Building an existence

Starting a business is not easy; as an immigrant, there also must be some frustration and difficulties. As a result, immigrants starting businesses could face more challenges that we can not imagine. This time, Karen would like to share her thoughts which was published at Canadian Immigrant magazine, June issue. Read Building an existence below:

Building an existence

The Canadian Immigrant magazine is no doubt targeted at Canadian immigrants to read, but I am locally born and raised here and enjoy reading it very much. I find the stories in this magazine very authentic and real and a lot of the time extremely inspiring. I currently own a marketing company and when I have my down days I pick up this magazine and read about some of the challenging stories that some of these immigrants went through just trying to get to this beautiful country called Canada and then have to start up a business and I think to myself, ”You know what? Things aren’t so bad afterall.”

I have an unusual background where my parents were born in India, but we are of Chinese descent. They frequently told me stories of how back home they had to study under a lantern as there would frequently be electricity outages, they had very little money to go to school or for food. In general, they had very little money for anything.

It’s extremely hard to relate to this growing up as a child, but now that I am an adult managing a home, finances, business and more, I can understand the pain and struggles they must have went through to give their children a better future. Instead of accepting things as they are, they took their destiny into their own hands, with the risk to fail.

I really admire immigrants, including my parents, relocating to another country and starting out all over again without family or friends. I think that’s the biggest risk an individual can ever take in their life and it’s not something that everyone can do. For those that did, please give yourself a big pat on the back.

As a way to give back to the community, I would love to connect with immigrants who are looking to start a business and would be interested in accessing a local’s knowledge. As a child of immigrants, I know firsthand which difficulties you might face. And even more as business owner, I can tell that starting a business is never easy, even less so as an immigrant, I can imagine.