How a Chinese immigrant in a Welsh town has built a following on Chinese social media platform Douyin and what his fame says about language and belonging
We’re standing at a general store in Port Talbot, a working-class industrial town in south Wales. Chen Qinghan, a journalist for the Chinese-language media outlet Initium Media, takes us inside. Beyond the price tags of the vapes, sweets, fizzy drinks and crisps on sale, there’s an unusual special offer available. Help the owner of the shop film a short video, the article reports, and the drinks are free.
The owner in question is Fei, a 40-year-old man from Changle, near the city of Fuzhou in southern China, capital of the province of Fujian. For the last decade or so Wei has been running The Aperitif, an unremarkable local shop in Port Talbot which has been selling the basic necessities of life (and alcohol) for the last fifty years. [Photos in the original article give a sense of the vibe]. Nothing special, you might think. But his Douyin account, known as “UK Shelby” – presumably after one of the characters from British television hit Peaky Blinders – has 900,000 followers. The secret to its success is it deceptively simple content: Fei teaches the town’s Welsh residents to speak Fujianese dialect and Mandarin on camera, in exchange for snacks.
Wei’s videos tend to feature a rotating cast of local teenage boys, most prominently a stocky, red-cheeked boy Fei has named “Seven Catties Six.” In China’s internet culture, the term “foreign teenagers” carries mildly menacing overtones: restless and rabble-rousing. Yet this particular Fujianese uncle, who can barely speak standard Mandarin himself, has somehow managed to round up a group of these potential troublemakers to stand obediently in front of a camera shouting Fujianese dialect words, a source of considerable online astonishment in China. On Douyin, the hashtag #teenagertamer generated millions of views. Fei became, briefly, a celebrity.
But journalist Chen Qinghan, who visited Port Talbot in November 2024 and spent three hours at the till watching the town pass through, is interested in a somewhat different story. His article is less about online virality than about what precedes and underlies it: eleven years of daily interactions, of letting shoplifting teenagers pick one free item from the shelves and telling them to ask next time, of covering energy drinks for boys without pocket money, of driving teenagers home in his cobalt-blue van. “Only when they genuinely respect you as a person,” Fei says, “will they be willing to film videos with you.”
The locals in the videos are largely unaware of their online afterlives. Among the recurring cast is Michelle, the mother who shouts “Nǐ hǎo” before Fei has finished introducing her, and nine-year-old Caden, whose shouts words in Fujianese. The videos are uploaded to Chinese social media platforms. Most locals only find out how many likes they got the next time they stop in. In Fujianese dialect, phrases like “Hǔ jiū” for “Fuzhou”, or “Yā bà yā yìng” for “excellent”, function less as cultural transmission than as a private language between people who have simply known each other for a long time.
The article’s secondary and more subtle subject is the audience on the other side of the screen. At nine each evening, with one hour left until closing, Fei sets up a second phone and starts a livestream on a smaller account: “Late-Night Souls, Fujianese Dialect.” Nine in the evening in Wales is five in the morning in China, but there are nonetheless around seventy viewers there. They are mostly Fujianese men scattered across the world: running supermarkets in Florida, riding delivery bikes through Changle county at night, sitting inside shops in Argentina. They send online gifts, argue good-naturedly in dialect, and leave their microphones open so the others can hear their background sounds: truck engines, street noise, the soundscape of being somewhere far from home, late at night.
Anthropologist Song Ping, who researches overseas Fujianese migration, describes this as the operation of “little traditions”: the informal, unsystematic knowledge that grassroots communities build to navigate unfamiliar worlds. What Fei has built is something like that: a loose order held together by nicknames (the Dean, the Director, the Director-General), dialect, and the accumulated credibility of years of turning up.
The piece ends on a detail that really earns its place. Fei’s most recent filming idea is to ask a local elderly woman in Port Talbot to recite a phrase from the Chinese internet: “At sunset the mountains return to the sea; the sea holds its depths. No one is without regret – only some do not cry out in pain.” He writes out the characters, notes the pronunciation, and explains the meaning.
The journalist Chen questions him why he’s chosen to do this. After a brief pause, he offers: the contrast is the point – an old lady saying something so literary. She doesn’t press him further. She doesn’t need to.
The original article ‘「英區謝爾比」的多重宇宙：福州方言，威爾士teenager和抖音直播間裏的深夜靈魂’ by Chen Qinghan was published in Traditional Chinese by Initium Media on August 27, 2025.
It is available here.
Initium Media (端傳媒) is an independent Chinese-language digital media outlet founded in 2015, specialising in in-depth reporting and commentary on politics, society, and culture across the Chinese-speaking world.
