by Astrid Bouwman
Chi Lau is now a familiar face within VNC. His career from member to board member and then to secretary took place within three years. In addition to his secretary duties, he participates in various subgroups and initiates continouosly activities such as the company visit to Huawei and the visit to the ‘Nieuwe Instituut’ in Rotterdam on the occasion of the exhibition of the architect Ma Yansong. Who is this passionate secretary, who has found his feet in a short time?
If I could choose
Chi Lau was born in Hong Kong and came to the Netherlands at the age of six with his parents and older siblings. The Lau family settled in Twente and started a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant. Chi grew up in the hospitality industry and did not enjoy it at all at the time. It meant that he had to help out a lot in the restaurant and especially as he got older, this led to tensions. Of course, the generation gap played a role, but it was also a clash of cultures. Home and school were two separate worlds. At home Chinese was spoken – school and friends, the outside world was Dutch. At that time, the Lau family was one of the few foreign families in the area.
For a long time, China, or rather, the Chinese identity, was not something Chi was proud of or saw the value of: “I actually thought it was a disadvantage for myself. Not because I was discriminated against, but because I always had to help out in the business. Compared to my friends, I had much less free time and that felt like a limitation.”
From aversion to acceptance and appreciation
During his studies in mechanical engineering, Chi began to view his Chinese roots more positively: “I think the turning point came when I started university. In Eindhoven I met people with similar backgrounds for the first time and that was the first eye opener for me of okay, I’m not the only one. We were able to talk about the same things and had similar experiences.” Through the contacts with fellow students, Chi learned a lot about his own situation and gained more understanding of his home situation. The aversion to China gradually gave way to interest, partly because the country was in the news more often in the 1990s and increasingly attracted public attention.
In his first job at DSM, Chi worked in a joint venture with Japanese colleagues. He immersed himself further in Chinese culture and at one point decided that he wanted to work in China. This was achieved through an open application to Philips. This is how he became the boss of the car lamp factory in Hubei. There, like other colleagues from the West and to the surprise of the Chinese staff, he needed an interpreter; he did not speak Mandarin, only Cantonese and the Wenzhou dialect of his parents. Gradually, he has mastered Mandarin.
Best of both worlds
During his Philips years, Chi held various senior positions in sales, business development and product marketing in Germany, France, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was also through Philips that he met his wife, who is originally from Shanghai. Ultimately, his Chinese identity has greatly benefited him in both his career and personal life. Chi is grateful to his parents that, unlike his older sisters and brother, he was given the opportunity to study and thus the chance to pursue an international career, which he looks back on with pleasure. After fifteen years of wandering around Asia and Europe, Chi returned to the Netherlands in 2023 to provide informal care for his mother. His two children have now finished studying and left home.
Chi has set up his own company in the energy transition and mediates between Chinese and Dutch companies in this field. As a small self-employed person, Chi is flexible and can combine his work with caregiving responsibilities and his role as secretary of VNC. He regularly travels to China for work and visit his in-laws.
Development in turbo mode; Positive and negative
Chi greatly admires the speed with which changes are taking place in China. “Developments that take us in the West three generations are taking place in China within one generation. Not so long ago, landline phones were a rarity. To make a call you had to go to the telephone exchange in the village. It was also very expensive. From that situation, China has been teleported directly to the mobile phone and is now years ahead, with possibilities we can only dream of.”
As a problem of this ‘pressure cooker’ technological development, Chi sees that the software, i.e. the people, cannot always keep up with the pace. “This poses challenges, especially for the older generation. Relationships between people are also under pressure. Forty years ago, almost everyone was poor, but now the differences in wealth are immense. However, it is admirable that no one in China dies of hunger.”
Coming home to VNC
Due to his long absence from the Netherlands, Chi’s network, both social and business, had been diluted and he was looking for new contacts. Thanks to Frans Greidanus, a friend from Philips and VNC board member, he came into contact with VNC. Initially as a regular member, but he was soon asked to help with activities in the east of the country. In July 2024, he joined the board and a year later became secretary.
Chi sees connecting with like-minded people as the main motivation for his intensive involvement: “It is great to share my Chinese background and work experience in China and Asia with Dutch people who already know China or don’t know it at all. It feels like being an ambassador to me.”
Look beyond the clichés
According to Chi, the Dutch generally have limited knowledge about China: “People often remain stuck at the level of prejudice, just as the Dutch are associated with clogs and windmills abroad. Media coverage is mainly negative and politically driven, and the American perspective is all too easily adopted.” This underlines once again the importance of an organization such as VNC, which aims to promote a more balanced image of China.
Critical language and beautiful imagery
When asked which film he would recommend, Chi immediately thinks of the film ‘To Live’, by Zhang Yimou. He actually thinks all of this director’s films are worthwhile, but this one in particular. The 1994 film follows the life of a family between the forties and seventies and shows the political and social events in an unvarnished way. The film was banned in China for a long time. In addition to its impressive content, it is also beautifully filmed.
As far as literature is concerned, Chi is a fan of Lu Xun, a Chinese writer who has meant a lot to modern China. Many books by Lu Xun have been published and Chi especially likes his short stories. Famous, for example, is ‘The true history of Ah Q’. It is a sharp social critique against the background of the revolution of 1911, written in 1921, but still very much worth reading.
Plea for nuance and recognition
Chi argues that we should look at the similarities and broadly highlight them. There are more similarities than you might think and certainly more than there are differences: “Look through the superficial surface, try to empathize with the other, with an other culture.” He wants to contribute to this himself by drawing more attention to the contribution that Chinese people in the Netherlands have made to the Dutch economy and society. According to him, that contribution is not sufficiently recognised, partly because it is not customary in Chinese culture to stand up for yourself. As other important causes of the lack of appreciation, Chi sees the blind spots of the media and the coarsening of the social climate, of which Asians are also victims.
Chi is working on a next VNC project on this topic, about which more will be revealed soon…
