Posted on May 3, 2016

A Parallel Chinese-Language Internet Helps Immigrants Navigate Life in America

Frank Shyong, Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2016

When Grace Hui moved to Los Angeles from China in 2014 and Googled the Chinese characters for “Los Angeles immigrant,” the first result was Chineseinla.com.

The Chino Hills-based website, a disorganized Yelp-meets-Craigslist hybrid, was a throwback, and Hui, 29, thought some of the posts were phishing scams.

But with more than 680,000 listings, more than 350,000 registered users, 2 million monthly visits and sister sites in 15 cities, Chineseinla.com has become a teeming virtual portal to Chinese life in America. It’s one of the only ways that Hui could connect to a country she couldn’t understand.

“American Internet is useless to me,” said Hui, who used Chineseinla.com to look for a job. “My English isn’t good enough to get the information I need.”

In the San Gabriel Valley and in Chinese enclaves across the nation, a new wave of Chinese immigrants–many of them affluent students with poor English skills and a smartphone habit–are tapping into a parallel system of Chinese-language apps and websites geared toward helping them navigate life in America.

For restaurant recommendations, there’s Chihuo, a Chinese food-centric Yelp or Zagat. 2RedBeans, the Chinese OkCupid, helps Chinese speakers find love. They travel with ETAcar, a Chinese version of Uber, and order food with ToGo626.com, a delivery app that works with about 400 restaurants, most of which are in the Chinese neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley.

The growth of these websites are a side effect of a stubborn reality: the language and cultural barriers that new immigrants face extend onto the Internet.

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More than half of Los Angeles County’s Chinese population speaks limited English, according to the American Community Survey, and a larger, temporary population of Chinese students, tourists, and travelers has even fewer English skills.

For companies such as ETAcar, the language barrier means profits. The Chinese-language ride-hailing app, largely similar to services like Uber and Lyft, launched in 2014 and now has about 400 drivers throughout North America, with about 300 in Los Angeles, mainly serving the San Gabriel Valley.

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For those with no English skills at all, one Chinese-language app, Shenma, promises to handle virtually all details of life in Los Angeles.

Shenma Life, Chinese for “magic horse,” is a personal assistant located inside Wechat, a messaging-based Chinese social media app. Subscribe to their account on Wechat or text them requests, and a staff of about eight people in Chino Hills and 10 others in China will handle traffic tickets, hotel bookings, car rentals, class enrollment and anything else a Chinese-speaking student could need.

For 24-hour VIP service, users can pay $299 a month or $999 a year. Lu Zhang, director of North American operations for the company, said it has about 3,000 users.

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