How I Found Myself (and Shed Who I Thought I Should Be) at Age 55
At 55, I am finally doing what I’ve wanted to do since I was 19. These days, instead of waking up to face a day of P&L spreadsheets or managerial minefields, I wake up in the morning knowing that everything on my to-do list is my own. In the morning, I might have breakfast with an interior designer or a collector. Later, I might visit an artist in their studio, where we’ll talk for hours about their work and vision. Maybe I’ll spend the afternoon making calls and doing the actual work of selling art—but then again, I might decide to spend it on the sofa with my dogs, scouring Instagram. The point is, after spending pretty much my whole adult life climbing the corporate ladder, trying to hit prescribed markers of success and striving to fit in places not necessarily welcoming to a working-class gay kid from Chinatown, I am finally living for myself. I feel happy. I feel energized. I feel fulfilled. People are afraid of making a career pivot late in life because they think, I put in so much work already—it’s too late. But I’ve learned that taking a few steps back in order to move forward is not only okay; it’s also thrilling. For me, starting an art consultancy now is already paying off in joy.
My love for beauty was instilled in me from childhood by my mother. She didn’t own beautiful things, but she loved beautiful things. We lived in Chinatown, where she single-handedly supported me, my sister, and my grandmother as a seamstress after my father died when I was 3. My mother only had a high school education and didn’t speak much English. But she somehow knew that museums were one of the very few places that were both welcoming and free. We would roam all around the city looking at art. Most often, we would visit the Met, where we took in everything—the European paintings, the Chinese wing, the period rooms, the contemporary galleries—not quite understanding what we were gazing upon but admiring it all with a hungry reverence.
I can’t help but get a little emotional when I think about how hard my mother worked and the sacrifices she made for us. This was her life: Every morning she got me and my older sister ready for school, and then she would go to a stifling factory on Lafayette Street, where she sewed blouses or dresses all day. It was a place I knew well because my sister and I would often go with her on weekends to help with piecework. After work, my mother would always shop for dinner at the open markets in Chinatown and cook us a beautiful meal. (We may not have had a lot, but we always had great food.) Many nights, after she did the dishes, a man from a different factory would often show up with a load of garments for her to sew after my sister and I went to bed.
My mother’s sole aim, naturally, was to give us a better life, as far away from the sweatshop as she could imagine. “Didi, you have to study hard,” she would tell me, using the Chinese word for “younger brother.” “You don’t want this kind of life.” I was to have a white-collar job and work in an office, maybe even become an accountant. “Everybody always needs an accountant,” she liked to tell me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t want to become an accountant. By junior high school, I was obsessed with musical theater, and all I wanted to do was sing and dance. I auditioned for one of the coveted spots as a voice student at the High School of Music & Art (the specialized public high school now called LaGuardia) and was accepted. But I was also granted entrance to the Bronx High School of Science, the competitive public high school famous for churning out Westinghouse Science award finalists. For my mother, the choice between having a son onstage and having a son en route to the Ivy League wasn’t even a discussion. So I enrolled at Bronx Science.
The problem was that from day one, I was basically a D student. I might have tested well enough to get in, but compared to the other kids, I couldn’t cut it. The worse I did academically, the more committed I became to trying to express my crazy, creative self. This was the ’80s, when the downtown art scene and clubs like Palladium, Area, and Danceteria were happening. At age 14 and 15, I was regularly staying out until 3 in the morning, hanging out with artists of all kinds. Needless to say, my mother was deeply concerned (and she didn’t even know at that point that I was gay!). Meanwhile, every day for four years, I felt like an outcast at school. It was miserable knowing that I was failing at a place that was all about success.
When I got to college, I had a breakthrough. Sitting in my very first art history class, all those years wandering around the Met came rushing back, coalescing into something that resembled true understanding. It felt like I had arrived home. Art became my passion, and—surprise!—I was suddenly a straight-A student. I had a fantasy of becoming a famous art dealer like Leo Castelli or André Emmerich. But after graduation, I ended up doing what was safe and what I knew would make my mother happy. I climbed the corporate ladder.
