Clare Zhang

“So, do you order in Mandarin?” I ask Clare. 

“Not always,” she chuckles. “I speak fluently and understand everything, but I am told that I have a very American accent when I speak Mandarin.”

On Tuesday, July 2, Clare and I are perusing the menu at House of Pancakes in San Francisco’s Sunset neighborhood, and we happen to be the only ones at the restaurant because, it turns out, most San Franciscans at 11.30 am on a Tuesday happen to be working. Not the two of us, clearly, who both happen to have an entire week off for July 4th.

Clare agreed to be interviewed for the magazine and prepared a thoughtful itinerary for the day, loaded with places and experiences of great meaning to her life in San Francisco. House of Pancakes is one of those: a tiny Chinese eatery in the Sunset, where she often came to get her favorite comfort food when she lived in this neighborhood, her first residence in San Francisco.

“Okay, how about scallion pancakes, beef pancakes, and lamb skewers?”

“Deal,” I say. 

Clare and I should have met each other in college. Our dorms were about three hundred feet apart from each other, and we overlapped on campus for three full years. But our paths never crossed. Instead, it was after I moved to San Francisco and after I met Ben, who became my housemate for the next four years, that I got to meet Clare, his girlfriend. Ben was the same class as Clare at MIT and lived in the same dorm as her, which makes our asymptotic paths even more astounding. Over time, as we went through the trials and tribulations of mid- and late-twenties in San Francisco, the three of us became friends. 

But Clare didn’t immediately move to San Francisco after college. She first moved to Palo Alto and began her Master’s program in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. A relatively standard path for a freshly-minted, high-achieving graduate, except for one detail: she dropped out of the Master’s program after one month.             

“Unusual for someone who just left the notoriously ambitious culture of MIT,” I remark as we savor the delicious comfort brunch.  

“Oh, it definitely was,” she laughs. “And, it was very unlike me. I always did things by the book and it’s just not something you do as a child of Chinese parents. I remember my mom telling me to just suffer and to get through it, but I couldn’t. I really felt I was not getting anything out of the experience. It was actually my brother-in-law who encouraged me to have trust in myself and my skills, to just leap into the uncertainty and figure things out as they come.”

Clare’s decision to leave the Master’s program after just one month was monumental, not just because it was unexpected, but because it forced her to chart a completely new course. San Francisco, with its intersection of tech and creativity, became her playground. She landed her first full-time job as a product design engineer—a role that would perfectly blend her love of engineering with her passion for design—and moved to the Sunset neighborhood.

“Did you always know you would be in the MechE space?”

“Not really,” she says, “I was always into arts and crafts, but I didn't even know how to use a drill or a saw before coming to college. Plus, I actually declared a major in Materials Science and Engineering and thought I would go in that direction. What happened was that I did an undergrad research project where the graduate student, my supervisor, was a mechanical engineer. She got me excited about mechanical engineering, and I ended up switching majors.”

With our plates empty, we leave House of Pancakes and step out into the sun, and then head toward Little Aloha, a Hawaiian spot known for its shaved ice. Clare is a big fan of this delicacy, which originated in Taiwan, a country she loves, and so she gets a cup of mango- and passionfruit-flavored shaved ice. At Little Aloha, a cup of shaved ice is indeed a cup of ice, one that has been pulverized into a dessert structure that one does not eat but instead chisels.

“I feel like ever since I have known you,” I say, “you are always traveling for work.” 

“It’s a lot of travel,” Clare laughs. “Not necessarily something they tell you when you’re thinking of becoming a product design engineer.”

Clare has worked as a product design engineer at Nest, then Google, and now Mill. Though the products varied across the companies, from home hardware to food recycler, one aspect of the job has remained a constant for Clare. Having to travel internationally to manage relationships with suppliers. 

It’s part of the hardware tech industry that end consumers often don’t think about, and it’s something that is prevalent in all American hardware tech companies, be it a scaling company like Mill, Clare’s current company, or a hardware giant, like Apple. Because the end product consists of physical materials (in other words, it’s not a software application), those physical materials have to be supplied by someone and manufactured somewhere, and the someone and the somewhere are typically suppliers in other countries, like China or Mexico. 

That means a product design engineer, like Clare, who designs the end product and thinks about the mechanics of how each part comes together, has to establish good relationships with those suppliers. Not just for vibes but for legitimate ease of business operations. After all, for a product design engineer’s work to come to life, everything needs to be supplied, manufactured, and assembled according to the specifications. And what better way to ensure that all goes accordingly than to expand a product design engineer’s role into a supplier management role as well? 

“Is it like an unspoken secret of the MechE, product-design-engineer world,” I ask, “that you have to become good at relationship management if you work in hardware tech?”

