Let it be,without forcing it;

In September 1998, I do not know whether the route had gone wrong or the pilot had simply been momentarily distracted, but the plane landed in an ancient city. I found an equally old postbox and told my family: I had arrived in Portugal. Wang Sanxiong, born in 1973, from Qingtian, Zhejiang.

I was twenty-five that year. The first choice of my life—going abroad. I chose Lisbon; I chose this city, and I chose the first half of my life.

On my second day in Lisbon, I found a job washing glasses in the bar of a Chinese restaurant. The owner was a rather plump man from Qingtian, a good boss who knew how to treat his employees with understanding. He belonged to the first generation of Chinese restaurateurs in Europe and had started out as an immigrant worker himself. I liked listening to his stories about working in the United States: how he had crossed the ocean alone to New York, settled himself there, brought his family over, and finally decided that they would open a restaurant together in Portugal.

“A Xiong, another reservation has just come in—for twenty people. Do we still have room?” the owner called out, phone in hand.

I looked around the dining room and said, “We can seat them in half an hour.” By then I had already moved up from washing glasses at the bar to managing the restaurant. The restaurant business—I felt I might like it.

It was another Saturday evening, right in the middle of the dinner rush. The Chinese restaurant stood in a town on the outskirts of Lisbon. It had eighty seats and a distinctly Chinese interior. That night, we served more than 120 customers.

The owner cooked the staff supper himself!

Six months later, I left the first restaurant where I had worked. There was no other reason: the suburbs were simply too quiet. They did not give me the feeling of European life I had been looking for.