Joseph Chang, 36

Previous job: Deloitte Corporate Finance, senior vice-president, Los Angeles

Current job: Head of Beijing office, Asia-Pacific investment banking, at Houlihan Lokey

The change: After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with an economics degree in 1995, Mr Chang joined investment banking firm Banc of America Securities. After four years, he plunged into two automotive ventures. They failed.

In 2001, he went to business school at the University of Michigan. After graduating in 2003, he started another automotive venture. It never took off. In 2004, he settled down to investment banking at Deloitte Corporate Finance.

But China was always on the mind of the first-generation American-Chinese, whose parents moved to the United States in the 1970s. Last year, when he was headhunted to lead US investment bank Houlihan Lokey's China expansion efforts, he did not hesitate. He arrived in Beijing in August last year.

'If I did not have the China angle in my career, I would probably be on Wall Street working for somebody else, doing their deals, not mine, on someone else's team, not leading mine, and not knowing when my next advancement would be,' he said.

'Given the global financial crisis today, where the US market will suffer a downturn more severe than imagined, I don't even know if I would still have had a job had I stayed in the US.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.