“Kind of!” Clare nods and laughs. “I mean, it’s definitely necessary. It’s much easier to provide feedback about the assembly process when you are in person with the suppliers. It makes the feedback loop faster.” 

“I’m guessing this is a curve ball for most people who get a mechanical engineering degree and get into this line of work?”

“Definitely,” Clare adds, “because it’s less tangible. Plus, if you work with suppliers in different countries, you have to take cultural elements into account. A supplier in China will have different expectations and different social norms compared to a supplier in Mexico. There are a lot of social cues that you have to learn to pick up to be successful. But, I do think it’s exciting in a way as well. It’s not something you can learn in school or by reading a textbook.”

I ask Clare if she ever feels that the way she has to communicate with suppliers has affected how she communicates in her personal life. 

“Oh, that’s a good question,” Clare says and pauses for a bit. “I think I definitely became better at letting things go. Managing supplier relationships is complex, so you learn to let go and deal with uncertainty. I did also become confident in expressing what I think and not just going with the flow.”

She then laughs. 

“What?” I ask. 

“Well,” she continues, “I also did notice that I have become hyper-specific in casual, everyday conversations, which sometimes comes off as, I guess, maybe too rigid?”

We finish chiseling our shaved ice and continue walking around the neighborhood. Clare shows me the building in which she lived when she first moved to San Francisco, and says that she now wants to take me to the Castro from the West Portal tram station. This, Clare points out, is a tragically inefficient way to go from the Sunset to the Castro. 

“There was the L train that I used to take, which was perfect,” she says, “and then they paused the service because they had to make improvements, and so they introduced the L buses instead.”

“Not good?”

“They’re fine,” she sighs. “The one that goes in the opposite direction comes regularly, but I almost never see the L bus that goes in the direction we need. So, I just end up walking toward the West Portal station, which takes a while, and I then take the K train from there to the Castro. Otherwise, I would just be waiting for this ghost L bus to arrive.”

The walk from her old apartment to the West Portal ends up being about fifteen minutes long, though I, enamored by the beautiful scenery of the houses and flowers in the Sunset, remain oblivious to the inefficiency of this route. Unlike Clare. 

“I would just like to point out,” she announces when we arrive at the West Portal station, “that we saw two L buses going in the opposite direction while we were walking, and none in the direction we’re going.”

We take the tram to the Castro and walk over to Philz Coffee for a caffeine boost. Inside, the place is packed, and it looks like a collision of two universes. Up front, you've got the techies—headphones clamped down, fingers flying across keyboards, looking like they're coding their way to the singularity. Meanwhile, near the back, it’s a different scene entirely: sun-drenched dudes in tank tops and short shorts, strolling in and out with iced coffees in hand, looking like they just came from a beach photo shoot. And somewhere between the two, Clare found her pre-pandemic haven here at Philz in the Castro. It is here that she used to come to work on her digital art—mostly comics at the time. 

“How did this start for you?” I ask. “The characters in your comics are never fictional, they are always people from your own life. It’s very personal.”

“I think I needed a way to process what I was experiencing,” she answers. “I have always been an observer, I even had a Notes file on my phone of daily observations, but I think I wanted to find a way to express myself in a way that felt right for me. I liked how the comics translated those experiences. I guess they have been my own form of a diary.”

It’s fair to say that she found the right process because the output has been nothing short of sublime. Clare’s comics often depict her interactions with the world around her, surfacing, in the most affectionate and uncynical way, the absurdity of life and all the hilarious curve balls it throws at us. Many of the comics can be found on Clare’s art Instagram as well as her website, and she even made a print booklet version of the comics drawn during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The cover shows Clare as a comic character, wearing a face mask and holding a baseball bat, ready to hit the four balls— numbered 2, 0, 2, and 0— coming her way,

Now, it’s important to note that Clare was drawing even before the invention of the iPad and Procreate. In middle school, she got her hands on the WACOM Graphire3, a futuristic device at the time that used a stylus to translate her physical drawings on a pad into digital art. Drawing was her escape from the mainstream adolescent culture in Houston, Texas, which, to this day, culminates in homecoming games and mum-adorned dance nights. Though, Clare clarifies, she did pause drawing in high school because her marching-band practices—in the suffocating Texas humidity, mind you—took up so much of her time. She stopped playing the flute in the tenth grade and, in her own words, has “never looked back.”  

“I was really into animated shows as a kid,” she laughs. “I really liked Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Jackie Chan Adventures, and Hey Arnold!. But, mostly, I was really into Pokémon. All I wanted to do back then is draw Pokémon.” 

The influence is apparent in Clare’s comics. Her characters express emotions freely, they have larger-than-life, exaggerated quirks that consistently deliver comedic relief, and their dialogues are sharp and intentional, without ever being too on the nose. Even if you don’t know Clare in real life, you’ll quickly identify her core traits through her art: conscientiousness, diligence, and acute observational humor that only an imaginative wallflower can have.  

