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“The first few years were living a dream and learning what this lifestyle was,” he recalls. “But after two to three years, it plateaued. I felt like I was no longer growing as a person and no longer looked forward to doing this.”
Despite being drawn to the job for its promise of big data projects, much of his work involved monotonous and conventional accounting tasks. He felt he was “living on other people’s timelines” and pushing agendas that were not his own.
Even the networking events, meant to inspire, deepened his reservations. “There were a lot of networking sessions where we got to meet the firm’s partners. That was also when we heard a lot of their war stories. And I thought, oh my God, if I were to stay at EY, this is what I could look forward to becoming.”
That future involved becoming someone who travelled constantly for work, had surface connections with acquaintances, and little time for home life and passions for the sake of climbing the corporate ladder.
As cracks began to show in his day job, Mr Chow pursued improvisational comedy on the side “to stay sane”. What began as weekend classes grew into spending most of his after-work hours performing with an improv troupe, going to open-mic nights and immersing himself in New York’s comedy circuit.
Clowning, in particular, resonated with him because of two memories that he can still vividly recall to this day.
When he was 10, his Maha Bodhi School teacher put on a clown show and called him up to perform. He was at a loss as to what to do until the teacher whispered the answer into his ear – which he promptly blurted out, which had the class cracking up with laughter.
The other moment was when he was 29 and met four Brazilian clowns in Brooklyn. They took him to a Jacques Lecoq show – a physical theatre show inspired by the namesake French stage actor – that he found beautiful and heartwarming in equal measure. At the end of the night, they told him, “Eugene, you’re a clown, don’t you know it?”
“Clowning is about us being human. It’s about us finding the cracks in between, it’s about us being okay with not knowing,” says Mr Chow. “It’s about being truthful about who we are and being okay with being seen.”