"I'm out of money, I'm planning to go back and find a job to work."
In the early hours of the morning in Chiang Mai, Jian looked up and said to me. Jian is 25 years old, from Yunnan. This is not the first time she has had to interrupt her journey, return to the country, find a job, save money, resign, and then continue back on the road.
This time she stayed in Chiang Mai for an unusually long time, and she doesn't remember how many times she has spent all her savings. She is curious about how other young people manage to travel and earn money at the same time.
After all, in the philosophy of most Chinese people, survival is more important than faith, and travel is just a spice sprinkled on survival.
Throughout history, people have always had to leave their homeland for survival, breaking into the East, moving to the South Seas, and leaving their hometowns to make a living. In the digital age, foreign lands have become the current young people's exploration of the distant and even the daily life— the emergence of a group known as cross-border digital nomads.
Backed by Thailand's highest peak, Doi Inthanon, and the digital nomads wandering under this ancient city, they have their own set of logic about survival and freedom.
The Lies of Restarting Life
"I knew about Web 3 when I was in high school, but during two internships in college at internet companies, I found I didn't like the work pace of big companies. Finally, before graduation, I found a job in the Web 3 industry, and I've been there ever since."
Zoe, a post-2000s girl from Shenzhen, is the youngest member I met in the digital nomad community in Chiang Mai. She has the distinctive wheat-colored skin of Southeast Asian islanders. Shortly after graduating from university, she has already achieved what many dream of—a work-life balance (WLB), traveling and working with some friends in the community in places like Dali, Shenzhen, Chiang Mai, and Bali, which sounds like a life trajectory that only a white girl would have.
In her nearly half-year journey in Southeast Asia, Zoe is one of the few I've met whose career took a digital nomadic turn from the start. And many more young people aim to escape from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen to rebuild their lives in exotic Southeast Asia.
Before this, I saw more nomads who had gone through many twists and turns, sometimes eagerly exploring, sometimes passively waiting, but anyhow, living abroad was enough.
This is quite different from the image of nomads shaped on domestic social media platforms.
It's neither the labeled brave rebellion against meaningless "bullshit jobs" in pursuit of personal spiritual freedom, henceforth sun, beach, and sea, nor the so-called "demystification" of digital nomads, who hastily resign, tour the world, and suddenly realize the meaning of life, then announce to the outside world that being a digital nomad is just a game of traffic monetization, eventually taking the old path of "selling courses and cutting leeks" on TikTok and Xiaohongshu.
Just like Che Guevara wrote in his diary while riding a motorcycle across the South American continent: "I feel that I am different now compared to when I first started." Digital nomads also have their so-called "life moments."
In a dilapidated Malaysian passenger ship bobbing in the South China Sea waves, on a motorcycle weaving through the changing shadows of Chiang Mai's ancient city walls, in the back of a pickup truck speeding along a tropical cloud forest road near the equator. Each time, immersed in the hot and sticky air of the Southeast Asian wilderness, that familiar floating sensation always arrives at some point during each unknown journey, suddenly descending and then quickly fading.
This makes many young digital nomads linger and hesitate.
However, even in Southeast Asia, the trivial and inevitable daily life is equally unavoidable.
The nomadic lifestyle is not a panacea for life. In Chiang Mai, a city with lower living costs for nomads, friends often complain to me about the difficulty of establishing themselves abroad—because the client has not settled the salary on time, and when they are poorest, they only have a few hundred Thai baht left and have to rely on borrowing to get through the tough times.
Australian Theravada Buddhist monk Damika Bhikkhu said in "Good Questions, Wonderful Answers": "Seized by fear, people go to sacred mountains, sacred forests, sacred places."
In the original text, this sentence lacks context, and people may be trapped in their comfort zones due to fear of the outside world, but for nomads, foreign lands are not utopias, and seeking outward is also a fear of the routine daily life.
Urban young workers tired of the same old routine, everything oriented towards money, and a lack of sense of meaning, they are anxious about the future, losing the present; in Chiang Mai, where coffee and hobby freedom can be easily achieved, many nomads also wander in cafes and bars amidst a reversed daily schedule.
What can be confirmed is that in Chiang Mai's old city, where there is a Buddhist temple every few steps, the lifestyle of many digital nomads is also hard to escape the shackles of survival itself.
Alcohol, tobacco, how many places they've been to, how many impressive people they've met, superficial freedom cannot constitute the flow of life.
In 2021, the international consulting firm MBO Partners conducted a survey titled "The Digital Nomad Search Continues," showing that most digital nomads do not continue their lifestyle for more than three years.
Three years, this time limit is a curse for these confident adventurers of youth.
Wilderness or Track?
Compared to the bustling, overcrowded Bangkok, Chiang Mai during the rainy season is another world.
