By Keqiao Cheng, EDITOR
“I didn’t see the city changing because I was gone during its changing, but I could see the differences every time that I came back here.”
Ben, the protagonist of this video, came for the first time to Chongqing in 1994 for three months because the university in Minnesota, where he was studying, had an exchange program with South University, which is located in Chongqing.
He really enjoyed the time here and, because he wanted to learn more about China and Chinese language, he decided to come back in 1997 once he finished college. After a period where he was working as a teacher at universities of Chongqing, he moved to Shanghai where he worked for a couple of years in a real estate company.
During that time, Ben realized that if he would like to do something different, a teaching degree wasn’t enough so he came back to the US to take an MBA course. But the recall of China was too strong and in 2012 he decided to come back to Chongqing.
When in 2012 Ben came back to live in Chongqing, there was not any bar producing draft beer and the imported beer was very expensive. So if he wanted to drink good beer, the only option was to learn how to make it. After a long time of preparation, Ben’s Riverside Craft Brewery opened in 2017.