- Name: Stephen Lee
- Surname: Lee
- About Me: It may seem like a grandiose title or a lack of imagination but I do have a degree in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia and Metaphysics and Epistemology (i.e. the Meaning of Life) was my particular interest. I was born in Canada although my parents emigrated from China, separately, with their mothers while they were still teenagers. I guess I'm not exactly a typical CBC though having grown up in a small B.C. town in the 60's (Osoyoos) where there were no other Chinese families and we were 5 hours away from the big city (Vancouver). I did study Philosophy at UBC and seemed to be the only non-Caucasian person in the faculty at the time; I enjoyed it but I must admit that it may have been that I was also rebelling against the stereotypes of Asians being only interested in being engineers, scientists or doctors. It took me a while to figure out that, in a sense, I was letting myself be as much a victim of prejudice by not doing what I really wanted to just so that I could challenge people's invalid race-based preconceptions. I did go into law - what else do you do to make a living when you have an undergrad degree in Philosophy? I practiced it for 10 years and decided that I hated it because it seemed like one day you were arguing "White is black" and the next day, "Black is white" depending on who's paying the bill and frankly there was never an end as decisions could be appealed ad nauseam and only the extremely wealthy could afford it. I switched to IT and learned programming, computer operating systems and databases and found that much more to my liking; no b.s. - if you didn't know what you were doing, it just didn't work or it worked unreliably. Plus there is always something new and exciting on the horizon and there really is the chance for putting more power in the hands of ordinary people who have something meaningful and important to say.
