In late August 2003, on a chilly Edmonton evening, I was dropped off in the Safeway parking lot by Southgate Centre with two large suitcases and very little idea what would come next.
A University of Alberta graduate student had picked me up from the airport, drove me to the parking lot, unloaded my bags and left. I was standing in a city I had never seen before, 9,000 kilometres from my home in Xi’an, China, with no clear sense of where to go, no place to live and knowing little English to help me figure out how to begin. I had arrived in Canada with very little certainty and one simple goal: find a way to survive graduate school. I came to the U of A to begin a master’s in library and information studies (MLIS), drawn by the university’s strong reputation and a field that seemed to sit at the intersection of knowledge, access, technology and services, even though at the time I did not yet fully understand what librarianship meant or how I would fit into it.
Like many international students, I spent those early months trying to make tuition, rent and groceries stretch just far enough to get through the month. I stayed in the smallest basement room I could find and cut corners to living standards wherever I could. I remember buying a large pack of chicken thighs because it was the cheapest, stewing the whole pack at once, and rationing it so carefully to make it last the week that by the middle of it, it had all gone bad. I remember winter evenings in Edmonton, walking more than 20 blocks home with groceries, fingers numb from the cold, because I could not justify spending $2 on bus fare. I did not think of this as resilience at the time. It was simply what I had to do.
I grew up with a quiet but relentless rule: Don’t complain. Effort is always expected, good outcomes do not simply fall into your grasp and when something falls short, you work harder and do better. So that is what I did. I worked multiple jobs so I did not have to ask my parents for more money. I cut down sleep to catch up on recorded lectures because language was a barrier. I had to relearn how to write, how to think, and how to be a student in a completely different academic and cultural environment.
At the time, it felt like survival. Looking back, those years taught me way more than I realized. They taught me patience, to make peace with discomfort and to keep grinding. Long before I thought of myself as a leader, I was learning the habits that would later shape how I lead: staying composed in hard situations, making decisions without complete information and finding a way forward when challenges felt overwhelming.
My first job in the library began while I was still in school, as a student web assistant helping support the library website and digital collections as a part-time job to help cover tuition and living expenses. I did not think of it as the start of a career, but it gave me my first real sense of how much invisible work it takes to make knowledge usable and accessible to others.
As opportunities began to appear, I did not think of them as leadership. In many ways, I stumbled into the work that shaped it. I said yes to projects because they needed doing and stepped into difficult situations because someone had to. I often took on work before I felt ready because life had taught me that feeling ready is a luxury. It was also how my parents taught me to move through the world: You carry your share, do what needs to be done and do not stand back assuming someone else will step in. I was rarely the most confident, the loudest or the sharpest person in the room. I simply wanted to make things better. Because to me, being useful mattered more than being noticed.
The unexpected turning point in my career, and in my leadership, came when I was asked to lead a technology team at the U of A Library. I was leading IT professionals, first developers and programmers and later system administrators — people with technical depth I did not have and could not pretend to have, and people with strong opinions and confidence that could often clash. I was often the least technical person in the room, and everyone knew it.
That was uncomfortable, but it taught me valuable lessons. I learned that leadership was not about having the deepest expertise in the room; it was about being willing to admit what I did not know, ask better questions, listen carefully and create the conditions for other people to do their best work. That lesson did not come easily. I remember walking into rooms and feeling invisible. I remember saying something and watching it pass by, only to hear the same point land differently when someone else repeated it. I remember the quiet assumptions people made about Asian professionals: that we were hardworking and dependable, but not naturally assertive enough to lead.
But that is also just who I am. I grew up in a culture that taught me to listen before speaking, observe before asserting my own opinions, and trust that supporting others ultimately strengthens the whole. Those instincts can be easy to underestimate, even by me, especially in environments that often reward certainty, opinions and visible confidence. It took time for me to realize I should not keep treating those instincts as limitations or weaknesses. I did not need to become someone else who is louder, sharper or more assertive to lead well. I needed to lean more fully into who I already was, and what my culture and experiences had shaped me to be.
My leadership journey may have been accidental, but how I ended up in an academic library was not. It became the place where my work, my values and my sense of belonging came together most clearly.
The library was one of the first places on campus where as an international student, I felt I could belong before I fully knew how. It gave me space before I had certainty and access before I had confidence. Libraries are one of the clearest expressions of public good in a university. They are built on values that have always mattered deeply to me: sharing knowledge, supporting others and creating access and space in ways that enable people to grow and succeed. Those same values shaped how I learned to live and lead, and why I found belonging there.
Over time, that sense of belonging grew into something more: a sense of responsibility to the place and the people who made that kind of belonging possible.
In July 2026, I will step into the role of interim vice-provost (Library and Museums) and chief librarian at the U of A. It is a role with a broader mandate, with the library, museums and U of A press as the three pillars of the portfolio, and with responsibility for stewarding some of the university’s core academic and cultural infrastructure through a period of constant change. But even as the scope shifts, what the role asks of me feels familiar: to lead with steadiness, to create clarity where there is uncertainty and to help make it possible for others to do their best work in service of something larger than themselves.
I often think about how different that path might have felt if I had seen more people like me standing at the front of the room. In a profession where Asian librarians make up only a small share of the field, and an even smaller share of its leadership, it was easy to internalize the idea that people like me were more often expected to be dependable than directive, diligent than visible. It may not have changed the work itself, but it might have made the path feel a little less lonely. It may also have been easier to recognize earlier that the qualities often read as quiet, careful or deferential in people like me were not signs that we were meant to stay in the background, but could also be the foundation of how we lead.
I also hope what I share offers some encouragement to the quiet Asian kids sitting in the corner of their classrooms, reserved but thoughtful, wondering if they are too quiet to lead. If you learn to trust what is already in you, and lean into the parts of yourself you were taught to question, you may already carry more of what leadership requires than you realize.
