What it's like being Indian in China for 21 years

ELI5/TLDR

Max Chernov visits Tony, an Indian celebrity tailor who left Mumbai at 16 and has spent 22 years in Shanghai cutting suits for Bollywood stars and politicians. Tony talks about how Shanghai feels more open than Mumbai (especially for women), how Chinese kids decide things without asking their parents, why Indians buy everything made in China, and why he still flies home once a year just for the street food. The whole thing is a quiet portrait of a man who has comfortably stopped being homesick.

The Full Story

A tailor with a museum problem

Tony shows Max a coffee-table book that the Chinese government published on the history of Indians in Shanghai. Four pages are about him. There are photos with the tennis player Leander Paes and with Yao Ming, who Tony had to measure standing on a stool. He used to play with Yao’s daughter at the house. The shop is small. The work, he says, is mostly in the cutting — the sewing he hands off to a Chinese team that has been with him for years. A suit takes two days.

Two cities, two cultures

The conversation keeps circling back to Mumbai vs Shanghai. Tony’s framing is simple: Delhi is more like Beijing, Mumbai is more like Shanghai. The skylines rhyme. The streets do not.

“Here a girl can come up to you and take your mobile number. She’ll ask you for your mobile number. But in Mumbai, if you go ask a girl, you have a slap on your face.”

He is not making a moral point, just noting the air pressure. After 22 years he is more used to Shanghai, and he thinks the openness doesn’t travel — you can’t carry that culture back to India.

The other big difference is family. Indians, in his telling, run every decision past their parents. Chinese kids, even under the one-child policy generation, mind their own business and decide for themselves. He says this with admiration rather than envy.

The lifestyle inversion

Ask him which city has the better lifestyle and the answer is unexpected: India, by a wide margin — but only if you have money.

“You have a car, you have your own driver, you have a cookie in the house, you have maid… You want a glass of water, you just tell them. Maid, give me a glass of water. She’ll bring you a glass of water. But here you cannot.”

Shanghai will sell you a part-time cleaner. It will not sell you a live-in household for the price an upper-middle-class Mumbai family pays. So Shanghai wins on infrastructure and openness; Mumbai wins on the silver-spoon economics of domestic labour. Both things are true at once.

The trade

Tony’s casual macroeconomics is sharper than it looks.

“If you can get one thing for a dollar, why you pay five?”

That, in one line, is why Indians fill the Canton Fair every year and why every light bulb in an Indian shop seems to come from Guangdong. He thinks Modi has warmed things up — visas to Chinese citizens just reopened after a five-or-six-year freeze. On Russian oil and US pressure he is similarly direct: if America wants India to stop buying from Russia, America has to offer a better price. Nobody has.

Being curious goods

When Tony first arrived, Indians in Shanghai were rare enough to be free entertainment. He says he could walk into a restaurant and not pay — neighbours would invite him over for a beer and pick up his bill, just to talk to him. That novelty has worn off as the city has filled with foreigners, but the friendliness imprinted.

The street-food pilgrimage

He goes back to India once a year, briefly. Not for relatives — his siblings are in Hong Kong and the Mumbai house sits empty. He goes for the food. Specifically the street food. Bollywood stars he dresses sometimes try to take him to a five-star, and he refuses; once they tagged along to a roadside stall and were mobbed by a few hundred people within minutes.

“They cannot come to having street food.”

Fame, in Tony’s telling, is mostly a thing that stops you eating well.

Sixty-plus and unbothered

He is past sixty, looks younger, and says he no longer chases anyone. Clients find him. He has a Hindu shrine in the shop, believes in karma in a fairly literal sense — do good and good comes back, harm someone and you’ll get punched harder. He once owned 400 pairs of shoes and would spend half an hour deciding which to wear. He has thinned the collection. The vibe is a man who has metabolised a lot of life and is now sitting down with a coffee.

Key Takeaways

Indians in Shanghai have a 100+ year history. Sikh men in turbans served as British-era police in the International Settlement; Tagore lived there briefly. The Chinese state has now published a coffee-table history of this community.
The Delhi/Beijing, Mumbai/Shanghai pairing. Tony’s intuitive geography: capitals match capitals, commercial hubs match commercial hubs. Skylines rhyme but social codes don’t.
One-child-policy independence. Tony observes that Chinese young adults make life decisions without consulting parents — a behavioural side-effect of the demographic policy that’s underrated in Western coverage.
The Canton Fair is functionally an Indian trade convention. “90% Indian” by Tony’s eyeball — most things sold in Indian shops route through this Guangzhou wholesale marketplace.
The household-labour arbitrage. Upper-middle-class Mumbai life beats upper-middle-class Shanghai life because Indian wage differentials let you buy a full domestic staff cheaply. Shanghai’s cost structure makes that mathematically impossible.
India-China visas reopened in 2025 after a roughly 5-6 year freeze that began with the 2020 Galwan clash. Tony’s read: Modi’s recent overtures and the Russia-China-India alignment under US pressure are the proximate cause.
Tony’s price-elasticity argument on Russian oil. Sanctions don’t work as moral pressure; they work only if you outbid the discount. The US asks India to give up cheap Russian crude without offering replacement crude at a similar price. So the trade continues.
The fame-vs-street-food tradeoff. A useful inverse indicator of access: the more famous you are in India, the less you can eat where the food is best.
Being a curious good is a real advantage. When Tony arrived, Indians were rare enough that locals paid for his meals just to chat. The asset wasn’t a skill — it was scarcity.
Cutting is the bottleneck in tailoring. The skilled labour is in the cutting; sewing is delegated. A bespoke suit comes together in two days when the cutter is good.

Claude’s Take

This is a charming, lightweight expat interview — closer to a YouTube travel vlog than to journalism. Tony is a good talker, generous with anecdotes, and the camera lingers on enough texture (the book, the shears, the Hindu shrine) to make it feel like a real visit rather than a setup. The signal-to-fluff ratio is decent for the format, and there are a few genuinely interesting beats: the visa freeze and reopening, the Canton Fair demographics, the household-labour inversion.

But it is one man’s vibe, not analysis. Tony is a successful tailor in Shanghai’s cosmopolitan core, not a representative sample of Indians in China — and his read on Chinese family culture comes from observation, not inhabitation, which he flags himself. The Russia/oil bit is street-corner geopolitics, accurate as far as it goes but not a substitute for actually understanding the trade flows. The video also has two embedded sponsor breaks that eat real minutes.

I’m landing at 5. It’s pleasant, it has a few sticky observations, and it doesn’t waste your time, but it’s also the kind of content that won’t change how you see anything. The real value, if there is one, is the specific texture of Indian-Chinese cultural exchange at a personal level — the kind of thing demographic statistics can’t capture. Worth it if the topic interests you, skippable if it doesn’t.