Meet our 2022 Scholar - Wang Ying
Rebecca travelled to Yunnan to meet our scholar, Wang Ying. Let's find out more about her!
Over the summer, I had the privilege of being able to visit our Next Gen Scholar this year, Wang Ying, in her hometown of Ninglang, Yunnan. The region is hidden deep in the mountains, northeast of Lijiang city. Yunnan is wonderfully diverse: out of the 55 ethnic minorities in China, 25 of them hail from the single province of Yunnan. Ying’s hometown is in the vicinity of Lugu Lake, a lake bordering Yunnan and Sichuan.
The breathtaking (and terrifyingly high mountains) on the 4-hour bus ride there
And the scenery you see once you get there which makes you realize that it’s all worth it!
We meet at a restaurant by the lake, to try a traditional dish with a delightful concept: turn on the steam spout at the bottom of the pot, throw in some fresh fish, mushrooms and vegetables, and top it all off with a peculiar-looking straw hat. In just a few minutes, clear water turns into a delicious creamy, white soup. As we dig into our piping hot meal, Ying tells me more about herself.
Meeting our scholar in person! Wang Ying (left) and me with a delicious meal before us
Ying hails from the Yi ethnic group, and her people are scattered around Yunnan and Sichuan. In her home and many other Yi homes, they sit around a fire pit, fire being an important part of Yi culture. Ying is cheerful, energetic and easy-going. She’s about to start her studies at the Southwest University for Nationalities as a business major.
Ying’s family gets their income from harvesting crops, and she’s been helping out with the recent harvest. But farming crops as a household is as one would imagine –– physically-demanding, time-intensive, and more often than not what you reap isn’t always what you sow. Droughts and other adverse weather conditions on top of changing supply and demand for different crops means that neither quantities nor prices are predictable.
An unsteady source of income means that Ying’s family has to be ready for times where money is scarce. Investing is unheard of, especially when you could lose an entire harvest’s worth of income on one bad investment. If households had cash to spare, it went straight into their savings to help tide through rainy days and sudden medical expenditures.
This also means that Ying and others her age may be starting off with very different perceptions of money and risk. Her and her brother’s education is an investment by her family: her parents teach them from young that Mum and Dad work hard so that they have a shot at getting a good education and a more fulfilling career that can provide for much more.
This all happens in the backdrop of China’s intensely competitive environment, and with what’s already hard to gain much easier to lose everyone is kept on their toes. I ask her about her feelings towards investing, and she tells me that it’s still a daunting concept, with too many hard skills that she has yet to grasp.
Even though we can’t discount the usefulness and importance of having analytical tools and crunching numbers to help us visualize our risk and return, I start discussing with Ying the many other facets of investing that make it so much more interesting. In Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness, Housel remarks that “Investing is not a hard science. It’s a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing, which can make even smart people nervous, greedy and paranoid.”
The idea is not that following a fixed formula is a sure-fire way to make lots of money and get rich, but that even intelligent people can fall prey to lots of psychological traps, forgetting that almost nothing in life is guaranteed much less the P&L of your portfolio or how your lifetime wealth can evolve and come under attack in ways you least expect. How we anticipate such behaviour and act to mitigate risks when crafting our investment strategies requires a lot more than the technical skills that business schools teach year after year, decade after decade.
Being well aware that we can learn so much from all the brilliant investors around the world while all being inherently different may be the most golden headspace to be in at our age. People often don’t start things because they’re afraid of facing a world where they might fail at achieving what they really want. But knowing that who we are and what we want are constantly changing, and that failure is guaranteed can give us just enough room and motivation to get going, make mistakes, learn from our experiences and enjoy the ride as we go along.
I tell Ying that one of the main messages in Housel’s book that we’ve brought her is that money has the power to give us freedom. People who forget that and start getting greedy beyond their means “risk what they have and need for what they don’t have and don’t need”, as Warren Buffet once remarked. At Z Club we are learning how to invest in ourselves, our lives and our freedom just as much as we are learning about how to invest in equities. Ying smiles when I describe how empowering investing can be and tells me she hopes to be able to give some of the money she makes to her mum to thank her for taking care of the family. She hopes that one day she will be able to visit China’s larger cities and explore them for herself.
We’d like to end off our article with a warm welcome to Ying for joining our big family and taking the first step towards becoming a lifelong investor. It was an absolute pleasure to be able to meet you in person and have such a meaningful conversation throughout our evening together. These are such exciting times as you begin your university and investor journeys at the same time, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds.
We’d also like to take this chance to express our gratitude for Discerene and Mr Tan Soo Chuen’s efforts in setting up the scholarship and for the enduring faith in all of us at Z Club. We look forward to the many exciting opportunities ahead to continue creating value for our scholars and our members.