Let it be,without forcing it;

“The news says Wuhan has been locked down,” my wife told me.

During the Chinese New Year of 2020, I went back to China.

On the first night after returning, I stood on the balcony of the living room and looked at the empty streets.

Qingtian is a hometown of overseas Chinese, known as “Little Europe”. Cafés line the streets, European-style buildings stand one after another, and even at the market people can pay directly in euros. There is a popular saying: “The streets of Qingtian are all paved with euros.”

For the first time, Qingtian felt so quiet to me; like a child who has just come home and can finally lie down on the sofa. But that quiet lasted only a moment;

Many images flashed through my mind: restaurants, employees, family.

“What will I do if I get stuck in Qingtian?”

I could not answer my own question.

“We need to change our flights now and go back to Portugal,” I told my wife.

She understood what I meant. We changed our flights to the next day and returned to Lisbon.

Not long after we returned to Lisbon, the pandemic began spreading across Europe. The situation in Portugal grew more serious by the day. I followed the news every day, waiting to see what measures the government would take for the restaurant industry.

I sent an internal message to the company managers’ group:

“No matter what happens with the pandemic, the employees’ accommodation is your home, and the food in the restaurant refrigerators is food for everyone.”

When the pandemic arrived, the entire restaurant industry went straight into an “ice age”. Everyone in the restaurant business was making one last attempt to save themselves.

The news said: “Restaurants may open, but they may not serve customers inside; they may only operate through delivery.”

I asked the manager of each restaurant to arrange voluntary one-week shifts for employees. While working those shifts, they received fifty per cent more pay.

Throughout the pandemic, not one employee left SUSHICOME.

Uber Eats suddenly grew during that period. The question I heard most often was:

“Sanxiong, how do you use that delivery platform—the one with the U?”

To keep their restaurants alive, more and more Chinese restaurant owners crowded onto Uber Eats. Everyone knew that without delivery, it would be difficult to survive. But once they were on it, who realised that restaurants had already begun to depend on delivery?

The pandemic dealt a fatal blow to the restaurant industry. Business worsened by the day, and everyone was searching for a second path. That was when I understood: if a restaurant depended only on dine-in business, the livelihood of a restaurant owner was far too fragile.

I asked myself:

“Am I going to spend my whole life opening restaurants?”