• Wu Zhixun left his hometown and his job at a local bank to spend his 20s pursuing an acting career in Beijing.
• He entered his 30s ready for a career change and noticed Beijing lacked the flavors of his hometown.
• One year after opening his restaurant, Wu, now 31, says he has made back his initial investment.

Wu Zhixun stumbled into acting by accident when he was a young adult. Years later, a similarly unexpected turn of events led him to open — and become the face of — a popular restaurant in Beijing.

In 2013, the sporting brand Li Ning was sponsoring university basketball games across China. They chose Wu to appear in an ad. Soon after, people started recognizing him on the streets of Yunnan, the southern Chinese province, where he'd grown up.

After graduating, he got hired by a local bank, but six months in, a video-streaming company asked him to appear on a reality TV show in which he'd be cooking for celebrities.

"I thought it was a scam at first," he told Business Insider. But they offered to buy him a flight to Beijing, 1,500 miles northeast of Yunnan, so he quit his job and dove into the world of acting and television.

Career shift into F&B

Over a seven-year acting career, Wu appeared in three TV shows and a Huawei campaign.

In 2017, after his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, he returned to Yunnan for a year and a half to spend time with her.

While he was back home, he invested money into two F&B ventures, neither of which panned out.

The first was a snack shop. Wu and three partners each invested 100,000 yuan into the shop, which sold chicken feet, rice noodles, and mango rice. The shop shuttered after six months.

Next, he invested 50,000 yuan in a Japanese restaurant. Within three months, the restaurant closed. Looking back, he said he could see the problems were with the location and the management.

The restaurant was tucked away on the second floor of an office building, and no one on the management team had any experience running a kitchen. They didn't know how many ingredients to order, and they often sold out of popular dishes before the end of the day.

Bringing the taste of home to Beijing

At the end of 2018, Wu moved back to Beijing. Within a couple of years, he met his partner, and they started discussing the idea of starting a family.

He wanted more career stability and was tired of being an actor. "You're always waiting to be chosen," he said.

While living in Beijing, he spotted a market opportunity to serve authentic Yunnan food.

"Yunnan flavors are textured," he said. "There are sour, fragrant, numbing, spicy notes, and these are all from natural plants."

Restaurants in Beijing just weren't getting the flavors right — so he decided to launch his third F&B venture.

He needed money for the initial investment, so he sold an apartment his mother had given him and invested 600,000 yuan into the restaurant.

His mother was against the idea of him selling. "My mom needs to know something will have a 100% success rate before she'll do it," he said.

Hands-on management

It's been almost two years since Wu, now 31, began planning his restaurant, Yican, or Can Bistro in English. He works with a business partner, Qu Fei, who invested an additional 400,000 yuan into the business.

Learning from his previous business failure, Wu knew he wanted to open the restaurant in a busy area. He chose a commercial business park in southeast Beijing, near Sihuidong station.

They hired Yunnan chefs and slowly renovated a space that had previously been a clothing store.

The restaurant has been open for about a year. When BI visited the restaurant in early February, all 10 tables were full by noon.

Can Bistro is a dog-friendly restaurant, and a Bichon Frisé and a Schnauzer were among the guests. Diners sat on rattan chairs, eating from speckled black ceramic dishes. Steaming bowls of sour papaya fish, spicy beef, stewed chicken, and crispy tofu covered the wooden tables. Some guests washed down their meals with Asahi beer and natural wine from Yunnan.

A meal for four typically includes around six dishes. The stewed chicken, 68 yuan, has become popular. The potatoes fall apart, and the meat is perfectly tender. The sour bamboo shoots and water spinach dish is an uncommon combination in Beijing, but popular among the Dai ethnic minority in Yunnan.

Beijing's changing food scene

Over the past five years, Beijing's food scene has seen waves of restaurants open and close. "Ninety percent of bistros close in their first year," Fiona Wu, a sales professional working in Beijing's lifestyle industry, told BI.

In order to make it in the Beijing market, Fiona said restaurants need to be popular "from the beginning."

And that's where it came full circle for Wu.

"It was about looks at first," Fiona said of Can Bistro's popularity. "The look of the place, the restaurant decor, and the bosses' being handsome, attracted users on RedNote," she said, referencing the popular Chinese social media app.

Shortly after opening, Wu's marketing team posted a series of candid photos of its owners on the Chinese social media app. The photos had captions like, "Not drinking coffee unless a hot guy has made it for me." Wu said that people who saw the restaurant online began to come in person.

"Without that marketing campaign, they wouldn't have gotten so much footfall in the beginning," Fiona said.

