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 real math on going car-free, 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.
Money #
The other half of frugality, and the half most frugal-living sites skip. Cutting expenses has a floor and income does not, so this section covers the retirement arithmetic, how much you actually need, credit card rewards done properly, and the careers that pay well without a graduate degree. Arithmetic you can check, not advice you have to trust. I am not a financial advisor and none of it is financial advice.
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, with the ingredients bought in Chinatown at a third of supermarket prices.
AI #
Plain-language explainers on how the tools everyone is suddenly using actually work. How LLMs work, what a token is, why models hallucinate, how quantization fits a huge model on a phone, and what happens to your data. No hype, no jargon, no company allegiance.
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, a capybara arcade game, a GPS speedometer, a credit card tracker, and a retirement planner. What all six have in common is in what shipping six apps solo taught me.
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.