I was attending Innersect, a Chinese streetwear convention/festival, as a guest of one of the producers of the event. When I landed in Shanghai I got a frantic text from one of the other producers asking if I spoke fluent Mandarin. Because I did, they assigned me to work with A$AP Rocky + his team who was headlining the festival. Although they had other translators for the event, none were fluent in Mandarin/English and experienced producers in touring, so since I checked off all of the boxes I got hired on the spot.

LIONS SHARE was approached by Spotify/Anchor to utilize their new Music + Talk format and we thought it was a perfect opportunity to highlight some of our favorite emerging AAPI artists and highlight topics that are important to us and fun for other people to discover or learn more about. I think one of my favorite episodes was about Cambodian Hip Hop -- having not known much in the space, it was really great to have an expert like Eric Diep join us and tell us about the history of Cambodians in America and why hip hop plays a unique role in their community as opposed to a how hip hop is utilized in K-pop for example. I think also AAPI perspectives, especially in America, skew very East Asian, and I have heard from some of our community members, how much this episode meant to them because it told a story from a demographic that often gets overlooked.

My first gig in music was touring with Kanye West in 2011. Something that I caught onto early on was how his creative genius was fueled by the fact that he had a knack for surrounding himself with emerging talent, people who would later go onto become icons in their own right (Virgil Abloh, John Legend, A-trak, Mike Dean, Jerry Lorenzo, etc to name a few of the more well known ones). By doing so, he was able to elevate his game to a place he could've never gone on his own. I am very grateful that I was able to observe this early on in my career, as it's something that I've carried with me throughout. Collaboration is so important to success.