“Sometimes if you don’t do what you really want to do now, you probably won’t have a chance to do it later in life.” A young urbanite who quit her job to travel

WASHINGTON—The portly Chinese man strolled through the open-air market in Mogadishu, holding an AK-47 to his chest, surrounded by six gun-toting security guards. Under a crystal-blue sky was a nightmarish urban scene: walls riddled with bullet holes, piles of garbage strewn on dirt roads, a gunshot or two ringing in the air.

But for Zhang Xinyu, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from Beijing, the capital of war-ravaged Somalia was just another tourist destination. He had spent most of 2012 travelling to unusual locations with his fiancée, Liang Hong.

Zhang and Liang are among a growing number of Chinese who want to escape the rat race and see the world. The intense pressure of trying to get into the best school or pursuing a lucrative career has left many young Chinese hungry for freedom, romance and adventure. Chafing under social expectations to hold down a stable job and save up to buy an apartment, they fantasize about travelling to exotic places and leaving work or school far behind.

Perhaps that’s why On the Road, a 15-part documentary about Zhang and Liang released in 2013, has received more than 100 million views on Youku, China’s YouTube, with thousands of comments expressing encouragement and admiration.

While the vast majority of Chinese will never wander through a Somali marketplace, stories like Zhang’s have stirred a sense of collective wanderlust.

On the Chinese community discussion site Douban, a group called “Quit & Travel” has more than 200,000 members, its own iPad magazine, a promotional video clip, and even a theme song, which urges followers to find “another self on the road, a self that is relaxed, free and tolerant.”

Several popular comment threads on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, discuss the trend of travelling after a “naked resignation ” — a new term referring to the practice of quitting work without lining up another job. On Weibo, the term has been mentioned almost 600,000 times.

The desire to take a travel sabbatical has become so prevalent among white-collar urban Chinese that it’s almost cliché.

According to a viral tweet on Weibo, there are now four typical yuppie dreams: “Opening a café in the city, quitting one’s job to travel in Tibet, running a small inn in Lijiang, and biking to Lhasa.” (Lijiang is a tourist town in southwest China; Lhasa is the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, a popular destination for well-heeled Chinese, despite the region’s severe ethnic tensions.)

But to many young Chinese struggling to find a job or support their families, a sabbatical seems like a luxury that only the fu’erdai — “rich second generation,” which refers to the children of the wealthy and connected — can afford.

Some are incredulous that Zhang and Liang have the courage to step so far out of the daily grind of working to pay for mortgages, child care and parental care that bedevils so many Chinese in their 20s and 30s. But Zhang is a self-made man, who says he never went to university and never held a desk job.

Instead, after a stint in the late 1990s as a mechanic and cook in the People’s Liberation Army, he worked as a kebab peddler, a street sweeper and even the manager of a public bathroom. Zhang earned his first million renminbi (approximately $175,000) in 2002 by making tofu machines and selling them to tofu merchants.

By the mid-2000s, Zhang and Liang were running a moderately successful jewelry-store franchise. At that point, “what I thought about all day was making money, buying a house, making more money and buying a bigger house,” Zhang says in On the Road.

The turning point came in May 2008, when Zhang and Liang visited Sichuan province, immediately after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the area. They said they were deeply touched by the ephemerality of life and “decided to follow their dreams.”

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In 2012, Zhang and Liang started travelling to places like Mogadishu, Chernobyl, Oymyakon in Siberia (one of the coldest places on Earth), and the Marum volcano on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. They plan to get married at the South Pole.

China’s media has reported on many young urbanites leaving their jobs to travel: one woman received breathless local media coverage for travelling around China in an RV. “Sometimes if you don’t do what you really want to do now,” the woman told the local newspaper Ningbo Daily, “you probably won’t have a chance to do it later in life.”

Ningbo isn’t Mogadishu. But it’s a start.

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