Wandering Under Different Stars

Stories of migration are often told with too much polish.

On social media, people see only the highlights: permanent residency granted, a job at a major company, a child admitted to a world-class university.

But between those highlights lie long stretches of blank space: the cold wind before a dawn shift, the frustration of one rejected interview after another, the nights spent questioning yourself in an unfamiliar city.

I had wanted to write these stories for a long time—to fill in those blank spaces and let each person be seen. Not to turn anyone into a model of success, and not to assemble a collection of miracles, but simply to preserve the truest fragments of a life in motion.

I began with people in IT because it is my own profession. I have written code, worked through the night, felt the tension of a production release, and watched colleagues and friends build careers across many different companies.

After moving to Australia, most of the people around me were still in technology. Some write low-level code at large companies. Some work as full-stack engineers at startups. Others have moved into testing, business analysis or project management. Their stories are close to me. I understand the difficulties they describe, and I recognise their hesitation and perseverance.

For me, this is not only a record of one community's career paths. It is a record of ordinary people choosing, enduring and carrying on while far from where they began.

Perhaps these fragments can help more people see that migration is not a handful of rows in a planning spreadsheet. It is a life lived through daily struggle and uncertainty.

For immigrants working in IT, professional and personal challenges are often intertwined.

Someone works in a chicken-processing plant while trying not to lose touch with technology. Someone else finally enters a major company, only to discover that cultural distance and the promotion ceiling are harder to overcome than any technical problem. These rises and falls belong to migration, but they also resonate with anyone trying to find a way forward at work.

I chose to write one hundred stories because a single story is too easily romanticised.

People love to say that someone had a smooth journey, or became successful in one decisive moment. Put a hundred stories together, however, and a fuller reality begins to appear.

Some people are fortunate; others fall again and again. Some choose the ambition of a large city, while others choose the steadier rhythm of a smaller one. There is no single answer—only different people making different choices at different moments.

Migration is a long experiment. We place ourselves on unfamiliar ground, rebuild the rules of daily life, and learn to measure safety all over again.

Along the way, we lose many things and slowly gain others. That is why I see this project as a record, not an instruction manual. It is not here to say, “This is the right way.” It is here to show that, however different their roads may be, people keep going in ways of their own.

You may never have migrated to another country. But drifting is not only geographical. Changing cities, industries, companies or ways of life can create the same sense of rupture and uncertainty.

So these one hundred stories do not belong only to Chinese IT professionals in Australia. They also belong to everyone who has made a difficult choice and persisted through a difficult season.

I hope that, when these stories are placed together, a new understanding will emerge.

Drifting is not the destination. It is another sea of stars—vast and unfamiliar, yet still alive with possibility.

Life, after all, is worth the journey.

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Wandering Under Different Stars.
Every choice asks for perseverance.
These one hundred stories are the paths of a community—and a mirror for us all.