Six years ago, Wang Lei made a decision that changed her life forever. Inspired by two documentaries on mountain climbing, the 38-year-old Chinese-American decided to challenge herself to the limits of human endurance.
She wanted to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents and reach both the North and South Poles. Many scoffed at Wang's pipe dream. She had no athletic background or climbing experience.
But Wang made her dream a reality seven weeks ago when she scaled Mount Everest to complete what climbers hail as the 'adventure grand slam'.
By reaching the summit of the world's tallest mountain, Wang - who once feared even stepping out of her apartment in Boston because she found the cold intimidating - had successfully become the first Chinese woman, as well as the first Asian-American woman, to climb the famed Seven Summits.
'I was afraid of the cold at first,' said Wang, who was in Hong Kong this week on a speaking engagement at the City University of Hong Kong. 'I'd heard that the weather in New England was brutal. My office [where she worked in the IT and finance industry] was only a block away from the subway and the subway was only a block from my apartment. I was afraid in the beginning, but somehow I overcame my fear of the cold,' she said.
Born in Jiangsu province, Wang travelled to the US in 1995 to study computer science, earning an MBA at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. She never dreamed of becoming a climber, nor dared to live the life of an adventurer - until one fateful Sunday in June 2004.