xiaocang (zhang xiangling) was a warcraft 3 player and caster in china. in 2009 a friend told her to try league of legends on the north american server. she liked it enough to look up which chinese company held the licence. it was tencent. she had a friend hand in her CV for brand manager on league, and got in. the project group inside the marketing department was two people: her on brand, and a guy called bobi on marketing, who later ran tencent's TGA.
the part she says stuck with her was the first time she took a chinese team to an international league event. the game hadn't been promoted in china yet and there were barely any players, but she still needed a roster. so they held an open selection among the strong players they knew. a last-minute squad, behind the foreign teams in game understanding and in mechanics. they lost without any suspense. everybody expected it, and it still got to her. she decided she'd push the game in china no matter what, so that a chinese team could beat the strong foreign ones some day.
so she started making league casting videos. that wasn't her job. it was a hobby, nothing commercial in them. from the second half of 2010 until she resigned in march 2012 the view counts were enormous, and the videos took all her free time. she says she didn't even have time to date. once a taxi driver watched her in the mirror, then told her she badly needed a nourishing soup. by early 2012 she felt her body had hit its limit, and she left tencent.
at the end of 2012 she and her friends turned LOL Ladies into an offline club. she turned down a lot of sponsorship and paid appearances so the players could train full hours. that one didn't end the way she wanted. on sept 8, 2013 she came off nearly ten hours of live broadcast from the chinese qualifiers for the season 3 world championship, and we sat down and talked for three more.
(that talk went into a book i wrote on how chinese esports got built. this chapter's free, link in the comments)
