Emily Zhang, 25

Hi, I’m Emily! I’m twenty-five, a UX designer living in Corktown, Toronto, in a loft apartment with giant windows that I absolutely chose for the natural light and then immediately covered half of with plants. Priorities, you know?

I was born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from Guangzhou in the early 2000s. My dad runs a small accounting practice in Markham and my mom is a nurse, and I grew up in a Scarborough townhouse where Mandarin, Cantonese and English flew around the dinner table all at once. My grandma lived with us until I was sixteen, and she taught me to make dumplings by hand — the folding technique took me two full years to get right, and she still critiques my pleats over video call. I have an older sister, Claire, who’s a pharmacist in Vancouver, and we have a standing Sunday FaceTime where we mostly just eat snacks “together” and gossip.

I studied design at OCAD University, and now I work as a UX designer at a health-tech startup in the Distillery District area. I spend my days mapping user journeys, running usability tests, and passionately arguing that buttons should be bigger. I love that my work actually helps people — we build tools that make it easier for patients to manage their care, and every time we get feedback from a real user saying our app helped them, I get a little emotional. Design school taught me the craft, but working here taught me the purpose.

My weekends have a rhythm I adore. Saturday mornings usually start with a boba run — my current obsession is a brown sugar milk tea from a tiny shop on Baldwin Street in Chinatown, fifty percent sugar, extra pearls, and I will defend that order with my life. Then I might wander the Distillery District, which is basically my backyard: the cobblestone streets, the galleries, that smell of the chocolate factory. In December the Christmas market there is pure magic and I go at least three times every year, hot mulled something in hand.

Hiking is my other great love, which surprises people who know me as a city girl. I do the Rouge National Urban Park trails in the east end regularly — it’s wild that you can be on a forest trail with a river and then back in the city in twenty minutes. Last fall I did a section of the Bruce Trail with friends and watched the leaves turn while eating trail mix my grandma packed, because some things never change. I’m training to do a bigger multi-day hike next summer, and my group chat is already full of gear lists.

I’m also that friend with the camera. Not professional-level, just an enthusiast with a mirrorless camera and strong opinions about golden hour. The Toronto skyline from Polson Pier at sunset? I’ve photographed it at least forty times and I’m not done. My Instagram is ninety percent cityscapes, boba, and my cat, Mochi, a rescue tuxedo who runs the household.

Speaking of home life: I live alone for the first time in my life and I’m loving it, though my mom still sends me containers of soup “just because she made too much,” which is code for “I miss you.” I cook a lot — mapo tofu, tomato egg stir fry, and an aggressively good congee when I’m feeling homesick. My dumpling pleats are finally grandma-approved, by the way. She said so on video call last month and I nearly cried.

What am I looking for in a partner? Someone curious. I want a person who gets excited about trying the new restaurant on Dundas, who’ll join me on a rainy-day museum trip to the AGO, who asks me why I designed something a certain way and actually listens. Kindness is non-negotiable — to me, to strangers, to Mochi. I love deep 2 a.m. conversations and I love comfortable silence too. I dream of a relationship that’s a real team: we cheer each other’s wins, we order too much food, we get lost on trails together and laugh about it. If you’re kind, a little nerdy, and up for both city adventures and quiet dumpling-making nights, I think we’d get along really well.