One year after opening, Wu said he and Di have made back their initial investment. Wu said that in the summer, lines often form outside the restaurant.

Running the restaurant has meant both Wu and his business partner have had to learn each other's way of doing things.

Wu says he's happier now. He visits the restaurant every day — and still has time to play basketball twice a week.

"It's a world away from when I was at the bank."

• Zou Qiang, 39, is the founder of a tailoring brand based in Shanghai.
• She met her partner 11 years ago and, like an increasing number of women in China, doesn't plan to get married or have kids.
• Part of her decision is due to money and time, but it's also a personal choice.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Zou Qiang, a fashion designer and owner of a tailoring brand in Shanghai. The following has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

My parents divorced when I was young, and I didn't have a very happy childhood. After I grew up, I wanted to do things that made me happy. I don't want to give to other people; I just want to make up for that time. Maybe that's selfish, but I've thought that for a long time.

I met my partner on an online dating forum. We were both based in Shanghai and, after a few months of chatting online, met up in person for Japanese food.

After a couple of months of dating, we decided to make it official. We shared the same perspective on what a relationship should be — monogamous best friends who are attracted to each other.

We've been together for 11 years now. We rent a two-bedroom apartment in the center of Shanghai, where we pay 10,000 yuan a month in rent, or $1,370. It's relatively cheap as we rented it unfurnished.

My mom often gets asked by her friends why I don't have children and why she doesn't put pressure on me. She points out to them that they have to look after their grandchildren every day and how it's aged them while she can go traveling. She's not the typical Chinese mother.

Many of my friends' parents believe that since they raised their children, they are entitled to be repaid with grandchildren or to be cared for in their old age. They see their kids as investments, not as individuals. My mom just wants me to be happy, and she says that makes her happy.

My partner's parents have been asking if we'll have children. They live in a village about 140 miles from Shanghai and have told my partner that it's embarrassing not to have grandchildren. But so far, I haven't changed my mind. Sometimes, parental pressure gets to my partner, and we discuss having kids, but I'd be the one carrying the baby, and I don't want to.

I have no interest in being a mom

Two other concerns I have about having a child are finances and who would take care of them. Having a child costs a lot of money. In Shanghai, I would need around 200,000 yuan, or $27,400, spare for hospital costs and basic necessities the first year. Also, to keep up with my job, I might need to hire a nanny.

My partner works in sales for a tech company, commutes to the office, and makes more than me. As I work from home and run my own business, I know I would be the one responsible for taking care of the child.

I've noticed that after a few of my friends had kids, they often started complaining to me. They tell me what hard work it is and about conflicts with their partners. None of them put pressure on me to have a child. About half of my friends have kids. The other half don't want kids or haven't found a suitable partner.

My fashion line is my baby

I started my own brand 12 years ago, and it's like my child. I even feel like every piece of clothing I make is like a child. When I'm designing, I start with an idea, look for the fabric, and find the buttons. After it's made, I still think about and care about each piece.

This winter, I designed a series inspired by a story about my partner's father. He rarely came home, but when he did for Lunar New Year, he'd pull money from a pocket sewn inside his coat. Each coat in my series features a unique inner pocket, meant to hold a piece of your childhood while keeping an adult appearance.

I design around four seasons of clothing a year for my brand, Duet, and also make individual pieces. I price them from 600 yuan for a pair of trousers to 3,000 yuan for a dress or coat. Everything is tailored. My clients tend to be women aged 35 to 50. My brand combines traditional Chinese elements with more modern Western styles.

I get to do what I like

Before I started my brand, I studied marketing and international tourism. I worked in human resources and then as a Mandarin teacher. When I had to go to an office, I couldn't sit still, and I felt bored. I'm doing work that I like now, and I can do whatever I want.

I eat out at least five times a week and travel several times a year. The last trip I took was to Russia with my partner, and we spent around 20,000 yuan on bear watching, climbing a volcano, and whale watching. We both like snow-capped mountains, so we travel to mountainous places every year. I would find it hard to give up my lifestyle to have a kid.

Despite China's efforts to encourage childbearing — including monetary rewards and subsidies — I come across more and more people who, like me, are not interested in having kids. In the past, people would think that you were weird if you didn't have children.

There are more and more weird people now, so it's become a normal thing.

Do you have a personal essay about life as a millennial in China that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor at [email protected].

• Ren Binglin, 25, is a photographer and digital nomad based in China.
• While browsing online, he came across a retirement village for young people and booked a two-month visit.
• He picked fruit, meditated, and drank beers with new friends. He says his experience in the mountains changed him.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ren Binglin, a photographer and digital nomad based in China. Ren spent almost two months at a youth retirement village. The following has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

A few days of work in Beijing was all it took for me to realize I needed a break.

