The Chinese entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia who’ve abandoned the rat race for sun, sand and scuba diving – but it’s not been easy
- Southeast Asia has long attracted southern Chinese immigrants, but now young, northern mainlanders are abandoning China’s extreme work culture for a slower life
- Whether opening a cafe in Bali, scuba instructing in Thailand, or building a guest house in Malaysia, following their dreams has been tough during the pandemic
Visitors and residents in Bali’s Canggu district are spoiled for choice when it comes to dining, and now, Shaanxi-style biang biang noodles have been added to the mix, courtesy of an émigré from northern China.
The “Nanyang”, as the Chinese have long dubbed Southeast Asia, has attracted migrants from China since the Song dynasty (AD960-1279). Yet the majority sailed from southern provinces.
Mandarin-speaking, wheat-eating Li Yang, then, is a rarity in Indonesia, where the bulk of “Chindos” can trace their family line back to Guangdong or Fujian provinces. Nevertheless, she is part of a growing number of northern entrepreneurs willing to exchange the familiarity of home for the opportunities, and lifestyle perks, of Southeast Asia.
Li hails from Liaoning province and the vast Songliao Plain.
“It can get just as hot in the summer,” she says, of her village, Hujiafang, which is surrounded by corn fields, flanked by the Hun River and located some 6,000km (3,700 miles) north of Bali. “But in the winter it’s much colder than here, of course.
“I lived there until I was 17, then I went to college in Xinjiang [in northwestern China]. But I dropped out after a year and went to Shenyang [Liaoning’s provincial capital] to work in a cafe instead,” Li says. The mid-2000s were a time of easy mobility in mainland China and Li then landed a job at a magazine in Beijing.