Riding a motorcycle, driving in any direction around the old city for less than an hour, you can see greenery covering the mountains, occasionally dotted with quiet, dark ponds. By evening, the noisy throttle roars also quiet down with the sky, and all you can see are large chunks of clouds above. If you're lucky, the stars will appear behind the clouds blown open by the mountain wind. This also makes Chiang Mai considered an ideal place for meditation and seclusion.
Junan, over thirty, moved from Dali to Chiang Mai last year. He and his workplace are hidden in the mountains outside Chiang Mai.
Strictly speaking, Junan is not a typical digital nomad, because his profession does not require the internet.
If viewed from the perspective of long-time urban dwellers, Jun and his work might experience absolute freedom—he is a holistic practitioner.
He takes students into the wilderness, playing the guitar, blowing the didgeridoo (a traditional instrument of Australian Aboriginal tribes, one of the oldest instruments in the world), dancing, singing divine songs, setting up deities, lighting incense, and arranging various aromatic herbs in a loft filled with the tropical atmosphere of Southeast Asia, leading people on a "spiritual journey."
Junan is a music teacher from Dali. Whenever life needs a bit of freshness, he comes to the rainforests of Southeast Asia, to the mountains of Chiang Mai. Then he becomes the representative of wilderness and freedom in the eyes of others.
"So do these links of body and spirit make your real life better?" My question is rather utilitarian.
"Hmm, indeed they do," Junan pondered for a moment. "I have a more concrete idea of what I want, like most of the participants in our spiritual ceremonies are foreigners, and my current goal is to hope that more Chinese people can experience the spiritual world."
Many participants in the spiritual ceremonies are founders of domestic tech companies, investors, and people from the Web 3 industry, "Generally, the feedback is good, over eighty percent of people come back."
The link between body and spirit may break through class, but participating in holistic courses has a threshold—starting at 10,000 yuan each time. And in Chiang Mai, the per capita GDP in 2021 was about 135,991 Thai baht (approximately 28,000 RMB).
A core aspect of the relatively free life of digital nomads is geographical arbitrage (Geo-arbitrage), earning US dollars and RMB between the blurred lines of different worlds. Junan's life and career in relatively low-cost Chiang Mai are indeed getting better as he hoped.
Outside the Web 3 industry cluster, the life of digital nomads is not as comfortable as imagined, especially for those whose professions are not very suitable for remote work and who want to switch careers to become digital nomads.
Jian, who has traveled abroad multiple times, carefully calculates her daily living expenses. She looks for various purchasing opportunities and asks other nomads about their money-making channels.
When the accommodation price at Mad Monkey (a well-known budget hostel chain in Southeast Asia) exceeds 300 Thai baht (about 60 RMB), she immediately opens the hotel booking app to find a replacement. She keeps her daily meal budget within 100 Thai baht, and she almost never participates in popular activities in Chiang Mai like elephant conservation or watching Muay Thai matches.
Another example is A Lian, who resigned from a major domestic internet company. Her transition was relatively smooth.
On social media, an important theme of A Lian's self-media channel is exploring how digital nomads around the world make money to support their global living.
"I self-studied Web 3 development for over a month, quickly mastered the front-end trio and REACT, blockchain development, Solidity development, and also listened to industry podcasts, attended online conferences, followed news, worked on some simple projects on GitHub, and carefully wrote a LinkedIn profile. On Twitter, I thought about joining a community first to work on some simple projects, accumulate some practical project experience, and then slowly switch jobs, but I didn't expect to be able to chat with founders directly, maybe my sincerity touched the big shots, and by the end of August, I got the opportunity to enter the industry and join a project team. Everything from zero to one, starting as an intern."
By the rippling pool, under the bright floor-to-ceiling windows, nomads like A Lian each guard a table, facing their work tools, typing away at their keyboards, quiet yet with an urgent atmosphere, reminiscent of the study rooms in university libraries during postgraduate entrance exams.
If digital nomads coming from China to Chiang Mai carry a certain depth typical of East Asians, as well as faces full of stories, the long-staying Westerners in Chiang Mai have an unimitable sense of relaxation. Coming to Southeast Asia to live, flying to Australia on a Working Holiday Visa (WHV) seems to have become a trend for Western young people to explore their youth.
A French guy I know, William, occasionally takes on remote part-time jobs while living on unemployment benefits, not worrying about GAP years while wandering around Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore for half a year; an Australian punk guy works two to three months a year, then rides a motorcycle bought in Laos, touring Southeast Asia for most of the remaining year; a New Zealand girl I met in a Chiang Mai hostel doesn't have to worry about retirement issues at all, even though she has never worked or paid personal insurance, she can still receive a full pension when she retires.
