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Uncle Bean describes the years

he has spent, “People in those days

like us had no choice. As you put
me here, what I could do was

to do a good job.”

Uncle Bean has a few labels next to his name, such as “The
First Specialty Coffee Man in China” and “visually impaired
roaster”. In 2002, he started his journey in the coffee industry as
a green bean trader when he took over a coffee imports business.
In 2004, however, he halted his journey because of his rapidly
declining eyesight, and started developing an interest in roasting.
These ups and downs can’t represent the whole story of
Uncle Bean’s 53 years of life experience. This story seeks to
explore a man who claims himself to “toe the line”, yet whose
spirit powers him to seize the opportunity brought by his unfor-
tunate fate and break the chains of destiny. This story is about
how a man stumbles in the dark to be a roaster

“Toe the Line”

When talking about his family and his upbringing, Uncle
Bean frequently uses the description: “toe the line”. A native
Beijinger, he grew up with his grandma until his teens, and re-
turned to live with his parents before he started his own family.
He describes his grandma as a “working class woman from the
old society” and his parents “traditional Chinese intellectuals”.
As for himself, he says, “I was quite ordinary when I was young,
nothing shiny. The way I followed was the typical growing up
path of the Beijing people.”
Born in a time when jobs were assigned, Uncle Bean’s
family wanted him to go to a university to get an “iron rice bowl”, but became quite comprehensive by 2000. In 2002, the compa-
a job with security. He later enrolled in the Beijing Institute of ny received a commission to undertake the import of coffee,
Technology (the current Beijing Institute of Technology), a which marks Uncle Bean’s first encounter with coffee. Back then,
higher education school with a military background, where he “coffee was equal to Nescafe”. “There were only a few coffee
studied engineering management. Recalling the academic atmo- options, and customer demand was not much. Coffee beans from
sphere back then, Uncle Bean says, “The school was under mil- Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia were enough to meet
itarized management.” Aside from his background in science and the market demand.”
technology, science and technology, he also played piano and By 2004, Uncle Bean suffered from a dramatically declined
read literature. “Just as hobbies. They were not part of my pro- eyesight. “I could only feel a faint sense of light.” The tragedy is
fessional path.” says he. due to his congenital non-inherited retinitis pigmentosa, with
In 1991, Uncle Bean was assigned after graduation to a an incidence of one in a million. He left the company, ended his
state-owned company in charge of import and export business. career as a raw bean trader, and traveled to Germany and Swit-
At that time, the domestic import and export business was still zerland accompanied by his wife for medical treatment. “I hoped
dominated by foreign trade agencies. As he recalls, the business I could go back to my previous life.” He underwent two surger-
category in the company was relatively onefold when he joined, ies in five years, but the results were not what he was expecting.

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