They say some people are born with restless feet. Mine showed up at 26. What started as a working holiday in Australia eventually became a decade-long journey through three countries — and landed me in Winnipeg, Canada, on August 31, 2019, with a student visa, a dorm room, and no real backup plan.
Brisbane to Emerald — Working Holiday in Australia (2008)
In 2008, at 26, I boarded a one-way flight to Australia. I landed in Brisbane and started the most unglamorous job imaginable: dishwasher at a pizza and pasta restaurant. The English I had studied in Korea dissolved the moment real conversations started happening around me. The kitchen was loud, the shifts were long, and I understood maybe half of what people said.
A few months in, I heard I could make more money in the interior — and moved to a small town called Emerald in Queensland. I got a job at McDonald’s. That decision changed my life in a way I never expected. One of my coworkers was a young woman from Hong Kong. She’s my wife now. We worked side by side, started talking, and the rest followed. I spent about a year in Australia total — and what I took home wasn’t better English. It was more important than that.
Hong Kong — Two Jobs, One Decision (2017–2019)
Since my wife is from Hong Kong, it made sense to build our life there. We arrived in March 2017. My first job was as an Inventory Manager at a wholesale cosmetics distributor — stable work, but Hong Kong’s cost of living made it clear I needed to earn more. I moved on to a position as a Site Engineer for a piling contractor working on the Hong Kong Airport’s Three Runway Extension project. Large-scale infrastructure work. That experience would later prove more valuable than I realized when I entered Canada’s construction industry.
Life in Hong Kong was genuinely good for a while. But 2019 changed things.
The protests began. I watched police — widely seen as aligned with Beijing — use force against demonstrators in the streets. Media coverage was suppressed. The psychological toll on Hong Kong people around us was real and visible. My wife felt it deeply. The sense that freedoms were being quietly dismantled was not abstract — it was in the air every day.
What finally pushed me to act was thinking about our child. Our baby had just been born. The idea of raising a child in a system drifting toward authoritarianism — one where political education would shape how they think before they could think critically — wasn’t something I could accept. Around June or July 2019, my wife and I made the decision: we were leaving. I was still in my thirties. There was still time.
Why Canada — Not Australia, Not the UK
We looked at three options: Australia, the UK, and Canada.
Australia was familiar — I’d lived there — but the growing Chinese economic and demographic influence made it feel uncomfortably similar to what we were leaving. Immigration policy there kept shifting, which made long-term planning difficult. The UK felt out of reach financially (the pound is brutal), and from what we heard, racial tensions were a more significant issue than in Canada.
Canada made sense for two concrete reasons. First, my wife had relatives there — we could get honest, firsthand information about what life as an immigrant actually looked like. The answer was encouraging. Second, Manitoba’s Provincial Nominee Program (MPNP) offered a clear pathway: one year of study in a qualifying field, then secure relevant employment, and you could apply for permanent residency. The roadmap was clear — Study → Work → PR — and that kind of clarity mattered when everything else felt uncertain.
So: Winnipeg it was. My first reaction when I researched it? Oh… so this is Canada. It looked like a mid-sized Korean city that hadn’t quite finished developing — or honestly, a lot like Emerald, Australia. Coming from the hyper-dense energy of Hong Kong, Winnipeg felt almost eerily quiet.
August 31, 2019 — Arrival in Winnipeg
I arrived on August 31, 2019, and moved straight into a university dormitory. I had enrolled at The University of Winnipeg in a Project Management program, but since I had no official English proficiency score, I had to complete a 3-month English Pathway course first — after which I could enter the main program directly. Having the dorm arranged through the school made the arrival logistics manageable, at least.
The hardest part wasn’t loneliness. It was the weight of everything riding on this working out. And my child was two years old. Watching them grow up through a phone screen — noticing small changes in their face on a video call — is a specific kind of hard that’s difficult to put into words.
COVID — The Variable Nobody Planned For
Shortly after starting the main program, COVID-19 hit. Small businesses around campus started closing first. Then the university went into lockdown. Everything moved online.
I lost two things: connections and spoken English.
My plan had been to build a network by actually being around people — Canadian classmates, professors, local professionals. Online classes made that nearly impossible. The English loss was subtler but more lasting: listening and speaking improve through real interaction. Staring at a screen doesn’t replicate that. My reading and writing improved. My ability to hold fast, natural conversations in English barely moved.
That said, the two years weren’t wasted. Alone in a dorm room, I went deep on Canadian construction and project management. And Winnipeg winters — minus 30 to minus 40°C — have a way of building a certain kind of resilience. The empty streets that felt alien in November became just normal by February.
If you’re preparing to immigrate, here’s the one thing I’d say: nobody leaves with everything in order. I didn’t have perfect English, a savings cushion, or certainty about what came next. I had a plan and a direction. That was enough to start. The rest came one step at a time.
Continue reading: Part 2: First Job in Winnipeg and Breaking into Canadian Construction