Chiang Mai has the quaint shared spaces on Nimman Road, as well as the low, old buildings near the Ping River with dark rooms, just like Westerners holding high exchange rate currencies, working for Western high-welfare companies, completing their "geographical arbitrage." In Chiang Mai, digital nomads from different cultural classes also have their own wilderness and tracks, it's just that some people are born in what others see as "wilderness."
Any person's narrative is not only derived from themselves but also from the history and culture behind them.
As French writer Éric Pessan said: "This place I once tried hard to escape: a social space I deliberately distanced myself from, a spiritual space that served as a negative example during my growth, is still, no matter how I resist, the hometown that constitutes the core of my spirit."
Acknowledging that some cores still continue as an inseparable part of body and spirit, this may be the first lesson abroad for digital nomads heading to foreign lands.
Returning to the Real Present
"Endless monsoon rains, otters may once again transform into whales." This is a sentence by Malaysian Chinese writer Wong Kim Chew, because the ancestors of whales evolved from fish that came ashore to mammals, but for various reasons returned to the sea, their close relatives are otters.
The rain in Malaysia is like the giant whales returning to the deep sea, repeating endlessly, while the rain in Chiang Mai is filled with the rhythm of life, each rain making the green outside the window more vibrant, the ancient city walls thicker.
Xia Xia is Chiang Mai's "otter," her first job after graduation was as a bank teller in her hometown's small city, a stable career position, "onshore" day after day life. "My daily job was to help the elderly get cards and withdraw pension money, I could completely imagine what the future would look like."
So, Xia Xia chose to return to the sea.
"At that time, cross-border e-commerce was very hot, I just happened to be good at English and got hired for an English customer service position. The boss was a foreigner, the workload was quite relaxed, and I slowly got to know the industry and started doing it myself."
Xia Xia began to move away from the basic customer service position, from earning hard work hours to gradually taking on some cross-border projects and remote positions. After gaining more freedom in money and time, Xia Xia wandered in digital nomad communities in Anji, Jingdezhen, Dali, and then Singapore, Penang, Chiang Mai.
After choosing to become a digital nomad, Xia Xia's work and life were improving, so when she suddenly decided to return to China for work at the end of the year, it surprised those around her, "Going back can get a senior management position, and this position can connect to some resources through the company's platform, and the current collaborations I have won't be dropped." Xia Xia looked excited.
And for most people, it has been a long time since they felt so happy because of work. Now, people easily become impatient with the present, thinking that a better life must be in the future. In the end, in one dry and solid night after another, they leave their jobs, lose friends, and look around in confusion.
China's youth spiritual mentor Xiang Biao says that Chinese people are living a suspended life, it's not important whether they can enjoy the moment now, the moment that might collapse in the future is what matters.
Xia Xia is an exception. In her case, whether or not she is a nomad is not the main thread of life, it is just one of the lifestyle choices she actively makes.
People living in cities, who invest excessive imagination in the life of nomads, just like that line from the movie "Into the Wild": "It is undeniable that 'being unbound' always feels exciting and happy. Because accompanying it is the escape from history, oppression, rules, and those tiresome obligations and responsibilities. The so-called, absolute freedom."
People can't always be surging with excitement, eventually, everything will return to the average.
But for Xia Xia, when she chose to jump back into the sea from the shore, it meant that a "young whale" could migrate from the warm tropical breeding grounds to the polar regions for food.
And having seen the comings and goings of young people, the manager of the digital nomad community, Zi Yan, never cares where the people entering the community come from, what they are doing, or where they are going. She hardly manages, she believes the community will naturally include people of all sorts.
Game enthusiasts have left a brand-new PS5 here, followed by contributions of "Black Myth: Wukong" and "Elden Ring"; Old Ai, who does the hookah business, bought two sets of hookah equipment to satisfy cravings, making the nightly hookah sessions a fixed program in the community, even the hookah master has been passed down to the fifth generation; local employees in the community can decorate the garden, courtyard, and other decorations according to their preferences, with little surprises hidden in public spaces everywhere.
"Let's see what it turns into."
In addition to cooperating with nomad communities like DNA, NCC, 706 Youth Space, Mountain and Sea Fort, and Tile Cat, Web 3 communities, Zi Yan also plans to incorporate some feminist communities next. "I don't really want to label the inn, just the community itself, it welcomes any normal human being."
Nomads are fluid, including the community itself, some people have left, but still want to come back, some have always been here, but also have no particular reason.
"People suitable for the nomad community end up staying here for a long time without realizing it."
As the rainy season in Chiang Mai is about to end, also a week after Jian left Chiang Mai to return to China, I asked her if she had found a new job, there was a moment of silence on the phone:
"Wish me to become a digital nomad soon."
"Don't need a lot of money."
"Just enough to support my wandering is enough."
