I have never talked publicly about how I ended up in China, why I went, what it meant to me, or why I ended up leaving. I certainly talked a lot about my experiences there, the “what” I was experiencing, but not the “why” behind it.
As the world is celebrating the New Chinese Year these days, I can’t help but reminisce over the ~3 years I got to spend between Beijing and Shanghai. Memories so vivid, they often lift me from my familiar surroundings, and transplant me back onto the busy streets of China where I was often the only foreigner in a sea of Chinese.
So how did I end up there? It was a confluence of four different reasons – two of them push (away from the US) and two pull (towards China). My first push reason was massive fatigue with the Bay Area and disinterest in my job prospects post-MBA. The other push reason was that I really didn’t want to be in the US during the Trump presidency. My first pull reason was my fascination with China. After my first visit in 2016 I had pledged to make it part of my life’s journey, and I felt the time was right. The second pull reason was a woman I had met who was living there, and part me wanted to see if it could go anywhere (it didn’t).
So before I knew it, a mere week after graduating from my MBA, I put everything into storage, packed a bag, got a tourist visa and found myself sitting on a plane with a one-way ticket to Shanghai. No Chinese, no job, no network or anything – just an AirBnB to get started, and this insatiable desire to start a new chapter.
Those four reasons aside, moving to China for me was absolutely aligned with who I am, always looking for new cultural challenges, and a desire to explore and understand the world by immersing as deeply as possible. I fundamentally believe in the global role China will play in future, and I wanted to connect to that.
Fascinated with the rise of Chinese tech, I wanted to help Chinese tech companies expand internally. I ended up joining bike-sharing mobility giant Ofo in Beijing, heading up their international Business Development. The company was operating 10M bikes in China, and was on the verge of international expansion. Within a year, we opened ~50 new markets in ~20 new countries. It truly was a wild ride, which got even wilder as mismanagement and a leadership feud with our investors forced us to scale back our international operations and focus on China where competition was brutal.
At my one-year mark, with a bleak outlook for the company, a VC-friend introduced me to a Chinese couple that she had just invested in, as they were looking for a third, international, co-founder. After two-weeks of founder-dating, we decided to work together and start a cross-border social e-commerce business. Happily I dropped my life in Beijing and moved to Shanghai, the city I originally intended to live in when I moved to China. What followed was a journey of starting a company, hiring ~50 people, raising more money, and turning an idea into reality.
Starting a company is always hard, but it’s even harder doing so abroad in a cultural environment that really doesn’t always work in your favor. Cultural barriers, linguistic misunderstandings, the entire spectrum of “foreigner working abroad” issues, amplified by the fact that China is so much more different than other international markets. So as we were ready to raise our Series A, some ~1.5 years into the journey, I decided to move on from it. As a co-founder, you want to see yourself there for many years to come, and I just couldn’t.
When I moved to China, I had certain professional goals. Of course, I had just graduated from business school and there was a certain career-trajectory we were expected to be on (i.e., steep & successful). Yet my time in China didn’t match those expectations. Ofo would eventually go down and bankrupt, and leaving a company you helped get started is always a disappointing experience because that wasn’t why you got started in the first place.
Yet as hard as China was, it was that very hardship that got me excited. I loved being in China, I loved every moment of it, every second I struggled, every misunderstanding, every frustration. I remember breaking down in the hospital out of exhaustion and frustration because I had no idea how to navigate a foreign healthcare system. I remember how lonely I felt at work, finding it hard to socialize in Mandarin. The difficulty of studying Mandarin and how many times I would repeat the same chapters and characters. But I wouldn’t want to miss any of these experiences. China didn’t give me what I was looking for professionally, but it gave me 10x of what I thought I would get personally.
After ~3 years, I wasn’t done yet with China. I still wanted to continue my journey and invest in a new relationship I was in. But after spending 6 months searching for new opportunities, I just couldn’t find anything that really satisfied me. That’s when I eventually decided to end my China chapter 1.0 (knowing I’d have future chapters), and to move back to the US to continue my job search there.
By the time I packed my bags and put everything into storage again – this is at the onset of the pandemic – I was expecting to come back just weeks later. The moment I was leaving China, I wanted to go to the US and just take care of some preliminary business (find an apartment, start networking, etc). But by the time I arrived, it became clear that going back to China wouldn’t be that easy. And before I knew it, China shut down. Even now, more than a year later, I have the majority of my belongings sitting in Shanghai, unclear when I will see them again.
The hardest part for me, other than my relationship which suffered tremendously from the border closures, is that I never had a chance to say good-bye to China. I never got to say good-bye to my friends, or visit my favorite places one last time. I thought I would be going back to China 3-4 times a year for both personal and professional reasons. But over a year later, all I have are my pictures and memories. I am not even sure I will get to visit China again in 2021. And this sudden cut-off is really something that hurts.
Remembering one of my last conversations in China, with my friend Alex who was also on the verge of leaving China, we declared China as a living and breathing experience that we would carry with ourselves into the world, and that it wasn’t just limited to a specific location. A year later, this is what China is to me, a memory that is alive wherever I go.