananmen and rebuilt as a chemical engineer; my mother worked as an accountant, then chose to stay home. Our apartment was small and steady: the hiss of a pressure cooker, the scent of steamed rice, Mandarin voices humming from the TV. Stability feels permanent when you’re a child—until it isn’t.
In 2006 we couldn’t make rent. I was sent to live with my uncle in China and did preschool there while my father found work in Alberta’s oil sands.
We reunited in Canada, but distance stayed. Fort McMurray was seventeen hours from Vancouver. Visits were rare. My father became a presence in stories more than in rooms. Later we moved to Calgary to be closer, and even then he was the ghost we waited for.
In our house, time was money in the most literal sense. You sold hours for dollars; the way to raise the price of an hour was to raise your skill. That was the strategy: get as educated as possible, spend less of your life for more return.
III. A Hunger for Greatness
Western Canada High School was my first explicit bet on that idea. It’s the crown jewel of Calgary’s public system, on par with private schools that cost sixty thousand a year. I chose it despite a three-hour commute because I wanted to be around greatness.
I stacked my calendar with labs and science fairs, debate and Model UN. One result cut deepest: ninth at the Canadian Biology Olympiad. Top four go to the International Biology Olympiad (IBO). I wanted that seat. I didn’t get it.
A classmate did. Canada selected mostly on how well you did at theory, but I’d ranked first in lab work instead. My classmate excelled on paper, struggled at the bench, and later went to Harvard off the IBO title. I went to McGill—with a chip I carried like a spare organ.
IV. The Lab Years
My plan at McGill was not subtle: finish undergrad in two years, a PhD in two more, and earn a doctorate before my former rival finished college. I nailed the first part, then discovered academia’s quiet sterility. Startups, by comparison, felt like electricity arcing through a room.
So I founded McGill’s iGEM team. We had no lab, no funds, and no playbook. We built all three. I raised tens of thousands, trained novices into killers, slept more in the lab than my bed. The Chinese are famous for 9-9-6; I lived 7 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. We made the global top ten in 2022. In 2023, the team hit number one worldwide—the first time for Canada and the only North American team to do it in a decade. I’d already graduated, but the foundation held.
Then I was out. The administration decided my standards made the environment “hostile.” On paper, I resigned. In reality, I was forced to step away.
It was the hardest kind of loss: not a failure of execution, but a failure to reconcile values. I learned what I needed to learn. Titles can be gamed; merit can’t. And leadership is often punished before it’s studied.
V. A Family Fractures
Meanwhile, my father was still a thousand miles away slaving away in Fort MacMurray. One day he fell for an online scam—more than three hundred thousand dollars gone, fifty thousand of it meant for my college education. We remortgaged the house. My parents’ marriage cracked. My father retreated deeper into work. We spoke less.
I can only imagine the shame. Years of life sold off in eight-hour blocks, erased by a stranger with a script.
When I finished at McGill, I skipped convocation and got on a plane to China. A startup accelerator had accepted me; investors handed me $150,000 for seven percent of a startup I hadn’t yet built. I pivoted relentlessly and eventually set up in a biomanufacturing lab in Beijing. The future felt wide open, despite all that had happened.
VI. The Call
On August 15, 2023, my father texted me for the first time in almost a year. “Son, the doctors think it’s cancer”. Ten days later I was home. At the airport, my mother told me it was terminal.
I held his hand in the hospital, told him I loved him, told him I never blamed him for the money. At 10:27 PM on August 27—three days before my twenty-first birthday—I watched him take his last breath.
Grief rearranges you. It doesn’t ask permission.
I wish I told my father I loved him more often when he was still with me. That’s a regret I’ll take to my own grave.
VII. Building Again
I stayed near my mom. It didn’t feel right to leave her when my father had just passed. I found cheap lab space in Calgary and built again—consumer biotech this time. In July 2024, I sold the company to a partner. We didn’t ring any bells. I just called my mother and sat in the car for a while.
After the sale, I joined a startup led by Dr. Li Li from the legendary Church Lab of Harvard. Anti-aging platform, serious science, real momentum. We aimed to raise a seed round in October. Then it slowed—lab politics, academic gravity. I left.
I tried again with friends on a slew of different ideas, but the chemistry wasn’t there. I left again.
VIII. The Pattern
If there’s a throughline, it’s this: distance and time trained me to value presence and speed. Growing up far from my father taught me that proximity matters. Watching my grandparents turn trash into rent taught me that dignity hides in stubborn work. Building a team from nothing taught me that cultures calcify quickly—if you don’t set standards, someone else’s standards will set you.
I despise the people who chase titles or maneuver through institutions. I never want to become them. You become a magnet for whatever you practice. If you practice talent, talent comes. If you practice virtue, virtue shows up. That’s not philosophy by the way, it’s a hiring strategy.
IX. The Return to Dawn
The last year has been a long circuit: labs and airports, hospitals and boardrooms, bets that worked and bets that didn’t. The ball is rolling now. I don’t know exactly where it will go. I do know the work feels true.
And at four in the morning, when I can’t sleep, I picture my grandfather pedaling into the dark with two empty bags and a route only he knows. The lesson isn’t subtle. You go out. You pick up what the world throws away. You make something of it. Then you go out again.