Wangjing is an area in northeastern Beijing known as a home for “Beijing drifters” in tech and internet work because many internet and technology companies are concentrated there. For Raymond Hou (Raymond), Wangjing was the main place where he and his wife Song Zhiyou (Yuzu) worked and lived in mainland China between 2019 and 2020, and the location of the last “home” in his employed career. They originally expected to live there for three to five years, but in early 2020 the pandemic forced them to empty the home remotely. Wangjing therefore holds both the experience of a fast-paced internet workplace and a long-term vision of life that ended prematurely in Raymond’s personal history (overall context in The Beijing Period (2019–2020)).
Three Moves and the Final Home
Raymond and Yuzu moved three times in Beijing. When they first arrived, they did not know the city well, so they booked a short-term stay similar to Airbnb and gave themselves seven days to find a home. They then moved into a shared community similar to JOY LIVING. Raymond described its layout as an open one-bedroom with no living room. The rent was higher, but it introduced them to the property manager and neighbors. For the third move, following a colleague’s advice, they rented a two-bedroom apartment in an older residential complex about a two-minute walk from Wangjing subway station and ran an Airbnb part time to help cover the rent.
When they moved into this final home in early December 2019, they decorated it expecting that “moving in this time meant staying for three to five years”: they chose a desk, bought furniture, selected colors they liked, and assembled the home piece by piece. Their plan was to work hard for a few years, meet travelers from different places through hosting on Airbnb, then visit people in turn and travel around the world. The contrast between that expectation of “staying a long time” and having to clear the home the following year became the most recurring emotional memory associated with Wangjing in Raymond’s writing.
Work Territory: Keep’s Wangjing Headquarters and a Shared Office
Wangjing was also where Raymond worked. He joined the fitness app Keep in product operations; the company’s headquarters were in Wangjing. Raymond once wrote that less than a month after starting, he proactively applied to hold an internal sharing session. He introduced colleagues to community-management methods he had learned in Taiwan and overseas and contrasted them with group-chat operations on mainland social media. More than one hundred people attended, including a co-founder, and three months later he received an S rating, the highest performance evaluation in his department.1 Yuzu managed a large workspace at the local shared-office brand Ucommune. The space also became a base for community events for independent workers, continuing Raymond’s longstanding interest in real communities (related career positioning in Remote Work and Business Thinking).
The Texture of City Life
In later reflections, Raymond recalled Wangjing and Beijing through everyday sensory memories. He especially missed Wangjing lamb offal soup, street snacks, the striving atmosphere in the internet industry, and a cityscape where old hutong walls and historical dust coexisted. The 798 Art Zone and Qianmen Street were places where he and Yuzu took photographs together. Raymond attributed these subtle feelings about a city to the routine of being a “worker”: the commute rhythm imposed by the company made him travel along the same route every week, so he grew attached to the shops and changes along the way. He contrasted this with his later fully remote work and ownership of his products and brand, when he wrote fewer such city observations. He believes the cost of autonomy and freedom was losing the kind of local feeling that more easily grows under constraints.
Emptying the Home Remotely and Saying Goodbye
In January 2020, Raymond and Yuzu each brought two empty suitcases back to Taiwan for Lunar New Year, intending to stay only briefly. After returning on the first day of the Lunar New Year, the pandemic spread globally and they decided not to return to Beijing. On March 1, they connected remotely and asked friends and movers who were still in Beijing to enter and dismantle and empty the home.2 While sorting through it, the movers found many items that could not be shipped overseas—food, appliances, cosmetics, and alcohol—and asked what to do with them. Raymond and Yuzu told them to take the items and give them away, but they broke down emotionally in that moment. This goodbye, without being physically present, became the defining image of Wangjing in Raymond’s story and the end of his relationship with the city (see The 2020 Retreat from Beijing to Taiwan and the Birth of Raymond Thirty for the later transition).
Significance and Return Visit
Wangjing is an “unfinished” place in Raymond’s personal history: the learning community they planned to build there, the home they meant to live in for years, and the city they meant to explore gradually were all cut short by outside forces. It contrasts with Tainan: A Spiritual Hometown After Six Years of Study, which Raymond regards as his spiritual hometown. The former was a foreign place that gained routine and emotional meaning through his worker identity; the latter was where he developed a sense of self during six years of study. In July 2024, Raymond and Yuzu returned to Beijing for their fifth wedding anniversary, filling in some moments they had missed at the time and spending a birthday and anniversary at the Forbidden City’s icehouse and on the Great Wall. He also recorded that the lamb-soup shop in Wangjing they used to visit could not survive the pandemic and closed, a concrete absence left by the interrupted life. The experience of an early ending later became a starting point for his full-time commitment to his own business and connected to the later construction of a Super Individual business.
Sources
Footnotes
-
Raymond Hou, “S01E40: Three Typical Student Mindsets That Keep You from Becoming a Professional Worker and Put You at a Disadvantage in the Workplace,” WordPress article, 2020-07-02. View original ↩
-
Raymond Hou, “Week One: Recording Our Retreat from Beijing, Drying Our Tears, and Starting the Raymond Thirty Podcast,” WordPress article, 2020-08-21. View original ↩