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• Creative Director. Born in Singapore...

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  Creative Director. Born in Singapore. grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, (preposterous, i know!) where i was a self-hating chinese person for a long time, because endlessly tortured for being the only chinese kid in school for years. until i flew the coop to new york for college (columbia). (that was a new period of acting out!) after a brief stint in singapore (because i had some time to kill after graduating early from college), like a good immigrant daughter, i went on to attend law school (university of pennsylvania). a good thing anyway, because, until then, i couldn't think, let alone read or write, in a straight line. (it's still a problem, it seems). to make a really long story short, i moved to hk 13 years ago because i didn't know what to do with my life in the us, confronted with the prospect of a mediocre and reluctant career as a lawyer. somehow, i got into the garment business when i arrived here. after 6 months of schlepping to shenzhen almost every day, my "partner" decided to return back to the us, leaving me at a loose end. i was planning to start my own jewelry brand, when, as luck would have it, a french shoe designer asked me to head up his asian business. of course, i said yes, and one thing led to another. and this is another really long story i won't condense into this space NOW. but here i am now, the creative director of shanghai tang. the trajectory of my life has been like a ride inside a pinball machine, with dumb luck, carrying me willy nilly from one project or company to another, but i take my hat off to hk for giving me the ride of life. it's still happening. and that's why i'm here.
  
  on a more prosaic note, i've been profiled on good morning america, elle magazine (US), time magazine, the new york times, wwd and appeared on the cover of fast company magazine, in connection with the turnaround of shanghai tang, in recent years. these days, though, i'm pursuing quite a few new projects, foremost among which are my pro bono championship of JUCCCE (joint us chinese cooperation on clean energy) which is a non-profit org, focused on china, dedicated to reducing demand for energy, as well as increasing the supply of alternative fuel sources.
  stay tuned for more on my other projects in the next few months....
  
  
  On Music:
  
  on music, i like everything. especially hard-edged rock music. i love linkin park, killing joke, PIL, marilyn manson, henry rollins, rage against the machine, beastie boys. but, when i had my son, i shelved all pop and rock music, on purpose (to eschew the PLR). if you enjoy pop music, with its easy, saccharine gratifications of singalong choruses repeated every 10 seconds, your music appreciation muscles become flabby very quickly. thus, i'm usually listening to chopin, beethoven or rachmaninoff piano music. i've been to mars and back with music, though: i started listening to astor piazzolla (bandoneon-playing god of tango music) and nusrat fateh ali khan (ecstatic sufi singer) before they were both signed on to real world records by peter gabriel 15 years ago and used to go to the knitting factory (experimental jazz and rock music club in manhattan) at least once a week before i moved to hk. the reason i don't listen to too much music is because i love it way too much and it occludes every other sensory experience when i am. if i could be reborn, i would be in the music, instead of fashion industry. that last statement, alone, speaks volumes about my love of music. that said, though, i don't have time to discover any new music, which kind of sucks. plus, i find that, in hk, people tend to like much softer music than i do. (i LOATHE acoustic music, female singing and vocals in general.)
  
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  On Films:
  
  i don't make time to watch videos, except on very rare occasions. either it's harry potter (with my eight-year old son) or a movie with ground-breaking cinematography ("300"). (i'm a nutter for reviews, so nothing gets watched unless it gets a "fresh" from rottentomatoes.com. i'm not saying that to flatter the alivenotdead crew. but to explain that i hate wasting time on mediocrity, in any way, shape or form, whether it be a movie, a meal or a person.) literally, i haven't watched a lot of movies since my enforced art house period, when my father brought me to movies like "aguirre, the wrath of god" and "throne of blood", when i was in my early teens. on top of that, i tend to be very dismissive of pop culture in general (because there's nothing worse than taking the path of least resistance ("PLR"), which is what pop culture is by definition: the lowest common denominator of enjoyment)

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• Occupation:  Designer
• Gender: Female
• Total visits: 35,923

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