I am the original Chinese Man. One Chinese guy, singular, actually Chinese, which is more than some bands with the name can say.

I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities on the planet, and I live here cheap on purpose. Not miserably cheap. Well cheap. I pay less than half of market rent, I eat for free more often than I probably should, and I fly out of SFO for the price of a coffee. This site is where I write down how, plus the other things I actually spend my time on.

What you will find here #

Frugal SF. The main event. How to live well in San Francisco without a tech-lead salary: rent control and why you never move out, the free-food tech-event circuit, the $2.05 way to the airport, and the gear worth buying exactly once. Real tactics from someone who does them, not recycled “make coffee at home” filler.

Cooking. I cook, mostly cheap and mostly good. Chinese home food, soups, the basics done right. Recipes you can actually afford to make on a weeknight.

Excel. I know my way around a spreadsheet and I explain it without the fluff. Pivot tables, lookups, the functions that save you an afternoon.

Apps. I build small apps and games, solo. On-device, private, no servers to babysit. The stories behind them are here: an offline AI chat app, a private speech-to-text app, and a capybara arcade game.

Why this exists #

Most “frugal living” advice is written by people who are not actually frugal, and most SF content is written by people burning through a signing bonus. I am neither. Everything here is stuff I do, tested against a genuinely expensive city, and written the way I would explain it to a friend who just moved here and asked how I pull it off.

No newsletter, no course, no funnel. Just what works. Chinese Man is what I go by online, the apps are real, and the cheap living is a lifestyle, not a bit.