WeChat app connects Houston’s immigrants
Via WeChat, Jie Wu often asks her parents and friends for details about Shanghai’s reopening after its pandemic shutdown. The mother of a 6-year-old, she’s especially interested in schools.
Are the kids asked to wear face masks? How are P.E. classes run?
It’s a window, she thinks, into Houston’s future.
The WeChat app has more than a billion daily users, most in Southeast Asia. In China, where it’s based, it’s sometimes called “the everything app.” It’s like Facebook, Slack, email, Venmo and Uber all rolled into one. People use it to shop, to play games, to order tickets and restaurant deliveries. They send stickers. They superimpose new hairstyles on their faces. They text friends and share files with colleagues.
Many Chinese Americans are leery that the Chinese government monitors the app. When using it, they’re often careful to avoid politics or discussion of intellectual property that might be stolen. But as a way of keeping in touch with far-flung relatives, friends and colleagues, the app can be hard to resist.
Through WeChat, Wu is still in touch with friends from her Shanghai childhood. An only child, she sometimes recruits friends still in Shanghai to help her elderly parents there — even sometimes going to their house to solve a computer problem.
It’s not the same as being there herself. But it feels good.
Connecting to neighbors
Houston immigrants don’t just use WeChat to connect to people back home, or to old friends scattered across the globe, or even to international professional groups. They also use it to connect to their immigrant neighbors here in Houston.
Sometimes the neighborhood chats — in English or Mandarin, whatever’s convenient — have a homey, neighbors-helping-neighbors vibe. In the NextDoor-like group for Wu’s Pearland neighborhood, she sees people post tips on where to buy hard-to-find supplies — say, a photo of full shelves of toilet paper at Costco.
Other times the vibe is global and cutting-edge. Recently Wu used WeChat to find a Chinese vendor who could sell her face masks, both for personal use and
for the Pearland Chinese Association to donate.
Many of Pearland’s Asian immigrants work as doctors and researchers in the Texas Medical Center, and have connections to medical workers on China’s front lines. Sometimes, Wu says, her neighborhood groups will host online seminars by Chinese physicians and epidemiologists, explaining what they’ve seen with COVID-19. “It’s helpful,” she says.
Everything electronic
These days Wu and her husband both work at home. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when both their schedules are heavy with meetings, their 6-year-old is left to her own devices. Sometimes she reads in a tent she set up next to Wu’s desk. Other times she works in her own “office,” which she set up in the bathroom with a mug, photos and tchotchkes — accoutrements she’d seen on her mom’s desk at Rice.
That Rice office can seem a long way away. These days, says Wu, her American life — her colleagues, her neighbors — comes to her electronically, via telephone, email, Zoom, Facebook, Slack, NextDoor. Sometimes, devoid of flesh and blood, Wu’s Houston life outside her house seems as faraway as China, no more vivid than WeChat.
Recently, her daughter suddenly grasped the concept of time zones — that some of the people her mom communicates with are on the other side of the world, where during her day, it’s their night.
“Right now that’s the biggest difference,” Wu laughs sadly. “The time zones.”