In early September, I was finding everything in the capital city too expensive. City life was suffocating me.

I was born in Henan — a province 400 miles south of the capital — but now, at 25, I'm a digital nomad, and there's no longer one part of the country that feels like home. I live in a mix of hostels, bed and breakfasts, and even rented a house from a farmer once. I also try to spend a few weeks a year back with my family.

I love different parts of China for different reasons. I like the climate of Dali, the wooden houses of Shaoxing, my friends in Taihang Mountain, the mornings in Yangshuo, and the nights in Shanghai.

One morning, I started searching for places I could visit up in the mountains. I came across Guanye, a youth retirement village, on Xiaohongshu, China's Instagram-like platform. It was clear it had nothing to do with caregiving or elders, just a lot of nature.

I was intrigued by the pictures of mountains, a swimming pool, and people around my age cooking, hiking, and watching films. I felt I'd get along with them. By noon that same day, I had left.

I bought a train ticket for just over 10 yuan, or $1.38, from Beijing. The village is in Hebei, about 180 miles southwest of Beijing, and the train ride to Baijian, the closest station, took around three hours.

My room at the home

Soon after arriving, I was shown to my room. All of the rooms had mountain views. Mine had floor-to-ceiling windows, a 1.8-meter-long bed, a fridge, a bathroom, and a TV. The TV stayed off for the whole stay.

The room was cheap: 3,600 yuan, or $500, a month, including food and accommodation. It was a courtyard house with rooms surrounding a yard, and the space was around 2,150 square feet.

As a photographer, my income isn't stable. There are times I have nothing coming in for two weeks, but then in one day, I can make enough to cover the month.

The difference between life in the city and life up in the mountains was huge. The quiet in the village was a luxury for me. Sometimes, in the morning, I would hear the sound of goats eating grass. It was wonderful to be woken up that way.

Guests were mostly Gen Zers and Millennials

Most of the people at the nursing home were between 20 and 30 — I'm 25. I also came across a handful of people in their 40s and 50s.

I didn't need to put in much effort to meet interesting people. There was a natural flow that attracted all kinds of guests. The managers treated me like a friend, not a customer.

I wasn't the typical guest. Most people go there to "lie flat" for a while before gradually returning to work. It's a bit like a short vacation for them. However, I was still working.

I enjoy my work, so this didn't bother me. I work in AI photography, customizing work for clients and also teaching students. I do a lot of it online.

Most people I spoke to at the home had encountered a setback in life, in their career, in their love life, or with family members. I met a lawyer who told me he was tired of being busy and had started to live a nomadic life, but due to the requirements of his job, he often had to go to court.

I also spoke to one of the founders, Cui Kai, a lot. He turned 30 this year but gives off the feeling of still being in middle school. There was no greasiness to him.

I asked another cofounder why he had chosen to run the nursing home in his hometown. He said he grew up in the village, and the courtyards belonged to a relative of his. He said his grandparents were around 95 now, and he wanted to spend more time with them.

I could see that the village was very poor and that the young people had left to find work. All I saw were older people playing mahjong every day. That cofounder said he didn't want to abandon his hometown. He wanted to build it up.

Our daily routine

For breakfast, they served eggs, steamed buns, rice, millet porridge, and flatbreads. At noon, there was chicken and beef, stir-fried potatoes and beans, and cabbage. An auntie would cook for us.

They often organized activities like picking persimmons or chestnuts, hiking, or meditation exercises in the morning. I heard that in the summer, they swim, watch movies, or drink together.

I participated most in the drinking-related activities. Sometimes we'd go to the river, collect wood to make a fire, and drink and chat. For my birthday, I remember around 25 of us drinking together, cracking jokes, and snacking on nuts, dried fruit, and cake. We went through so many crates of beer. There was baijiu, a Chinese liquor, too.

I think this home helps people recharge. In the city, costs are high, and some people are unhappy with their jobs. I find it difficult to establish deep connections with people. It's as if we live for others and wear a mask.

The experience changed me

I spoke to other guests who work in the city, and they told me their energy levels increased after going to the mountains. With more physical space, I felt like I had more psychological space.

Going to Guanye changed me a little, but not as much as some of the other people I met. I've managed to keep my life less intense over the past few years.

Recently, I caught up with some people I'd met at Guanye. We went to see a movie together. I found them to be different from when we first met. They were more reserved. It seemed that once they moved back to the city, they hid their true selves.