There has been a common thread, however. His name is Qi Shuge, or Sugar, as his friends call him. It's been four years since the amiable 28-year-old quit his job with the China Automobile Association and ventured south in search of his fortune. Most young men from Daqing would probably have set their sights on Harbin. The ambitious ones might have ventured to Beijing. Qi looked even farther afield, to East Timor, a troubled country still taking its first few tentative steps into nationhood. Even today, Timor remains a precarious place to make a living but Qi has persevered. Even the violent clashes of April and May that prompted the Chinese authorities to offer evacuations to its citizens failed to tempt Qi back home. "I was afraid that, if I left, I would lose everything. It took me three years to build and it would've been too hard for me to do it again.
I thought I could take care of myself, so I decided to stay in Dili during the 'crisis'," Qi said. In fact, both his parents have now uprooted and joined him in the southern hemisphere. He's recently bought a car and is now on the verge of opening up his second Internet bar. Despite the political instability and lawlessness that continues to plague the city, there's no suggestion of quitting now. "I'll go back to China in 2008, but only to travel," Qi said in fluent English. "I feel I should go back and join the Olympics celebrations it's the thing that makes me most proud to be Chinese. But go back to live, buy a house or get a mortgage? No." Money was the original motivation for the move. Despite the booming economy in China, Qi felt overawed by the intensity of competition for jobs, particularly given his lack of university education and limited English skills.
Over dinner one evening, a friend mentioned a trip he had made to East Timor, a country whose own economy was barely functioning in the wake of Indonesia's bloody withdrawal after a brutal 24-year occupation. Ironically, it was because of recent tragedies that Timor held promise for adventurous entrepreneurs. The United Nations and Non- Governmental Organization (NGO) staff who had flooded into the country had created a two-tiered economy where customers would be willing to pay high prices for the right products. Having borrowed every penny of his parents' savings, Qi made the long road trip to Beijing. From there he made a 24-hour train journey to Guangzhou and then took a bus to Hong Kong. From there he flew direct to Bali and flew from Bali to Dili the following day. In Daqing, the only foreigners he had seen were Russian. Suddenly, Qi was surrounded by foreign tongues, local Tetum and Portuguese, Malay, the African tongues of UN staff and, of course, English, the lingua franca of the cosmopolitan crowd.
Having never seen a use for his English studies at school, Qi was plunged into an alien language environment and worked hard to survive, studying by day and watching Western movies at night. Communicating back home also proved difficult. East Timor remains one of the few places in Asia where a China Mobile SIM card won't work. Internet speeds can be grindingly slow and VOIP web telephone services barred. "When I first came here, I felt very embarrassed. I thought: 'Why am I here?'" Qi confessed. Gone were the tall apartment blocks, crowds and industrial energy of Daqing, replaced by buildings wrecked by war, refugee camps and an eerie quiet after dark. "I didn't speak to people back at home and I lost contact with a lot of friends there. Because it was too dangerous to go out in the evenings here, I felt very bored." Sheer distance meant there was no easy way back. Collaborating with two friends, Qi poured what remained of his money into an Internet bar one of the first in the city.
Despite high line rental prices from Timor Telecom, the number of foreign workers in Timor convinced Qi that demand would remain high and time has borne this out. He now charges US$6 per hour for use of the Internet and has even set up an independent system to provide an Internet VOIP Phone service, undercutting the government service by 50 per cent. He earns from eight machines what he would expect to take from a 100-computer Internet bar back in Daqing and is well into credit with his parents. "I may have lost my friends, and my social life, but now I've got money," he said impassively, lolling on a chair on front of one of his flat-screen computers in his eponymous web bar. Qi's sense of isolation is perhaps partly down to the nature of the Chinese community in East Timor.
In 2002, he was one of the only Chinese in town. The number has swelled to around 500 out of a total population of 900,000. However, in contrast to many overseas Chinese communities, the Dili group isn't close. This is both a reflection of the transient nature of construction work, the main industry for Chinese in East Timor, and also the fact that food the social lubricant of Chinese the world over is nothing to write home about. "There's not much variety," said Qi with a shake of the head. "The seafood is OK, but most other things are imported frozen. Every time I see real Chinese food online, I start salivating." The food might not be very good, but East Timor has its compensations, notably the weather. Blue skies are guaranteed for much of the year and there is near-zero pollution because of the lack of heavy industry. Moreover, East Timor has some of the world best and quietest beaches. In travelling so far from his home, Qi joins China's enormous diaspora.
However, unlike the majority of the latter-day emigrants to Europe, Australia or the United States, the young Heilongjianger hasn't had the help of a Chinese community or been able to benefit from the experience of generations of immigrants before him. Qi has done things largely by himself. The leap that Qi has made is a giant one, not from poverty to wealth or from East to West. It's the first step on what he hopes will be a life of travel, new experiences and new friends. Judging from the cheery ambiance in the Sugar Internet Cafe, it seems Qi is off to a flier.
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