Wendy’s husband was an American actor who had appeared in an episode of Sex and the City. They knew each other in a corporate training in which she was an actor for an emergency training.

Before they got married, they were considering if he moves to Hong Kong or she moves to the United States. She says she could not have her husband, a non-Chinese, coming over Hong Kong. Feeling confident about her English, she decided to move over.

She also thinks it was a good time for her to take some new risks. They then moved to Los Angeles, the hub for the dubbing industry. She brought everything, including her two cats there, then she would not think this is a travel, but her new life.

She says it is difficult to look for job opportunities there, with the keen competition of her counterparts. Being rejected is less than news. She found it a bit depressed and liked drawing, then she did not need to talk to others.

The industry is also way different from that in Hong Kong. Most of the jobs are managed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists(SAG-AFTRA), the labour union for televisions and film workers, and only offered to members.

In her second year of living there, she went to a Chinese-speaking radio station and asked if it had got an advertisement for her to dub.

Unexpectedly, the director asked her if she was given a radio show, what she would do.

It amazed her since “you cannot walk into RTHK and ask them to get you a programme”.

She then replied that most of the people around her were not Chinese and she did not live in this community. She could instead be a bridge between the local and Chinese there. Liking to dig around the city, she then opened a show named American Lifestyle and introduced different things there and lasted for three years. Favourably, she could speak in Cantonese, her mother tongue, as well as have something to kill time.

Wendy says she used to think she was a westernised person, but she found she was in fact a Chinese after living there for a while, like missing the time getting along with the elderly. She and her husband did take time to travel to the western downtown of the LA to play lawn bowls with them.

According to her, LA is a youngster’s city and people move to there. It, however, is never a home but a stepping stone for most of them. Meeting the old people helped her feel secure in the foreign environment.

In her life in the States, she became more humble and got to know the different ways of working. She says the dubbing style in Hong Kong is hard-selling, while it is more casual there.