Zhao was born in a rural village in Jiangsu province in China in 1977 to a family of teachers, per Fortune.Zhao, who is Chinese-Canadian, moved to Vancouver in the late 1980s with his family, according to Forbes.
Zhao's father, Shengkai, was a professor who was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in China,that his family had to wait in line outside the Canadian embassy for three days to procure visas. He added that he was"lucky to have been able to leave at that time." Shengkai immigrated to Canada to pursue a doctorate degree at the University of British Columbia, per Maclean's. After the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Zhao and his family followed his father and moved to Vancouver. Zhao told Fortune in a March interview.
Zhao told Maclean's that it wasn't until he moved to Canada that he ever drank fresh milk, because it was so rare to find it in China. When Zhao moved to Canada, he held a number of part-time jobs, including working as a cook at McDonald's, according to the Maclean's report.Zhao also worked at a Chevron gas station and as a referee for volleyball games in his teens to earn money,
He's worth looking up to