At night, after leaving her employer’s downtown Seattle office, Vimel Meng would return to her apartment in Belltown and collapse onto the couch facing Elliott Bay. Through the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows, she could see the water near Pike Place Market, the distant mountains, the afterglow of the setting sun, and the seagulls circling above the city.
She often spent hours lying there in silence.
“I felt like my life was already good,” Meng said. “But I still felt like something was missing. I felt like I was always searching for something.”
This feeling had clung to her long before she came to Seattle.
Growing up in Tianjin, China, Meng learned early that survival depended on discipline and achievement. Growing up, her parents were unstable and emotionally volatile. Arguments could erupt without warning. Dinner tables could suddenly be flipped over in the middle of meals.
Meng described her father as emotionally unstable, saying he would sometimes suddenly begin yelling or become physically violent. Her mother, she said, often lived inside imagined versions of reality and performed emotions dramatically.
By middle school, Meng believes she had already entered a long period of depression, though she did not recognize it at the time.
Instead, she focused on school.
“I always thought I could change my destiny through studying,” she said.
Education became both escape and survival. She pushed herself relentlessly, eventually leaving mainland China for Hong Kong after excelling on the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
At the University of Hong Kong, Meng studied sociology and media and communication. As a child, she had dreamed of becoming a writer. She wrote stories obsessively and imagined creating magazines of her own one day. Writing, she said, became a way to emotionally detach from the pain around her.
“Imagine a story, imagine a new world, that’s dissociation,” she said. “It’s being able to break away from your current world, as if you have a place where you feel safer living.”
But adulthood slowly redirected force her away from creativity and toward financial security.
Hong Kong also taught her that artistic ambition often came second to survival. Around her, classmates pursued careers in finance, consulting and other high-paying industries.
“At that point, I thought making money was more important than ideals,” she said. “I couldn’t think about dreams if I couldn’t even guarantee my own survival.”
In 2019, Meng moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in data science and business analytics in Rochester, New York. She later worked in consulting in Chicago before eventually moving to Seattle for a position at a tech company.
At first, the tech industry felt exciting.
The salary was high. The rewards came quickly. Her performance reviews were strong. For a while, she believed she had finally reached the future she spent most of her life chasing.
Then the industry around her began to change.
As layoffs spread through tech companies and workplace pressure intensified, Meng said she slowly began seeing a different side of corporate culture. Performance metrics became increasingly rigid. Workers competed over increasingly small measurements of productivity. Human relationships inside teams began to feel transactional.
“Tech companies just want to turn everyone into AI like screws in a machine,” she said. The realization unsettled her.
Around her, she watched immigrant coworkers remain stuck inside jobs they no longer wanted because their visas depended on employer sponsorship. Some waited years for permanent residency. Others stayed in unhealthy workplaces because leaving could mean losing legal status, financial security, or the life they spent years building. “A colleague’s wife has been trying to get a permanent residency for nine years, but she still hasn’t succeeded,” Meng recalled.
Meng’s experience reflects a broader reality inside Seattle’s tech industry. In the past decade alone, more than 157,000 H-1B approvals went to Washington-based employers, including Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia and the University of Washington, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data cited in a recent The Seattle Times report.
The same report described how many immigrant tech workers have begun reconsidering whether they can continue building long-term futures in the United States as layoffs spread across the industry and immigration uncertainty intensifies.
For many immigrant workers, leaving the U.S. would also mean leaving behind the communities, friendships and lives they spent years building.
Many of the people around Meng, including herself, appeared successful by almost every visible measure. They earned top salaries in Seattle’s booming tech economy. They lived in luxury apartments, building adult lives.
Yet privately, many felt trapped inside lives shaped by visa uncertainty, corporate pressure, and the growing realization that material success could no longer resolve their emotional exhaustion.
One particular conversation with a coworker stayed with her.
Meng recalled asking a colleague, “Don’t you think there’s something wrong here?” Instead of disagreeing, the colleague quietly responded: “We all feel the same.”
The moment unsettled her. She began to realize that many immigrant workers around her were carrying the same fears and frustrations, but felt unable to leave the company because of family responsibilities, visa restrictions, and the years of sacrifice already invested in building lives for themselves in the United States.
