Lei Wang’s Biography

Born in Nan Tong of Jiang Su province during China’s Cultural Revolution, Lei is the second child in an engineers’ family. At that time, her mother was a materials engineer in Xi’An of Shaanxi province, while her father was a mechanical engineer in Beijing 500 miles away, so Lei lived with her grandparents in Nan Tong until she was four years old.

At the end of the Cultural Revolution, her parents reunited and Lei was raised in Beijing along with her brother and a cousin. The family lived on modest salary that was barely enough to cover food and children’s school expenses. Besides studying hard, Lei spent many happy weekends catching fish, shrimp, and cicadas, and making them her favorite snack.

Lei went to high school at Beijing No. 4 High School (one of the top schools in China), where her main interest was Botany. For five years, she spent many days and weekends hiking in the public parks gathering specimens, and became an expert in recognizing plants even in winter. Only in the summer, she got opportunity to hike in the mountains a few times to collect specimens, and she cherished those trips.

Upon graduating from high school, Lei applied to the best medical school in China. However, because it was being punished for students’ participation in the 1989 TianAnMen Square demonstration, students there were required to perform one year of military training. Instead, Lei gave up her interest in biology and medicine to attend college at Tsinghua University, the top engineering school in China, for Computer Science. Forty plus hours of classes each week left little time for sports or outdoor pursuits.

Lei came to the U.S. in 1995 to continue her graduate study in Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. After obtaining her Master’s degree, she left school to work as a software engineer on financial software systems in New York City, then at a start-up in Seattle. In 2001, she decided to go back to school for her MBA at the Wharton School.

It was there that she rediscovered her love of the outdoors. As opposed to her other times at school where all she did was study, Lei pursued many opportunities outside of the standard curriculum. It was while at Wharton that Lei first went ice climbing, climbed her first glacier mountain, Cotopaxi in Ecuador (5,897m/19,347ft), and climbed her first “big peak”, Kilimanjaro in Africa.

It was on the trip to Kilimanjaro after graduating that Lei discovered how weak she was. Of all of her classmates who took that trip, she was the weakest. Even a large, overweight classmate outpaced her on the mountain. She decided that when she got back she needed to improve her fitness and began running after work in the gym near her new home in Boston. The Hyannis Half Marathon at the end of February 2004 was the first time that she ran outdoors, and she went on to run two marathons later that year.

That February, she also saw Touching the Void, a documentary movie about a first ascent of a peak in Peru that nearly ended in tragedy. Later that year in June, she saw another documentary, Women of K2, about women climbers of the harshest mountain on the planet. The next day she checked out every movie in the Boston Public Library on Everest and watched them all in one day. It was at that point that she decided she would climb Everest, and after more research, she decided that she would do all of the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each of the seven continents.

She has now climbed six of the seven summits and skied to both North Pole and South Pole. With only Mt Everest left, she is well on her way to becoming the first Chinese woman to accomplish this feat.