“I mean, how do you even go about starting a comic?” I ask. “How do you go from nothing to this level of comedy?”

“I always start with a circle to ground myself,” she explains. “I then build toward what’s called the line of action. I try to have characters always express a very particular physical motion, like hunching or holding an item with their hand, so the line of action is a level of abstraction. Basically, how do you distill a pose into lines that serve as foundations. They also call it gesture drawing.”

As she is walking me through her process, drawing curves and shapes in Procreate on her iPad, I can’t help but smile. She might not realize it, but the symmetry between her art and engineering is hard to miss: start with the basics, and build from there. All sorts of other magic happens after these grounding elements, including refining the storyline, to get a comic to the final state, though Clare points out that she actually doesn’t draw comics as often these days. Not because she doesn’t have the time but because she went in a different direction, drawing fictional characters and using color. In a perhaps unconscious way, she went in the direction of her original influence: animated TV characters. 

“I think I got what I needed out of comics from a technical perspective,” she continues. “I became comfortable at drawing people’s expressions and gestures and telling stories. But, after two and a half years of doing that, I felt that I needed to move on.”   

I marvel at these fictional characters on her iPad and tell her that she should think about making a children’s story. That it would likely be a hit, whether online or print. 

“Uh, I know,” she says, “but then I become very existential about it. Like, am I then doing this just for the Instagram likes, or am I doing this because it’s something that I want? I like the fact that it is a hobby and that I get to do it the way I want.”

After Philz, Clare and I walk, and instantaneously regret our decision to walk in the scorching sun, to the Mission, where Clare needs to stop by the Fresh Meat Seafood store on Mission Street to buy ground pork. 

“I was thinking that we go to my place and make pork dumplings?”

“Oh,” I say. “Make them ourselves?”

“Yes! We’ll fold the dumplings together.”

At her and Ben’s place, Clare explains that she likes to make the traditional Chinese pork dumplings with a slightly zesty and herby twist. That entails diced ginger, chopped chives, chopped scallions, mixed in a blender and then added to the ground pork, all before the dumplings are folded. The fun part, however, is then putting small bits of the zesty-herby-pork mixture on thin dough circles and turning the entire thing into a presentable dumpling. 

“I feel like so many cultures have some version of rolling ground meat into a dough or a leaf or something,” I say, “and the rolling process being a thing. I remember grandmas in the Balkans when they prepared this type of food, putting minced meat on big vine leaves, then rolling them, and gossiping while rolling them.”

“Oh, yeah,” Clare laughs. “It’s the same in China. It can definitely be a family activity, and you’ll often find kids who are really good at folding the dumpling dough. It can be even competitive within a single family, who makes better-looking dumplings?”     

Clare gives me a quick rundown of how to fold the dumpling dough and we begin the process. If there is a competition out there over who makes better-looking dumplings, I for sure would never win. After half an hour of folding, my dumplings are asymmetric at best and hideous at worst. 

“Well,” I sigh, “they’re edible at least.”

“No, they’re great,” Clare smiles, “a distinctive look!”

We make delicious potstickers with the dumplings and eat them with sesame vinegar, while Clare shows me one of the products she designed, a Chromecast TV remote. It’s a sleek and modern product, but all I can think about is how I would not even know where to start if I had to design something like this. For Clare, however, this was creativity and fun packed in one — she says she is very proud of this work. 

“Okay, you should take some dumplings with you,” Clare says. “I’ll give you an ice pack to keep them cool.”

She lines up a dozen dumplings in a circular takeout container for me, and then looks at the chunky transparent plastic bag of chives that she opened.

“Maybe I pack the rest of the chives and give them to my sister in Indianapolis. She will probably use them.”

“Smuggling chives,” I laugh. “Lucrative business.”

Clare hands me the ice pack and the takeout container with dumplings. 

“Wait, what should I use for sauce?” I gasp. “I don’t really have anything. Maybe I could use balsamic vinegar?”

“No, Denis,” Clare laughs. “Take my sesame vinegar. There’s very little of it left anyway.”

She carefully packs everything for me with the precision of an engineer and the sleekness of a designer: dumplings in the perfectly sized circular takeout container (washed and stored, of course), the pack of ice on top, and the sesame vinegar nestled just right, all neatly tucked into a plastic bag. Functional, simple, efficient—pure Clare.

I head back to my apartment, with Clare’s impromptu work of functional art, and Clare, later that day, heads to the airport, with her chunky transparent bag of unused chives to give to her sister in Indianapolis, who, Clare later confirms, was indeed happy to receive a chunky transparent bag of unused chives.