One of Ellen Lo's main motivations is to beautify the spaces she's in.

In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs Ask Me SF, a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we'll get to that later in the episode.

We start with Ellen's childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she's gone back to visit, it hasn't changed.

Ellen's time in North Carolina wasn't easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who's a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much.

The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US.

Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano ("like a good Asian kid," she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes.

She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who'd never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen.

When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication.

We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen's older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close.

[There's a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.]

Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland.

She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen.

She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister's encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast.

Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen's move to San Francisco.

We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira