From Chicago's South Side to Shenzhen, China

We are Stella and Amy. We share firsthand stories at the crossroads of tech, business, and culture, helping leaders craft actionable cross-cultural strategies. Together, we bridge cultural divides and bring the world a little closer—one step at a time.

This is our first ever English episode after rebranding our podcast to StellaxAmy Podcast. You can listen to the full episode below or on YouTube.

StellaxAmy Podcast: EP73 - From Chicago's South Side to Shenzhen, China — An American Engineer’s Journey Across Borders

Josh on Business Insider | on LinkedIn

Josh, an MIT grad and Schwarzman Scholar, is a Shenzhen-based entrepreneur who founded The Sparrows after managing camera production at Apple. Fluent in Mandarin, he bridges Western companies and Chinese suppliers with expertise in sourcing, quality control, and project management.

Josh's journey began at age 14 in Chicago, when a Hong Kong company's investment in the movie "Inception" sparked his realization: "I gotta learn Chinese, bro. This is the future." While his classmates chose Spanish or French, Josh picked Mandarin as a "practical assessment of what language will give me the biggest return on investment."

After MIT and a Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua, Josh made an unconventional choice. Instead of heading to Silicon Valley or another big city back in the states, he took a $25,000 salary at a small product design firm in Shenzhen. "Shanghai would be too easy. " he said, "I knew if I moved to Shanghai, I would never really master Mandarin like a local."

The immersion was brutal but effective. Working in an office that was 90% Chinese-speaking, Josh found himself managing engineering teams, negotiating with factories, and yes, once designing automatic chopsticks for a YouTuber trying to sell them to his audience.

The most important thing Western companies get wrong about China manufacturing? They think they can just "shake hands and drink tea" with factory bosses and call it a day.

After two years learning the ropes, Josh joined Apple as an R&D project manager for cameras.

"For Apple, every single part of everything is controlled to a high degree of precision. There's an Apple employee representative at every single point of the supply chain."

This meticulousness comes with a cost. Josh describes the pressure: when 0.3% defects on a thousand-unit run for a small company becomes hundreds of thousands of unusable devices for Apple, "that's the type of thing that will destroy a business."

The company culture at Apple China surprised him—collaborative rather than the cutthroat environment he'd expected from Cupertino. But after 4 years, the limited upward mobility became clear: "Apple is the kind of company that grows down, not up. You can get more people reporting to you, but the likelihood of moving up is very low."

Now running The Sparrows, Josh has seen firsthand the common challenges Western companies face when navigating China’s manufacturing landscape.

"When it comes to doing things at scale, China is the big elephant in the room that cannot be avoided—no matter how many tariffs you put on this country."

The expertise gap runs deep. Josh points to solar panel manufacturing as an example: you might build a factory in America and hire American workers, "but what happens when that machine breaks? You don’t know how to fix it. You’ll end up flying in the Chinese to fix it for you."

His approach emphasizes the NPI (new product introduction) phase—helping companies scale from prototype to mass production. This means identifying the right manufacturers (often choosing between original equipment manufacturers and established industry players), conducting due diligence on their capabilities, and, most importantly, serving as a communication and cultural bridge to ensure alignment and quality.

Josh is candid about one of his competitive advantages:

"The world we live in is racist. The fact that I am an American in China who speaks Mandarin and can represent you at the factory, given our current geopolitical context, gives you a degree of comfort versus working with someone else."

But trust goes beyond appearances and nationality. It's built through understanding both cultures deeply enough to manage expectations on both sides. Western clients want Apple-level perfection; Chinese factories need complete specifications upfront. Josh's job is translating between these different approaches and keeping projects moving.

"It's my job to interpret unreasonable requests before they get to the engineer, but also to tell engineers 'we don't have all the information now, but you can do this part of the project,'" he explains.

The conversation takes a deeper turn as Josh reflects on his unique position as an African American in China. Growing up on Chicago's South Side, he was "comfortable with mortality by age seven or eight," navigating violence and poverty. He credits his unique trajectory to his tiger parents, who applied "120%" of every piece of advice they received from their network on raising successful children.

In China, he finds a different kind of freedom. "I enjoy being outside of America. I have such clarity of mind in my day-to-day life not having to think about personal safety—from being robbed or killed by a criminal or from being killed by police."

Despite common assumptions about bureaucratic challenges, Josh found the entrepreneurship process in China "quite straightforward and easy," though he acknowledges his MIT and Tsinghua background likely smoothed the path. The Greater Bay Area actively courts foreign talent with government stipends worth "hundreds of thousands of RMB for companies that are AI-related, robotics-related, or critical industry related."

The venture capital ecosystem differs markedly from Silicon Valley's speculative approach.

"VCs in China are not willing to throw money at AI curtains," Josh observes, noting that startups might receive zero-interest loans rather than equity investments—a more conservative but practical approach in the current economic climate.

The casual racism he encounters in China—people calling him "Black" on the street or, memorably, a Huawei store employee suggesting he marry a Chinese woman to "create the next generation of Olympians"—feels different from prejudice in America. "What I see the most is kindness and curiosity. I'm grateful for that, because it doesn't have to be this way, and I know in America it wouldn't be at all."

Despite current tensions, Josh remains optimistic about the potential for cross-cultural collaboration between the US and China. He points to moments like the TikTok refugees fled to RedNote as examples of genuine people-to-people connection: "You're seeing incredibly raw and unfiltered interaction of common folk from both countries just talking to each other. Like, 'Wow, you guys are normal!'"

For Western companies, his message is clear: China manufacturing isn't going away soon, so learn to work with it effectively. That means understanding it's "a very human-intensive, communication-intensive process" that can't be fully automated or managed from a distance.

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