An engineer looking home from a distance.
Several years in Europe changed how I see the place I came from. This site is where I use that distance to look at China more clearly — and translate what I see for people watching from outside.
I’m Lei Huang. I write this from Hangzhou, a city of tea hills and lake fog. I lived and worked here once before, spending two years building payment systems at Alipay, back when I thought the next step had to be somewhere else.
So I left. Shanghai came next: three years working independently as a solo developer, and then Berlin after that for another three years at Klarna. Most of what mattered in those years happened away from the desk: trains heading nowhere in particular, long lake walks, Brandenburg fields, notebooks that slowly turned into essays.
Distance has a way of returning things to you. I relearned China from a U-Bahn seat. I came home a different person than the one who’d left. These days I write and film about China — the messy, fast-moving, often misunderstood version that doesn’t fit neatly into a hot take — and I’m slowly building toward guiding travelers who want to see it on foot.
