COVER STORY
A QUEST FOR
LEARNING Leen Li shares her journey from a small town in rural China to a university in Halifax to Wealthsimple Foundation’s CEO in Toronto By Rebeca Kuropatwa
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oronto-based Leen Li is the newly appointed CEO of the Wealthsimple Foundation, an initiative of financial services company Wealthsimple, that helps children save for post-secondary education. Li has come a long way from her childhood home in a small, rural, coalmining town in northeast China. Born as the fifth child in a family with four daughters, Li’s parents and the rest of the small town she came from were convinced that this time the child would be a boy. Li’s parents even picked a boy’s name before she was born—Yong, meaning courage and bravery. Once she was born, they decided to keep her name.
account when I first came to Canada. I wasn’t able to say a lot of the things. My English was not that great. Moving to Halifax kind of forced me to learn English. I think that was a good call.” For many newcomers, their drive to move to Canada is connected to safety, freedom, and abundant space. For Li, though, she wanted to make the move to satisfy her curiosity and to learn about new things. “One thing my dad taught me is that people can take anything away from you, but the knowledge in your head, no one can take that away from you,” says Li.
A couple of months after she had moved to Canada though, Li picked the English name “Leen” for herself.
She adds that how to use that knowledge is up to us. You use it in your life, and you can change other people’s lives. The choice is ours to make.
“It’s not exactly like my last name, but it’s connected to my last name... something that reminds me of my heritage,” says Li of her choice.
“That was the critical thing for me, that I always wanted to learn more,” says Li. “Even right now when I think of my career in Canada, it’s always about questions I ask myself like: where is the next opportunity so that I can learn more of the things that I don’t know and want to learn?”
Li came to Canada as an international student when she was 25 years old, in 2001, with a finance degree and experience working at a bank and was her family’s first hope for a child with a master’s degree. “When I was working in China at a bank, one of the senior bank executives came back from the U.S. after he had earned a master’s in education,” says Li. “And he really took a different approach in the ways he managed the company. I wanted to be able to learn that myself, to be able to do something different.”
Once Li completed her studies in Halifax, she decided to apply for permanent residence and stay in Canada. Li made her way to Toronto, and her first autumn there brought her first Canadian job, working as a junior accountant at a local tech company.
Li opted to go to Halifax to earn her master’s degree, as it made the most sense financially, and the school offered smaller classrooms, enabling her to get more individualized learning from her professor. There too, she found herself to be the only Chinese person, making it so she had to learn English well to be able to communicate effectively.
But, being a people person, Li felt the need for more personal interaction in her workplace. She had some interaction with others, but often found that working at a tech company, a lot of the communication was done via screen, with face-to-face communication not quite common. This led her to return to the financial services industry – the sector she used to work in China before she came to Canada. Li took on managing small and larger companies, until the CEO of the tech company offered her a position in a new tech company he was in the process of building.
“Funny story,” says Li. “It took me – a banker – two hours to open a bank
“So, I joined his new company [in Toronto] and I enjoyed the technology
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CANADIAN IMMIGRANT Volume 18 Issue 1 | 2021
