The 31-year-old, who uses the pseudonym Chengzi, told Sanlian Lifeweek in a first-person account published last month that she pays for every meal she eats and every piece of clothing she buys with money she earned, while classmates her age still take help from their parents.
She charges $68 to $80 an hour for banquets and works seven days a week. Her clients are 99% Chinese or Chinese-American, and she takes jobs across all of greater Los Angeles County, with commutes running as long as two hours, she told Jiupai News.
Days before her graduation from the New York Film Academy, where she had studied four years of film production, her father called to say the family business had stopped operating, that he had kept her in school for two years while it was failing, and that he could no longer support her.
He offered to buy her a ticket home. She refused, telling him she wanted to see how far she could get on her own.
Within a day she sold her car, gave up her downtown Manhattan apartment, moved onto a mattress on a friend's living room floor, and started reselling the limited-edition sneakers she had once bought without checking prices.
