Raymond's User Manual

The 2020 Retreat from Beijing to Taiwan and the Birth of Raymond Thirty

5 min read

This was a transition in early 2020. Raymond Hou (Raymond) and his wife Song Zhiyou (Yuzu) had planned to make Beijing their base for three to five years. A trip back to Taiwan for Lunar New Year became impossible to reverse when the pandemic broke out, interrupting their original plan. Around the same time, the Raymond Thirty podcast went live and became the first concrete output after this interruption. This entry focuses on the retreat itself and the brand’s beginnings; the longer process of consolidating his identity under a brand rather than his personal name is in From Raymond Hou to Raymond Thirty, and the preceding work and life stage is in The Beijing Period (2019–2020).

Ending: A Lunar New Year Trip from Which They Could Not Return

In early December 2019, Raymond and Yuzu had just moved into a two-bedroom, one-living-room apartment in Beijing’s Wangjing area. They chose a desk and colors, assembled furniture, and planned to also work part-time as Airbnb hosts and meet travelers from different cities. Their expectation was that “moving in meant staying for three to five years.” In January 2020, they brought only two empty suitcases back to Taiwan for Lunar New Year, leaving the apartment to an international student who would leave a few days later than they did. After returning to Taiwan on Lunar New Year’s Day, they were caught by the global outbreak of the pandemic, which cut off the way back to Beijing.

Raymond later placed the interruption within a broader reflection on his working life. He described “going off track” from being an engineering student to freelance work, remote work, and teaching, then joining an internet company with thousands of employees in Beijing, “and finally retreating to Taiwan because of the pandemic,” where he encountered the working culture of a traditional conglomerate. This unexpected retreat brought his employed career—which he had expected to continue for several more years—to an early close.

Displacement: Emptying a Home Remotely

After a long period of assessment, they made a decision on March 1: connect to Beijing remotely and ask friends and movers who were still there to enter the home and dismantle and clear everything out. They could not ship much of the food, appliances, cosmetics, and alcohol across the sea, so from the other end of the call they could only tell the movers, “Please take them; if you like them, take them, or give them to friends or family.” Yuzu recorded that neither of them could stop crying in that moment.1 The experience of “being in Taiwan while the home in Beijing was emptied piece by piece” is the most tangible image of this transition, and a process of being forced to start over from zero.

The retreat period was not empty. In March 2020, Raymond joined a Taiwanese brand group with more than thirty years of history as a digital-transformation consultant. This transitional job maintained their income and gave him a close view of the digital challenges facing traditional organizations, building a point of comparison for his later judgment that his role was to “accelerate individuals, not serve organizations.”

Emergence: Turning the Interruption into Raymond Thirty

The day after clearing the Beijing home—March 2—Raymond and Yuzu settled on a new direction. The Raymond Thirty podcast released its first-season introduction in late February 2020 and officially launched in March. It was the first content project they planned themselves after retreating to Taiwan. Yuzu wrote of their state at the time: “We had no resources, only mutual support; no prominent background, only stubbornly backing ourselves.” They produced the show while both still held full-time jobs.

The name carried a clear intention: “Raymond” came from his English name, and “Thirty” referred to “standing firm at thirty” in the Analects. Raymond was twenty-five at the time and wanted to document over five years “what we could accomplish before turning thirty.” A line from the launch message that he regarded as central was: “A progressive society is one in which we no longer look down on every person around us.”2 In early March 2020 he also updated his social audience on his circumstances, listing the priorities of that period as “bringing our family home from Beijing, finding work, rebuilding a personal website, and starting an audio program,” showing that brand creation and the work of settling the retreat happened in parallel.3

Significance of the Transition

This transition deserves to be recorded separately because it directly connected an external event—the pandemic interrupting the Beijing plan—to a new content beginning—the launch of Raymond Thirty. The retreat gave Raymond no buffer period. Instead, it brought out a tendency he had long put aside: gathering years of experience in writing, remote work, and working independently into something he could build for the long term. Raymond later defined a “company of one” as the opposite of “expanding without limit”; it pursues stability, independence, and long-term flexibility. The first step on that brand path was taken in the days when they could not return to Beijing after Lunar New Year and then emptied the home by hand. The later evolution of identity and product lines is in From Raymond Hou to Raymond Thirty and Super Individual.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. 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 ↩

  2. Raymond Hou, “EP00: Raymond Thirty Season One Launch Message (What Can We Accomplish Before Age Thirty?),” podcast, 2020-02-27. View original ↩

  3. Raymond Hou, “Why Am I Making the Raymond Thirty Audio Program? Exploring a Diverse Achievement Model Before Age Thirty,” public Facebook post, 2020-03-01. View original ↩

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