I stay curious a little longer than most people do.

My story

I was you in 2017.

Free period, staff room, marking pile in front of me — and I realized I could describe my entire next 10 years in detail. Same desk. Same cycle. Nothing wrong with it. It just felt already written.Everyone said the same things: “You’re just a teacher.” “You’d have to start over.” “Tech only wants engineers.” They were wrong — but the path wasn’t a leap. In 2018 I moved from the classroom to MOE HQ’s IT division, where I learned the corporate language nobody teaches teachers. In 2021, Meta hired me. I was laid off in the tech downturn — and came back at TikTok, building Trust & Safety education for a marketplace of fifteen million sellers, across seven languages and nine markets. The road has kept going from there.When I shared that story on LinkedIn, hundreds of teachers and civil servants asked me the same question: how? Answering them taught me something — what I actually loved wasn’t the career advice. It was the stories. Theirs, and everyone else’s. This site is where I tell them.

Stories I couldn't not tell

The Long Way Home

I met Nico, a Spanish expat, at my outdoor bootcamp in Singapore. He told his story to plenty of people — it wasn't a secret. What was different is that I kept asking questions after everyone else had moved on. In 2022, Nico dove into open water to reach two drowning men. He saved one. He couldn't reach the second — a young migrant worker known only by his nickname: Money. Like the word.He wanted to do something in Money's memory, but the project he'd started wasn't going anywhere. It needed someone to find the actual narrative — something strangers would trust enough to fund. So I offered to write it. I renamed it The Long Way Home, tying the emotional core — a life that never made it home — to the project's real mechanic: a 5,000-kilometre relay swim, the actual distance from Singapore to India. I wrote the PR script, the media pitch, the website copy, and helped bring Rajnish — the man Nico saved — into the story. He's the one guiding Nico back to the rescue site now.The campaign is live at thelongwayhomeproject.com, raising funds for orphaned children in India. Rajnish showed up in person for the kickoff swim. And the two of them have agreed to be filmed — what started as a conversation at a bootcamp is becoming a documentary. All because someone stayed curious a few questions longer.

How one conversation traveled

The Seat Next to Me

I'd never engaged with Rwanda in my life. Then I couldn't stop asking questions.

I met a Rwandan diplomat at a friend's gathering in Singapore. Once we started talking, I couldn't stop asking: how does a country go from genocide to becoming one of the safest, cleanest nations in Africa? The curiosity became a real friendship — and eventually she invited me to stay with her family. I ended up at a national New Year's celebration, listening to President Kagame speak about his vision for the country. Not something any tourist itinerary could have given me.The part I love most happened on the way home. On the flight back to Singapore, I sat next to a Singaporean man who had just been in Rwanda exploring a business opportunity. He was struggling — he didn't understand the local system, and had no one to guide him. I knew exactly who could help: my friend's work is precisely about bringing investment into Rwanda. So I connected them.They're in an active business relationship now. He's investing in Rwanda and lives there part of the year. All of it traceable to one conversation at a party where I asked one question too many — which, I've come to believe, is exactly the right number.

Whatever you give comes back

Life Is a Circle

In Peru, I asked an artisan what the spiral on his pendants meant. He didn't give me the short answer.

He picked one up and turned it over in his fingers. Pachamama, he said. Mother Earth. And the shape isn't decoration — whatever you give comes back to you. Life is a circle.So I kept asking. What the coil stood for, how he shaped the wire, who taught him. More questions than a browsing customer is supposed to have. He didn't run out of patience. At some point he stopped explaining, looked at me, and said, "You're an intelligent girl."Then he reached past the row of pendants, chose a snake pachamama, and gave it to me. A gift — he wouldn't let me pay for it. He had just finished telling me the rule, and then he went and demonstrated it.I told him the snake is my Chinese zodiac sign.Neither of us had any way of knowing that. He'd chosen it for his own reasons — the snake coiling into the same spiral, shedding and returning, the circle again. I was born into it on the other side of the world, in a calendar he had probably never seen. Two systems that had never met, agreeing on one small piece of copper.We shook hands on it. Of everything I carried home from that trip, it's the thing I've thought about most.I keep finding the same pattern — in Singapore, in Kigali, on a road in Bolivia: stay curious a little longer than people expect, and they hand you something. Usually it's a story. That day it was a snake on a red thread.Whatever you give comes back to you.

From my LinkedIn

The Detours That Built Me

The dumbest person in the room. You know that feeling of being the dumbest person in the room? That was me. Every single time, in the beginning.I sent hundreds of resumes and heard nothing back, because on paper I was just a Chinese teacher. So while I waited, I kept moving. I walked into my first hackathon not knowing what a hackathon was — surrounded by developers, engineers, people who literally spoke in code. I stayed, got humbled by people much younger than me, and hustled anyway.I showed up at AI events and blockchain talks understanding maybe 30% of what was said, then went home and YouTubed the rest. Discomfort is the signal you're growing, not the sign to stop. You don't need to belong to show up — you just need to be curious enough to keep going back.The transition was one conversation, one event, one connection at a time. I couldn't see the progress while it was happening. You never do, until you look back.

A failed startup. Before MOE, before Meta, before TikTok — I tried to build one. No coding background, just a small team of enthusiasts and an idea: Matches, a mobile platform where anyone could buy and sell freelance services, freely.We did it all from scratch — engaged a tech team in India, built the business plan, learned to pitch to VCs before I knew what a pitch deck was, picked up UX/UI for iOS and Android, tested bugs at 2am. Nine months later, we launched four apps.Then, like so many startups, it failed. I won't pretend that didn't sting — we'd put everything into it: time, savings, sleep, belief. But that failure didn't end my story. It wrote the first chapter of it. Every pivot since — government, Big Tech, policy, trust & safety — runs on the muscle I built chasing that idea.If something you're building feels like it's falling apart right now: it might just be building the version of you that's ready for what's next.

Death Road, Bolivia. My time at TikTok ended last year. I'm grateful for the scale, the pace, the global exposure — but what stayed with me most is the people.After that chapter, I traded my laptop for a backpack and set off solo across South America — something I'd been putting off for years. The lessons found me fast.3,500 metres down Death Road: stay focused and trust yourself when things feel uncertain. High-altitude days: resilience is built through discomfort — not around it, through it. Constant change: the ability to adapt matters more than having a perfect plan. Every plan I made on that trip was rewritten within a day.I came back clearer, more grounded, and more intentional about what I want to build next. Career transitions feel a lot like this — uncomfortable, uncertain, full of things you didn't know you didn't know. The same spirit gets you through: just begin, stay humble, keep going.Have a story you've never told properly? Write to me — I'll keep asking until we find it.

© 2026 Kityin Ku — storyteller in Singapore. Stories, pivots, and the people nobody's noticed yet.