When Shi Choong, now a wedding planner helping other Portlanders celebrate their love, thinks about her childhood, she recalls the bright colors of her family’s two story shop house in Malaysia.
Her father’s retail store was on the ground floor, welcoming in passersby with Buddhist statues and prayer goods tucked in glass cabinets. Upstairs was their house—a quiet place away from the street traffic.
Choong was born in 1982 in Johor Baru, Malaysia, close to the border with Singapore. Her local community included Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Peranakan people.
“I hung out with people of different skin tones, of different mother languages, but I did not feel like we are different,” Choong says. “We respected each other’s culture.”
From a young age, her father treated her like a “princess,” buying her jewelry purses, dresses and even a karaoke set.
She was her father’s favorite child, but her mother felt differently.“There was one time, when I was eight or nine, he went to get me this beautiful princess dress, like a white dress,” Choong says. “My mom got so emotional. She cut the dress into pieces right in front of me. It was very traumatizing. I was crying: ‘Don’t do that!’ She just kept doing it.”
Not long after, her parents split up.
Choong and her siblings stayed with their mom. Living with her mom meant sleeping on unfolded cardboard boxes, folding up clothes for pillows, and eating the rejected vegetables from market vendors.
When Choong was only 15 years old, her mother finally snapped and left the country, dropping off her children’s belongings outside Choong’s father’s store. Choong took on the responsibility of her younger siblings, ages thirteen, eleven and eight.
A fancy dinner Choong thought was simply a New Year celebration was really the last time she’d see her father for a long time. Without warning, he filed for bankruptcy and left the area. He left both the shop and house behind, along with his children.
Choong moved into a classmate’s house with her three younger siblings. Her father planned to send payments to the family.
“The money didn’t come in, so the four of us lived in the guest room. So I started working when I was fifteen to pay expenses to live,” Choong says.
In high school, Choong’s day would include going to school, waitressing, tutoring, helping her siblings complete their homework, and then finishing her own. She repeated this day after day, until she found her siblings hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble.
Choong faced a tough decision. She called her grandma and uncle to ask them to take care of her siblings.
“I had to make the decision to let them go,” she says. “It was sad but we have all been separated since then.”
After couch surfing for about a year, Choong was reunited with her mother. Her mother’s boyfriend financially supported her to go to a good school in Singapore.
Choong moved to the United States to attend college after graduating high school. She landed in the Bay area and attended De Anza Community College to study communications. Though talented in the sciences, she wanted to try broadcast journalism.
When she was ready to transfer to a four-year university, she was accepted to University of California, San Diego.
Still in the Bay area, Shi received a call that would finally change the way she saw her family.
Her sister told Choong their mother was dying of breast cancer. That same day, her mother called to say her younger sister was in a car accident, in the hospital in pain and dying, too.
“At that point, they’re my family, right?” Choong says. “I have to make a choice. I gave up.”
When she returned to care for her mother and sister, Choong found she had been lured back by lies–her mother and sister were fine.
“Nobody was in pain, nobody was dying,”she says. “My mom said, ‘Oh, we just want to save you from the American culture.”
After months of living in Malaysia, her mother decided she could return to the U.S., but Choong had no funds.
Luckily, a man from her church sponsored her. Since she had missed the deadline for UC San Diego, she went to San Francisco State. She worked four jobs while attending school with a major in chemistry.
Choong received a fellowship at Purdue to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry, while working as a TEDx license-holder and organizer. She found joy in planning talks that opened peoples’ eyes to new topics.
After earning her PhD. in 2018, Choong joined Intel where she worked for six years. Always passionate about event planning, she was a wedding planner on the side.
However, the overwork of the past twenty years finally caught up with her.
“For a few years, I couldn’t even write,” she says. “When I would write more than ten or fifteen minutes, my shoulders would start to hurt.”
After two and a half years of physical therapy and acupuncture came surgery. Choong couldn’t work at a computer for a year.
“My whole life is about surviving one obstacle versus one obstacle,” Choong says, looking back at her path. “I have never had a minute to truly enjoy my life. I skipped being a child. I skipped being a teenager. I suddenly became an adult overnight.”
She realized event planning is what truly fulfilled her life. She quit her job and became a full-time wedding planner.
“I started doing weddings because growing up, I didn’t know how to love,” Choong says “I chose weddings because it helps me to learn. It helps me heal.”
Choong also suffered a long battle with body image. Her way of healing was to become a model through branding herself on social media.
“I was like, ‘You know what, I’m done feeling sorry about myself.’ I look beautiful. I’m going to start modeling,” she says.
Choong continues to plan weddings in the Portland area and loves being a part of others’ love stories.
“This is a time I want to really live the life I want and to do what makes me happy,” she says. ” I believe if you don’t give up, everything will work out in the best way you could ever imagine.”