lost in translation

Grieving and finding my way back

“Grieve is an honour.”

Over dim sum, the lady who’s kind enough to take care of my cats in London said to me. She’s a reader of East to West and we met through Hampstead Women’s Club. I was seeking some sense of community outside of my career identity in the middle of startup chaos.

I probably hit rock bottom when I found myself in career limbo while grieving the loss of my grandmother. Even limbo is not quite the right word for what I was going through. My body and mind were asking for a real break, but I did not know how to give myself one. I was driven by the fear that if I stopped, even for a moment, I would fall behind.

Sometimes life takes us to places we’re meant to be even if we don’t fully know about it yet.

Despite being from Hong Kong, I was “made” and born in Shenzhen. It is where my parents met and fell in love. My father was determined to be with my mother, who grew up as the eldest daughter in a family with very little. She’s fiercely stubborn, a trait I unfortunately inherited. As a typical Northerner, she would fight for the bill even when she couldn’t really afford it.

Maybe that’s why Shenzhen felt different to me in the middle of my grief. It’s not fully home, but it is part of home. It’s where my story began.

Through a mutual connection, I found myself advising a Sequoia China-backed startup on growth. Despite being 8 years old, the company had just pivoted and was effectively starting over, building a new product from scratch.

It was refreshing to see how a Chinese startup operates from the inside and to be on the ground in Shenzhen, observing how much had changed as policymakers continued to deepen integration of the Greater Bay Area. Every policy change creates opportunities for some while imposing costs on others.

I know, as someone who grew up in local schools with limited educational and career support, that I have been one of the beneficiaries of these changes.

For much of Hong Kong’s history, native English proficiency was a scarce and valuable asset. Today, that advantage matters less than it once did. Increasingly, the people who thrive are those who can move seamlessly between worlds: Cantonese, Mandarin, and English; Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and the wider global economy.

Suddenly, the English language skills I spent years trying to perfect - and often felt insecure about in professional settings - mattered less than I thought they would. By pushing myself into the discomfort of navigating three languages, I had accidentally developed a different skill: the ability to move between languages. Between systems. Between cultures.

Between East and West.

And the art of translation is far more complex than simply converting words from one language to another. As I worked on building the voice behind social media campaigns, I realised that I was constantly translating, not just languages, but between entirely different groups of people.

Founders and investors. Engineers and customers. Especially developers.

I found myself obsessing over details: a bullet point became a “>” symbol on X, all-lowercase became a deliberate writing style, and every formatting choice became a signal of what audience you were trying to reach.

This newsletter took a three-month break. But fortunately, I’m surrounded by loving friends who continue to remind me that I am, at my core, a writer. Over the past few months, I became absorbed in tracking metrics, building campaigns, and helping tell other people’s stories. I spent so much time writing for chapters that weren’t mine to own that I almost forgot to keep writing my own.

So this is my attempt to find my way back.

Working in Shenzhen was unexpectedly healing for my grief. For the first time in a while, I felt energised again, because I was creating value through the things that came naturally to me: writing, connecting ideas, and translating between different worlds.

In the middle of that process, I found my voice again.

Grief is strange as it lives in ordinary moments.

I still lock myself in a phone booth at WeWork when I miss my grandmother, whether I’m in Shenzhen or London. Sometimes it’s ten o’clock at night. I’ll sit there for a while, letting the feeling pass through me. Then I’ll walk back to my desk and continue working as if nothing happened.

As time passed, I came to a simple conclusion that not everyone will agree with, and I no longer need them to:

Work is an honour.