I had a 15-year career in publishing, followed by almost a decade in luxury retail. At the magazine company where I spent most of my career, I was the first publisher of color and also the first openly gay publisher. I made a nice living, enjoyed the perks of being an executive in a glamorous job, and was able to share all this bounty with my mother. I loved the delight she took in seeing my success. After all the disappointment she had felt when I was in high school—and later when I finally told her that I was gay—my success finally allowed her to have min, or what in Cantonese we call “face.”
Despite all the benefits, all those years in the corporate world were a terrible pressure cooker. The stress to hit numbers and put out fires was unrelenting. I spent countless nights sweating all the catastrophic “what-ifs,” on the verge of eruption, and relied on Ambien to sleep. On top of this, I had some abusive bosses who subjected me to the type of sickening behavior that would get anyone canceled today. On top of the stress, I was working in environments where nobody looked like me, and I didn’t have a community in which to commiserate. I couldn’t help but wonder if the way I was treated would have been different if I were white. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my colleagues didn’t think I deserved a place at the table—that there was an underlying attitude like, What could he possibly know? He’s not one of us. It wasn’t quite like high school, but it was still a lonely place where I always felt like the outsider.
I don’t know anyone who went through Covid without doing some kind of self-reflection. For me, the pandemic was a time of intense introspection. Several of my closest friends—all my age—died. Other projects and ventures I had delved into after leaving retail came to an end. The isolated time forced me to reconsider how I wanted to live the rest of my life, something a mentor called QTL, or quality time left. It’s a realization, usually sparked in midlife, that now is the time to leverage your experience to pursue what you really want while you still have the ability, drive, and network. I decided I needed to use my QTL to make a pivot. In February 2023, I announced that I would be starting my art business, Armature Projects.
Launching this company, I decided there’s no more time for fear, stress, or catastrophizing. My new mantra now is “What a pleasure,” and when I wake up each morning, I remind myself what a privilege and a pleasure it is to be presented with the day’s challenges. Maybe I’m being loaded down with a client’s demands. What a pleasure it is that someone’s relying on me to do something! A young artist I nurtured is leaving me for a big name gallery? What a pleasure it has been to work with a budding talent and see them rise. It is a pleasure because it is my own.
I am sure that there are people in my network who look at my business and think, Oh, he’s not selling to institutions, or What does he know about the art world? While that type of thinking used to affect me, now it does not. I am post-shame. I’m not worrying about min. You might be an important art person with an important art opinion, but I believe in my eye, and I know that there are plenty of people who like and respect what I’m doing.
I went for years feeling a sort of impostor syndrome: No matter what I accomplished, somewhere deep inside, I could not bring myself to celebrate it. I attributed any success to luck or, even worse, a type of undeserved grade inflation. Having spent so much of my life feeling not smart enough or not assimilated enough, it was hard to ever feel secure in any accomplishment. But now the mantra that I’ll be unmasked is no longer allowed to play in my head. I am post-impostor.
I make less money than I used to, but my new work has opened a front row to creativity more rewarding than anything I’ve ever experienced. Of course, there are still the day-to-day stresses and headaches of running a business, but instead of viewing each setback as a catastrophe, I view it as a problem to be solved. I sleep at night.
The main thing that I had to let go was the worry about failure. I know now I can handle anything that life throws me. I was the kid helping my mom in the garment factory who figured out how to avoid the rats underfoot (stand in the canvas bins) while making two cents for each shirt I wrapped in plastic. I persevered in cutthroat toxic environments that prized bellicosity over brains and successfully managed businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars despite less than ideal management. Perhaps most importantly, I made it through the lowest point in my life, my mother’s seven-year struggle with breast cancer, to which she succumbed in 2006. And I remind myself: If I can do all that, I’m not scared of anything.
You Might Also Like
