The courageous memoir of one woman’s globe-spanning quest to cultivate self-love, break free from external validation, and confront the long-buried truths of a traumatic past, by the former CEO and co-founder of Embrace Global.
On paper, Jane Chen was the embodiment of success. A Harvard and Stanford graduate, she was the CEO and a co-founder of Embrace Global, a company that developed a groundbreaking incubator helping to save hundreds of thousands of newborns in the world’s most vulnerable communities. Chen’s work gave her purpose—and earned her shoutouts from presidents and pop stars. Yet underneath it all, Chen was burning out. She was consumed by self-doubt and the relentless need to prove herself, shaped by wounds that had formed long before her career began. No matter how much she achieved, she felt like she was never enough.
Then, Embrace collapsed. Jane lost more than a dream—she lost the identity she had built her life around. Feeling utterly broken, she set off on a global quest for healing. Chen’s search took her across oceans and into the uncharted terrain of her inner world. She sat in silence for days in the Indonesian jungle. She sought wisdom from world-renowned healers and therapists. She burned holes into her leg for a frog poisoning ceremony. She dove headfirst into every form of self-help, from the spiritual to the psychedelic, the cultish to the comical, only to find herself face-to-face with the one thing she had spent a lifetime avoiding: the trauma of her upbringing as a first-generation Taiwanese American. In doing so, Chen discovered a profound truth: Real healing doesn’t come from achievement, approval, or even the tools we think will save us.
A revelatory memoir brimming with candor, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Like a Wave We Break is more than a story of personal transformation—it’s an invitation to confront our deepest wounds and to embrace the messy, beautiful truth of who we are.
