Before last Tuesday’s Kraken home game, there was a reception for a number of guests invited to the team’s Lunar New Year Night celebration. That’s a night Kelly Qian will never forget.
“Being there in the arena yesterday was a really proud moment for me,” said Qian, who interned with the Kraken corporate partnerships group and stayed on when her current partner marketing coordinator role opened up. “At the pre-game reception upstairs [in the Space Needle Lounge] seeing all the aunties and uncles come in ... it was a heartfelt moment for me, feeling Seattle is so diverse and you're able to find your communities.”
Those aunties and uncles happily and warmly reminded Qian of family gatherings during her childhood days in Shanghai (her father Andrew’s hometown, where Kelly, her parents, and older brother, Douglas, lived during elementary school years) and Taiwan (her mother Manching's birthplace, where they traveled for Chinese New Year celebrations).
“Chinese New Year was kind of the only time where a lot of my family would fly in from all over the place,” said Qian during our conversation this past week. “A lot of my heritage comes from being together with family, including our grandparents. Everyone wears red. We're cooking all day. We go to the temple before the meal ... these are the things that I really miss now [with her working in Seattle and entrepreneur Douglas based in San Francisco, though she does get to see her brother more often]. I have really fond memories of Chinese New Year. It brings me a lot of happiness thinking about it.”
At the reception, there were plenty in attendance who knew the feeling of Lunar New Year, whether Chinese or other Asian cultures. Lunar New Year is a time for family reunions, honoring ancestors, gifts, and traditional foods with an overall theme of wishing each other prosperity and good fortune for the new lunar calendar year.
“When I explain to someone what Chinese New Year is like, I say It's Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's all together, right?” said Qian (pronounced “chee-anne”). “Because you have the food from Thanksgiving, you get all the gifts like Christmas and for Chinese New Year, you get hongbao, the red envelopes filled with cash. That's like the best day of your life when you are a kid.”
Embracing Hockey, On and Off the Ice
Qian is smiling nonstop while she explains the Lunar New Year and its traditions, along with the aunties and uncles and local Asian-American cultural leaders she met at Tuesday’s game. She continues to beam talking about how she fell in love with hockey. As high school approached, Manching Lee and Andrew Qian intended for their daughter to continue her education (which included speaking English at home) at Holderness School in New Hampshire. Both of her parents are Yale University graduates (mom with an Environmental Sciences degree and dad Yale Law) and were familiar with the school.
Kelly knew from a young age that high school would be in the U.S. and specifically the East Coast: “My mom was very intentional about [speaking English]. In the summertime, bringing us back to the States for summer school in California. She didn't want us to have an accent and wanted us to adapt to the culture, to better understand all of the differences. That helped my brother and me when we came to the States for boarding school”
As a middle schooler in Shanghai, Qian excelled as a basketball player playing on boys' teams (“I did everything my older brother did,” she said, upbeat) and figured that would continue at Holderness. As it turned out, she made friends with a number of Canadian students at the boarding school and started skating on the school’s famed outdoor rink. Soon enough, her competitive juices led her to join “every stick-and-puck session,”, then the Holderness girls team and beyond.
“It’s how I learned how to play and skate for the first time,” said Qian. “I had never been to New Hampshire. When I got there from Shanghai, I was like, wow, there’s snow. trees and mountains. My school had one of the only outdoor rinks. Most of my friends were Canadian, so skating and playing hockey was like ‘one plus one equals two.’ I just started skating with them, then I fell in love with the sport ... I decided to change gears and pursue hockey. By junior year, I was able to make varsity.”
Choosing Hockey over Hoops
No disrespect to her father and brother, who both dearly love their basketball, but baby sister ranks hockey at the top of her sporting heart: “I love both sports. I think hockey is my number one. I played sports because of my brother and my dad, and piano because of my mom. Hockey was the first thing that I led ... nobody in the family knew what hockey was before I started skating and playing. It’s a whole other world I introduced to them. I think that's why I love it so much.”
The hockey love story gets better: Qian’s varsity days at boarding school converted into an opportunity to play for the Chinese Taipei women's team national team. She made friends for life, and is still keeping in touch with middle school friends back in Shanghai.
When Qian came out west to attend Seattle University, she discovered the University of Washington women’s hockey club on Instagram (score one for social media) and emailed the team’s founders to ask if it was possible to join the club.
“They made an exception for me to play on the UW team,” said Qian, who was a stalwart on the team. “It was a lot of fun. I met a lot of awesome people. We practiced at odd hours of the day [think 6 a.m. and 11 p.m.]. We made a lot of great memories together, including a road trip to Montana and playing at Kraken Community Iceplex. I played with them for 2 years while at the same time playing for KHL (Kraken Hockey League) with the guys [a men’s team] ... another highlight was playing a staff game on the Winter Classic ice last season.”
Leaving Home, Appreciating Her Parents’ Lessons
While Qian left her Shanghai home life at 14 years old, she said “I always knew that if I wanted to succeed, it meant going elsewhere for school.”
The influence of her parents didn’t fade and only grew stronger during summers on the West Coast when boarding school was out of session.
“My mom is someone I definitely look up to,” said Qian. “She is a businesswoman, an entrepreneur mom. Now, having colleagues who are moms but also working important jobs here with the Kraken, I appreciate my mom even more seeing the balances that [working mothers] need to have. I appreciate what my mom had to juggle with as she had to start her business at the same time as I was a baby. It's given me a lot of clarity into what she has had to experience growing up as the only girl among three brothers in Taiwan.”
Both parents were teenagers during the turbulent times of unrest in China, punctuated by the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989. Both mom and dad endured distressed childhoods, leading both to be highly motivated to pursue an education in the U.S. They met as Yale students.
“My mom just worked really hard [in her youth],” said Qian. “She had to leave home in order to find a better future for herself. My dad, too, knew education was the driver for his future. That’s why they both came overseas. It instilled a deep connection in my brother and me to find out what you need to do to get where you want to be.”
Out of the Comfort Zone, In the Know
Let’s call it a direct and daunting approach to getting out of your comfort zone: “One hundred percent. I was not all that comfortable leaving home and meeting everybody new. It had this pressure of finding yourself at a young age ... I came to appreciate when our parents told us the stories of their upbringing because it was a whole different time ... like they had to walk miles to go to school or a lot of food to eat. It makes me want to honor the foundation our parents laid for us, to take advantage of our opportunity. “
Qian said her mom’s intentions as a businesswoman have deeply influenced her own outlook, especially being part of the Kraken and One Roof Foundation mission to promote inclusion at work and play and in society.
“My mom started her own tea company called Gurung Tea [after early real estate success] because she wanted to give back and follow the beliefs of Buddhism,” said Qian. All the profits from the tea sales go back to a village in Nepal. Our culture itself is one in which everybody wants to succeed. Everyone hustles. When I was in Shanghai I would see farmers who from six to 12 hours away to come into the city to sell their produce ... my mom always wanted to make sure my brother and I always find a way to give back.”
“She exposed us to the needs of others when she brought us to Nepal [in childhood times]. We had a summer there where we lived at a boarding school, which was actually privileged. But that was the first time Douglas and I both experienced only cold water. Food was one scoop of everything, no more. There was no air conditioning. The bird flu was going on too. In my family and the Buddhist culture, the giving back a portion of what we do is really big. It’s always going to be part of me.”
