CreativeMornings

Delivered inside one of Canada's most significant cultural institutions, this keynote wove together three generations of family history to explore what endurance actually looks like when the systems around you are designed to work against you.

Liz opened with her grandmother, a survivor of the Japanese occupation who raised six children alone during the Korean War and buried two of them. Her mother, born into that aftermath, memorized entire textbooks to convince her own parents to keep her in school. Liz herself, born an unwanted daughter in a country that saw women as lesser, was sent to Canada alone as a teenager with no safety net, no language, and no blueprint. The thread running through all three stories was not triumph. It was endurance.

Rather than framing the talk as a story of overcoming, Liz examined the structural forces that make endurance necessary in the first place. The suppression of identity to survive corporate environments. The mental health cost of years of covert discrimination. The realization, eventually, that the seeds of doubt she had internalized were never hers to carry. They were placed there by design.

The session closed with three commitments she extended to the audience: break ground rather than glass ceilings, become the role model you never had, and use whatever power and privilege you have earned in service of others.