Working from home not all it is cracked up to be for some US-based Chinese tech workers
- More than 130 countries have introduced some form of restriction or tightened their border entry requirements
- Last year an average of more than 14,000 people per day travelled to the US from China
One has embarked on what he calls a “wandering earth trip” that will take him from China to Dubai and on to San Francisco. Another is up till 3am every night to communicate with her colleagues on the US west coast, while a third is out of a job after being unable to leave China.
These are the struggles faced by Chinese employees of US tech companies after they returned home for the Lunar New Year but were unable to leave because of the US travel ban imposed in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.
“I thought of the possibility [of being fired] when [US president Donald] Trump issued the travel ban,” said Sun, the only Chinese national among 15 employees at a small pharmaceutical start-up in California.
“When I received the email, I knew my premonition had come true,” said the 27-year-old chemical engineer. “I was disappointed but not angry. It’s a small firm and my supervisor needed someone to do my work,” he said.
Sun, who earned an annual salary of US$80,000 working in San Diego, a city he describes as “home”, is now in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin where he found a temporary job giving online English lessons to students for a basic monthly salary of 3,000 yuan (US$431).
The US was one of the first countries to impose a temporary travel ban on Chinese visitors due to the coronavirus outbreak, with a policy effective February 2 that denied entry to Chinese nationals and other foreigners who had been to the Chinese mainland in the prior 14 days.