Shanghai - My First Expat Assignment

In 2009 while I was working in the international tax team at the Deloitte Chicago office, the opportunity came up for me to have an expat assignment in Shanghai.

 

I cherished the opportunity to spend some time working in China. Originally I am from Beijing and after many years of being in the USA, acquiring my master's degree in accounting, working with an asset management firm and then with Deloitte, I thought it was a good point in my career to spend some time in China.

 

I had a great work experience on this expat assignment, it was great being in the middle of all those exciting deals. I had the opportunity to work directly with a partner in the firm who was also expatriated from the US to the Deloitte Shanghai office and this was also his first expat assignment. In addition to my professional skills, my Chinese language skills and the understanding of both Western and Chinese cultures gave me the ability to contribute great value to our team when serving US multinational clients operating in China and Chinese outbound investment into the USA.

 

I gained unique experiences from working on US-China cross-border transactions, I saw the rapid growth of China's outbound investment projects and US multinational clients expansion within China. I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, I gained so much practical experience in a year that would have taken somebody sitting in the US office years to gain.

 

This was truly an international work experience, as I not only worked with the Deloitte Chinese & American colleagues but also with colleagues from Canada, Germany, France, UK, Hong Kong and other places.

 

Shanghai is an amazing city! It is filled with an exciting energy that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world. Though Shanghai and Beijing are very different cities with very different local cultures, I greatly enjoyed learning about the city and its unique culture. During my year-long stay there I felt completely at home walking on the old streets nicely shaded by trees planted by the French in the 1800's, looking over the Huangpu river from roof-top restaurants in converted buildings built 100 years before along the Bund into Pudong where some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers now stand, I enjoyed learning a little bit of the local Shanghaies dialect, and enjoying local cuisine such as Xiaolongbao. Shanghai is truly a place where east meets the west and where modern blends with vintage.

 

The time spent in Shanghai was too short, a year later I was chosen to be the inaugural member and the US desk manager of Deloitte's Asia Pacific International Core of Excellence (APICE) which is based in Hong Kong and provides tax advisory services to multinational companies doing business in Asia or vice versa. I felt sad to leave Shanghai, but Hong Kong was a new adventure for my career and life, so I was excited to take on the new challenging role!