This story is part of Sixth Tone’s 10-year anniversary series, Ten Years in Transition.
Before moving to Saudi Arabia, Liu Danru dreamed she was arrested there for testing cultural boundaries. In real life, the move seemed almost absurd. She spoke no Arabic, was not yet fluent in English, and knew the region mostly through news reports.
The next day, her visa came through. And soon after, she was on a plane.
After seven years as a journalist at leading Chinese business publications, Liu, now in her mid-30s, had grown tired of watching others build the life she wanted for herself. Then she interviewed a woman her own age who was already running a Chinese company’s operations in Egypt. “I had never met anyone my age who thought about the world that way,” she says.
When another interviewee offered her a public relations role in Saudi Arabia, she took it.
