Jessica Wong, 24

Hey hey, I’m Jessica! I’m twenty-four, a grad student at the University of Toronto, and I live in a cozy apartment near campus with two roommates and approximately nine hundred plants — okay, maybe twelve plants, but it feels like more when you’re watering them all.

My family is from Hong Kong — my parents moved to Toronto in the nineties, and I grew up in Richmond Hill speaking Cantonese at home and English everywhere else. My dad’s an engineer, my mom’s a pharmacist, and my little sister is in undergrad at York, following me around like she has since she was four. We’re a classic busy Chinese-Canadian family: group chats full of restaurant recommendations, my mom sending me soup recipes I never make, and Lunar New Year dinners at my grandma’s in Markham that involve way too much food and competitive mahjong after. My grandma is eighty-two and still beats all of us at mahjong. We don’t talk about it.

I’m doing my master’s in information studies at U of T — basically the science of how people find and use information, which is a fancy way of saying I get to nerd out about libraries, archives, and data all day. I TA for an undergrad course, I work part-time at the Robarts Library, and my thesis is about digital preservation of community archives. Yes, I’m that person who gets excited about metadata. No, I won’t apologize. Before grad school I did my undergrad at U of T too, so I’ve been haunting these Gothic hallways for six years now and I know all the best study spots — the quiet floors at Robarts, the sunny tables at Gerstein, the secret-ish café in the basement of Sidney Smith.

Dim sum is practically a personality trait for me at this point. Every other Sunday my family does dim sum in Chinatown — our usual spot is one of the big cart-service places on Spadina, where my grandma orders for the table and nobody argues. Har gow, siu mai, cheung fun, egg tarts to finish — I have the order memorized. I’ve also started a dim sum rating spreadsheet with my friends, because grad school has broken my brain in the best way. We’re up to fourteen restaurants rated.

And then there’s K-pop, my joyful obsession. It started in high school with a friend’s recommendation and never stopped. I take K-pop dance cover classes twice a week at a studio downtown, and performing the choreography with a group of fellow fans is the most fun workout imaginable. My bias list has evolved over the years but my current ult group gets played on loop while I clean the apartment, much to my roommates’ despair. Last year I went to a concert at Scotiabank Arena with my sister and we screamed ourselves hoarse — core memory unlocked.

Toronto in my twenties is the best. I love the bubble tea crawl down Yonge, the vintage shops on Queen West, summer evenings at Sugar Beach with friends, and the AGO’s free Wednesday evenings — I’ve seen the same Kusama installation four times and I’ll go again. In winter, I’m the one dragging everyone skating at Nathan Phillips Square and then to a hot pot place in Chinatown to thaw out. Hot pot is the answer to Canadian winter, full stop.

I’m also the unofficial event planner of my friend group — I organized a Lunar New Year hot pot night for fourteen people in our tiny apartment, and somehow nobody starved and nothing caught fire, which I consider a personal triumph. My roommates and I track our bubble tea spending on a whiteboard on the fridge, and let’s just say the numbers are alarming. Grad school stipends were not designed for my lifestyle, but the memories are worth it.

What am I looking for? Someone sweet and genuine who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. I want a partner who’s up for dim sum Sundays and dance class showcases, who’ll debate K-pop comebacks with me or at least pretend to care, and who understands that grad school stress sometimes means I need a hug and a bubble tea, in that order. Kindness, humor, and curiosity about the world — those are my big three. I dream of a relationship that’s playful and supportive, where we hype each other up and build a cozy little life together. If you can handle my plant collection, my spreadsheet brain, and my terrible singing along to Korean lyrics I only half understand, I think we’d have a really good time.