Posts Tagged ‘ice skating’

With emerging technologies ushering in new industries while phasing out others, many of us are tackling challenges we didn’t envision when starting our careers. Fortunately we don’t have an audience watching as we stumble through the awkward learning phase.

Yao Bin wasn’t so lucky.

He was born in the People’s Republic of China in 1957 during the last gasps of Chairman Mao’s “Social Revolution”—which wiped out the class system—and a heartbeat before his “Great Leap Forward” plan to radically reform the nation’s economy. Yao’s birthplace was Harbin in Heilongjiang Province, a place of brutally cold winters nicknamed the “Ice City.”

Geographically, Harbin is almost nestled in the arms of Siberia and has always felt the influence of its Russian neighbors. Following their defeat in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Russia’s White Guard fled to Harbin, establishing the largest Russian community outside the mother country. Most were forced to leave during the post-WWII Soviet occupation, but during Yao’s boyhood, Harbin still bore the architectural and cultural influence of Russia … including, perhaps, that nation’s love for figure skating.

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