For many children of Chinese immigration who arrived in Spain, the future seemed written: help in the family bar, bazaar or restaurant and, over time, stay with the business. Without a doubt, a path that ensured economic stability. However, Kean Ye breaks with that script.
“My parents wanted me to stay in their bar,” he admits to José Elias on his YouTube channel, but he had another idea in his head: “I wanted to see the world, even if I didn’t earn anything,” he points out. That breakup, which began as an almost desperate decision, today translates into a textile store in Barcelona that invoices “about 40 or 50,000 euros on average per month.”
If we talk about data, more than 225,000 people with Chinese nationality reside in the country today, and around 60% come from the province of Zhejiang, the cradle of very powerful migratory networks.
After decades associated with the bazaar and the ‘Chinese on the corner’, this community has become one of the most important drivers of self-employment: more than 66,000 Chinese self-employed workers contribute to the Special Regime for Self-Employed Workers (RETA), which represents 14% of all foreign self-employed workers, and 55% of Chinese people of working age are self-employed.
“I had to get out of there”
Kean’s story begins like many others: in a neighborhood bar. His father had a restaurant in Nou Barris, then he invested in China and lost money. In debt, he returned to Spain and ended up opening bars. “Everything was going wrong,” he remembers. Determined, he took over the bar “one last summer,” aware that his parents needed someone who spoke good Spanish to keep customers.
However, the desire to “go out, see the world and learn things” was stronger. Kean mustered up the courage to tell his parents that his time at the bar would come to an end. Once away from home, things were not as easy as I thought. He invested in several physical businesses such as “a pet food and accessories store” and even in a sex shop; everything, with the pressure from parents to “do something physical.”
“In the end everything went wrong. And when it came time to pick up, I didn’t pick up anything,” he confesses. Far from taking it as a failure, he has seen it as an investment in learning: “It is better to screw up at 20-something than at 30 or 40,” he says.
Meanwhile, the Chinese community in Spain continued to change: the closure of small businesses has pushed many self-employed people of Chinese origin towards specialized hospitality, aesthetics or own-brand commerce, exactly the sector where Kean has decided to bet.
“There are many things that are the same; brand names, just us”
After those events, he decided to start his clothing store hand in hand with a 50-year-old businesswoman, a time that Kean takes as an experience that has allowed him to “avoid a lot of bumps.”
The area that was chosen for his clothing store was not a coincidence. It is a polygon where “there are many things that are the same, but the brand is only us,” he explains. And on their hangers there are brands as tall as Hugo Boss; but yes, bought in Europe and not in China.
“On the third day of opening, the Civil Guard came to take ‘invoices’,” recalls the businessman. Accustomed to chasing counterfeits in the area, the agents found everything in order: “When they left everything was negative, they found nothing,” he details.
While many families continue to be chained to bazaars, Kean has opted for a model with more margin and less physical burden, aligned with the new wave of Chinese businesses aimed at achieving added value.