Yi finds herself in a place far away from her home
At the age of 25, Yi Wen sold her house, quit her job as a middle school teacher in Wuhu in east China’s Anhui Province and arrived in Hannover in Germany with only a suitcase.
“I believed a better understanding of the self can be achieved in a distant place,” said Yi.
“My generation, the post 1970s, lead a somehow planned life of taking the college entrance exam, choosing their majors, entering the job market based on what they had learnt and getting married. But most people when they were 18 or 19 years old didn’t have a clear understanding of their selves,” said Yi. “The German society where I spent 16 years studying and living is like a flat mirror that reflected who I am. Based on this I learnt the relation between me and others, and the relation between me and society.”
For Yi, Germany was like someone in their 60s — graceful, mature, tolerant and highly ordered. It is a society with the power to calm you down.
In the early days, Yi studied in class and at night knocked on doors near the campus one by one, asking if they had a room to rent.
Moved by her persistence and courage, the school made an exception to introduce her to a landlady who used to let her house only to European students.
“In the two months when I stayed at Mrs Anna Schubert’s home, my language skills improved and for the first time I delighted a foreign lady with my own culture,” said Yi, who made traditional Chinese paper cuts as a birthday present for her landlady.
To earn tuition fees Yi worked at a computer driver assembly line in Berlin. “The person next to me was a German. He was always trying to be faster and would pick up anything falling on the ground and reorganize them,” said Yi.
A fellow worker at the assembly line caused her to rethink herself, ignore her identity as an intellectual and learn the importance of survival.
Yi graduated from Berlin University of the Arts with a master’s degree in social and economic communication. She worked as a marketing director in big companies like Siemens and Swiss Bank Corp.
In 2006 she worked as a China strategy advisor and global communication advisor for Germany’s economic and foreign ministries.
She was communication director for “Germany and China, Moving Ahead Together,” a top German national image campaign, from 2007 to 2010. Yi also helped Gegenbauer, a famous German family enterprise, to set up its health and consulting company in 2015.
Any of her achievements abroad might be the envy of young people in China. But Yi chose to come back home. “Life abroad may be colorful, but I also felt lonely,” she said.
Yi is now CEO of Shanghai Homing Swallow Health Tech Co headquartered in Songjiang’s Tames Town. The company’s key business is health management and homebased care for the aged.
“Sun Jiangyan, the founder of my company, is also a returned overseas Chinese,” Yi said. “One day on her flight from Singapore to China, she read a piece of news about how the solitary elderly people in Shanghai suffered in scorching weather in 2014. She would like to change the situation and therefore set up the company. The company is doing honest business. Before that she had already been a successful business woman running a listed semi-conductor company.”
Then Sun set up Shanghai Homing Swallow Health Tech Co and Yi joined. “I want to help release the burden of an aging society,” Yi added.
Yi is a mother of a daughter who is in her junior year in college. “I told my daughter, ‘Mom is very busy and can’t take care of you in every aspect.’ So my daughter is very independent,” said Yi.