Canada is a great country, and very tolerant and friendly for immigrants.
Although there are more opportunities in China due to the poor economy in Canada now, Canada is still a great country to live and work.
When I and my wife landed in Ottawa in 1999 with only $5000, we were very self-confident that we will be having a great life here.
We began to live in one bedroom apartment rented, it cost us($670 renting + $100 food)/monthly. Even the furniture and electric appliances are collected from garbage.
A desktop PC is the only new one we bought. Everytime, when we pay bills and buy something, we count how much we have left in the account.
I first found a general labour job at Walmart near the apartment. Because I need to raise very heavy boxes, I still have the root of 肩肘炎。 But it lets me to have a change to communicate with many low income native people in normal English they use.
I didn't want to find work in China Towns(I will tell you the reason in another post).
I am pretty confident that I can find a software engineer job but I could not start soon because of the shortage of local experience.
After 9 months, I found a programmer job at a small company.
I then found out that the way the software developed here is very different from China then. The OO patterns, framework, version control were heavily used more like a great team in engineering.
There is no other way. I could not work after 5:30pm since it was overtime, prohibited. I had to learn these skills at home after work and during the weekend.
I finally passed the probation and got a junior job. My company was bought by Nortel then in year of 2000, and I was promoted to an intermediate software engineer.
My wife began to learn Software QA in Algonquin College. After 10 months, she was referred by her best friend a internship job at Nortel. She was hired afterwards, and after 6 months probation, became a full time Software QA at Nortel.
Now, we both worked at Nortel, and we expected to be in intermediate level as a lifetime work. We bought a townhouse with very low down payment and mortgage due to our professional jobs. We moved in with brand new furniture and appliances. We feel that We have earned the payment of our struggle.
Unfortunately, only for about a year, IT Storm began. Nortel this giant began to shake. My division was killed in the first wave of lay off since it was bought by Nortel. We were shocked to see how those previously glorious high tech companies laid off people.
I sent hundreds of application letters, but could not hear anything. And many people decided to move to big cities like Toronto, or south of border,USA or even went back to China.
After a careful research, I found out that actually the largest IT employer in Ottawa was Government of Canada. And my background fitted their large enterprise application transition from old IBM mainframe to n-tiered Java EE very well.
After 3 months of lay off, an agent found a contract work at CRA for me. From then on, I began my professional consulting work and began to create a consulting firm owned by myself.
My wife was very lucky. She was in the last pool of people laid off by Nortel in 2011. And she was led by her previous manager at Nortel to Government of Canada as a term employee, and became a permanent one after 5 one year terms.
Now we have owned 3 houses in Ottawa(
2 bedroom 1500 square feet townhouse,
4 bedroom square 2100 feet single house,
5 bedroom 3000 square feet single house)
two cars, A SUV, A Honda Accord (renew every 5 to 7 years to avoid maintenance)
through our hard work and knowledge from the scratch.
The first 2 houses are rented out and managed by a professional company to cover the mortgage.
We can pay off the 3rd house's mortgage in 10 more years.
We can retire now at the age of 50 if we want. But we still work just want to show my successor, you have to work hard to gain wealth.
We seldom work after regular business hours and during the weekend, have a very good work/life balance.
We have 4 weeks vacation every year. We planned to do the global traveling after 10 years when our boy graduate from the university. We do our tooth cleaning every 3 months.
We can do regular exercise through the running machine and table tennis in the basement, swimming and skating in the sport centre nearby and skiing during the winter.
I am not interested in going back to Beijing or China.
When I and my wife leave this world, we will leave the kid $1.8M(by current value, sorry poor real estate price in Ottawa) real estate and $1.0M life insurance.
But we have already let my boy to deliver the newspapers at the age of 10 five evenings a week for 2 years.
He will start working at the legal age during the weekend to understand how hard to gain money.
We are proud of him.
