Profile | From ‘lost and broke’ to a Macau Grand Prix star: Hong Kong’s Vivian Siu on harnessing her pain to drive herself forwards
- Vivian Siu hit rock bottom after her mother’s death. She ‘wasn’t going anywhere’, but got a degree from Columbia and a banking job. Then she started driving
- In 2023, she became the first woman F4 driver to finish the Macau Grand Prix. She opens up about her motivation, and giving her elderly grandma new experiences
Vivian Siu could be considered a poster girl for the power of positive thinking.
The Hong Kong native was 16 and living in New York when her mother, her sole carer, died of cervical cancer in 2008.
“After she was diagnosed things happened really quickly – she died within five months,” says Siu, an only child.
“I was underage at the time, so if I had stayed in the States I would have been put into foster care. So I returned to Hong Kong because that was the only other place I had legal residency.
“I came back lost and broke, and did nothing for three years,” she says.
“It was a very dark time of my life – I wasn’t going anywhere.” Home was wherever there was a couch to crash on.
Then she got her life together, harnessing her “profound pain” as motivation to complete a university degree – her mother’s dying wish. She graduated with a degree in economics from Columbia University, in New York, in 2017.
The death of a close friend who supported her during her troubled teenage years also became a source of motivation for her.
Today the high-school dropout is a banker at UBS in Hong Kong, and her list of achievements does not end there.
One thing that helped me [...] escape my depression back then was coin-operated car-racing arcade games; that’s what I did every day
She also won the first gold for the Hong Kong China team in motorsports at the inaugural FIA Asia Pacific Motorsport Championship, in Malaysia, in 2023.
Her meteoric rise in the sport has been captured in Zero to Macao, a documentary by award-winning British independent filmmaker Jonathan Finnigan that has had a private screening but is not for public release.
He grew up in Macau and racing there was a way to bring some peace, Siu says.
What makes her story inspiring is not just her rise in the male-dominated world of motorsport, but how she has overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
For many who find themselves at rock bottom, substance abuse is a tempting escape. Siu avoided that toxic trap but admits she had an addiction during her dark times in Hong Kong – to car-racing arcade games.
“One thing that helped me escape reality, or escape my depression back then, was coin-operated car-racing arcade games; that’s what I did every day for a couple years,” she says. “I was playing arcade game Maximum Tune for hours at an arcade in Mong Kok. It is still there.”
Having circumvented the many proverbial roadblocks in her life, a big part of Siu’s mission today is to spend quality time with her 94-year-old grandmother Miu Ngan-lam.
“Our relationship improved after I got my act together, after going back to New York by myself, getting into university – a proper one, that’s when things started to improve.
“Unfortunately, my grandpa died two years ago, so it’s just her alone in Hong Kong and I’m the only relative she really has.”
“She worries a bit and didn’t watch me race in the Macau Grand Prix – she was scared,” Siu says. Little wonder: Siu was hitting speeds of 250km/h (155mph).
“In the beginning she wasn’t supportive of me racing, but over time she has seen what I have done and the positives that have stemmed from it, so she became more positive.
“I feel thankful that I have been able to share these special moments with my grandma,” Siu says. “In her time, her generation, she could never have imagined that this was possible.”