“We were already making top Seattle incomes,” Meng said. “Why was everyone still so unhappy?” For years, Meng had imagined financial success and independence was supposed to heal the uncertainty she carried throughout childhood. The effort and success towards meritocracy was supposed to make the suffering worth it. Instead, after finally arriving at the life she once wanted, she found herself confronting a different kind of emptiness.
The emotional collapse came gradually. After a toxic relationship ended in emotional chaos, Meng began seeking therapy. Her therapist eventually connected many of her struggles back to unresolved childhood trauma.
For years, Meng focused heavily on achievement and long-term planning, believing success could help her escape the instability of her childhood. But once she achieved the financial stability and career success she had spent years chasing, Meng said she began questioning whether the life she built was actually the one she wanted.
“I realized I had been living inside a framework I wrote for myself,” Meng said. “My life still felt like something was missing.”
A breaking point came during one particularly painful period at the company. Meng, who said she had long been considered a strong performer on her team, described becoming trapped in internal office politics after taking mental health leave. Instead of feeling supported, she said she increasingly felt pressured to protect herself inside a corporate environment shaped by performance metrics and toxic culture.
The experience forced her to reconsider what all those years of struggle had ultimately been for. And she came to believe the problem was not simply individual burnout. “It was the system itself,” she said.
So she decided to officially leave this profession, and embrace a new life. What followed was not a sudden transformation, but a long and uneven process of recovery. Meng took leave beginning in May of last year. Around the same time, she began developing the screenplay for her first film. “No Land Beneath Our Wings.” The film was eventually shot in late June, but she said most of the following year was spent slowly learning how to be alone with herself again. She returned to China for periods of time, hoping distance might help her recover. Instead, many familiar environments and relationships continued triggering memories connected to childhood trauma and PTSD.
At the same time, she found herself confronting another unexpected problem: she no longer knew how to express herself.
For years, Meng said, corporate life had trained her to communicate almost entirely through what she described as “business professional language” for workplace survival.
“I felt like I had so many things inside me that I wanted to say, but I couldn’t speak,” she said.
As a child, Meng used to write what she described as “flowery sentences,” but she eventually realized many of those words lacked emotional substance.
Relearning how to tell stories became part of her recovery.
Much of her previous creative experience came from documentary work during college, where storytelling depended more on observing reality than constructing narrative arcs. Developing a fictional screenplay forced her to begin again almost from zero.
Meng said she spent months rewriting the script alongside collaborators and mentors while trying to rebuild her narrative instincts. Before arriving at the third version of the screenplay, she had already gone through more than 20 different outlines.
Meng said she often felt caught between anxiety and excitement, anxious about creative challenges, but also energized by the feeling that she still had a long road ahead of her.
The film itself became a way for Meng to process not only her own experiences, but the emotional reality she saw reflected in many first generation immigrants around her.
Meng’s film, “No Land Beneath Our Wings,” follows a working visa holder named Iris who is trapped between corporate exploitation and immigration uncertainty, leading to a gradual loss of self identity. But for Meng herself, the deeper core of the film was also about freedom, and the reality that many seemingly successful immigrants no longer have control over their lives.
“What we spend so much time and effort pursuing is nothing more than the rights others were born with,” she said. “We seem to have lost the right to freely explore our lives.”
As she continued developing the screenplay, Meng slowly began reconnecting with a sense of being actually living she thought she had lost years earlier.
Mentors in the film industry encouraged her to stop viewing creativity as something fragile or temporary. Told her that coding jobs might eventually disappear or be replaced by future AI, but storytelling and filmmaking could always remain lifelong practices. The idea stayed with her.
Now, Meng said she no longer needs to rush to achieve predetermined milestones or pursue outstanding results and utilitarian goals. Instead, she has begun to focus on resting and learning how to tell stories authentically.
“I live not to be stagnant, overshadowed by the past; I live to this day to illuminate more people,” she emphasized.
This determination was ultimately reflected in the results of her filmmaking production.
No Land Beneath Our Wings was later accepted to play in the Seattle Asian American Film Festival on May 30.
Now, Meng spends much of her time writing, and continuing work on longer versions of the new story. She hopes to keep creating stories of the emotional realities of Asian women, first generation immigrants.
Years earlier, during the worst period of her burnout, Meng often sat silently beside the windows watching seagulls drift above Elliott Bay.
Over time, they became meaningful to her.
“I felt like we were just like those seagulls,” she said. “It felt like there was no land beneath our wings that belonged to us, but I still believed that one day I could fly beyond the mountains.”
