Imagine starting your life over completely in your early 30s.
You’re a young mom, a new immigrant in the midst of culture shock and faced with a considerable language barrier.
The easy thing to do? Take the path of least resistance.
Tina Lu, on the other hand, chose the opposite – and now, exactly 20 years after first arriving on Canadian shores, Lu’s never-ending persistence in both life and work has paid off in full.
Lu was recently named as a partner at accounting firm Manning Elliott, becoming one of the first female immigrants in the firm’s history to earn that proud distinction.
“As an immigrant, a female and a working mom, the work you already do in a day is a lot,” Lu says. “So, to see this work pay off, I’m very, very happy with the result.”
Whether personally or professionally, Lu’s upward trajectory has been anything but linear. Nor has it been easy.
Born in southern China, Lu attained her master’s degree in engineering and worked at a top-level firm in Beijing.
In 2004, and in pursuit of better healthcare and educational outcomes for her family, Lu came to Canada with no prior feel for the language, nor the culture.
She immediately took a job in a factory as a preliminary test to acclimatize herself, though it was a far cry from the life she had just left behind in her home country.
“It was a daunting experience for me,” Lu recalls. “I was a manager already in a listed company in Beijing and I got my first job in Canada in three days working 10-hour shifts in a laundry factory. I realized that wasn’t something that I wanted, but I needed to justify to myself that I could survive in a new job in a new country.”
And so, Lu’s process of renewal once again began anew. She studied accounting at UBC in 2005 and attained top marks in her class, but the language barrier persisted.
From there, Lu honed her language skills and feel for life in Canada while working for real estate developers and smaller-sized accounting firms.
She arrived at Manning Elliott two years ago, and was first elevated to a principal position before being named as a partner in early 2024.
“I’m used to the concept of never, ever giving up and being flexible,” Lu says. “I have the persistence to pursue the targets that I set for myself.”
It’s that flexibility that sees Lu working with a myriad of clients – individuals, trusts, partnerships or corporations – across numerous areas of her vast financial literacy: bookkeeping, tax consultancy, trust planning and preparing financial statements, among other areas.
Lu credits her role as a tutor in grad school for her ability to digest and process complex information, such that her clients are not only getting the best advice, but guidance that can be contextualized and understood for whatever age or stage they’re at in life.
“I really enjoy explaining the very complex and complicated things in a very simple way,” Lu says. “I relate to clients very well because I put myself in their shoes to understand what they need from a legal, accounting or an engineering viewpoint.”
To learn more about Manning Elliott’s services, visit manningelliott.com.
