AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“Chinese is one language that I will never learn.” I made several statements like this about the Chinese language and Chinese culture when I was in my early teens. I had no idea how wrong those words would turn out to be. After graduating from high school in White Rock, Canada in 1992, I was determined to study accounting, learn to speak Spanish, and travel frequently to Central and South America.
In order to save money for accounting courses, though, I needed to find a job. Therefore, I accepted an offer from a family friend to frame houses over the summer. My plan to study accounting gradually faded away and the “short-term job” to save money for college turned into six years of building and renovating homes for a big-hearted Italian.
Although I had given up my plan to become an accountant, my desire to study foreign languages and travel never died. I studied Spanish on my own and practiced with Spanish-speaking friends for the first four years that I was out of high school. I travelled to Venezuela for a month in 1994 and to Ecuador for three months in 1996 where I was able to experience firsthand the beautiful cultures of Latin America. I had officially contracted the “travel bug” and my desire to learn from foreign cultures was only getting stronger.
Although I loved working with Dominic, I decided to stop working in construction and start my own window cleaning business in 1998. My friend, Bob Heighton, was earning over 400 dollars a day with a very simple business plan and he encouraged me to do the same. I saw this as an excellent way to save more money for travelling and to free up time in my schedule for volunteer work. Therefore, I began dedicating 17 hours a week to volunteer bible teaching in the same year that I made the transition from being a carpenter to the owner of a small business.
Just two years later, my window-cleaning business had grown to the point that I needed to hire sub-contractors. Income from the business enabled me to save enough money to buy a rental property in Vancouver. Having several reliable people to help me serve my customers also allowed me the opportunity to travel again. Therefore, in the summer of 2000, I decided to leave my home and business behind and do full-time volunteer work in Malaysia for six months.
Living in multi-cultured Malaysia was quite a shock to my system. But after six months, I decided to extend my stay in order to benefit more fully from the experience. To support myself financially, I worked part-time as a Business English Advisor for Japanese companies that were based in Kuala Lumpur.
At the midway point of my time in Malaysia, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to learn one of the local languages. My choices were to study Malay, Tamil, or Chinese. Neither Malay nor Tamil are widely spoken outside of Asia so I decided to start learning the language that I had always said I would never learn: Chinese. Living in Southeast Asia helped me to realize that Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese had a very different sound and that Mandarin Chinese was much “easier on the ears”. Therefore, in 2001, I began learning simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese and still had no idea how much this decision would change my life.
At the end of my second year in Malaysia, I came to the conclusion that I needed to be immersed in the Chinese language if I was ever to truly speak it fluently. Therefore, in 2002, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan, to focus on learning this difficult language. I continued devoting 17 hours a week to volunteer bible teaching while teaching English 15 hours a week to support myself. But now I was also attending 10 hours of Chinese lessons each week which continued for the next three years.
By the end of my third year in Taiwan, I was speaking and reading Mandarin Chinese with greater ease. With every passing month I felt more comfortable living and working outside of North America. Teaching English as a second language had become my new profession so I decided to sell the window cleaning business and focus on life in Asia. In 2005, I said goodbye to my dear friends in Taiwan and moved to the bustling metropolis of Shanghai, China.
Unlike Taipei, Shanghai was a city full of entrepreneurial expatriates who were managing remote offices or starting their own businesses. In time, I also saw an opportunity to start up another business. In June of 2008, two friends and I formed an importing business based in Berkeley, California. In the beginning, my duties were limited to product sourcing and inspecting finished goods at factories throughout China. But as the need arose, I expanded my duties to overseeing marketing, purchasing, and eventually sales.
The cost of living in Shanghai had roughly doubled over the first six years that I lived there. This meant that teaching English for 15 hours a week was no longer able to cover all of my expenses and the business needed capital to continue growing. To complicate matters, the Chinese government was constantly changing the requirements for foreigners working in China. This meant that I needed to fly out of China at least every 60 days in order to renew my visa. As a result, I decided to leave the instability of English teaching and take a salaried management position at Matthews Metals in Suzhou, China.
When I began working for Matthew Metals in June of 2012, few of us were aware that the joint-venture business was on the verge of losing its biggest customer since IBM was already seeking a new supplier. I had visited many factories before this point as a buyer but I had never worked on the inside of a factory in any capacity before. Helping the factory to reach the standards expected of IBM was an extremely challenging, but satisfying experience. My language skills and problem-solving skills were being tested to an entirely new level. When I left the job in 2013, just one year later, Matthews Metals had regained quality consistency and had been awarded an extended line of products by IBM.
By January of 2014, Eco-gecko Products was growing steadily and it was becoming increasingly difficult in Shanghai to find teaching work without an accredited university degree. So after 13 years of exciting life in Asia, it was time for me to return to North America and revive the plan of completing college. I decided to move to Berkeley, California and study Business Administration at Heald College in Concord. After completing an Associate Degree in Applied Science in January of 2015, I took six months off to adjust to married life and then transferred to Eastern Oregon University. I am already using the business skills that I am learning at EOU to expand Eco-gecko’s product lines and improve market penetration. After I complete a Bachelor’s Degree, I plan to move back to Asia with my wife to continue a satisfying life filled with foreign cultures, volunteer work, and an entrepreneurial spirit.