Lin Min, Yang Mei

linmin67@hotmail.com

THE Barrett channel’s success is a vindication for Oli Barrett. When he was 13, he started a games channel on YouTube, which had accrued over 100,000 subscribers over a five-year period by 2015. Then he gave up the channel and focused on other things. For quite a long time, he regretted that he had abandoned the channel, which showed him playing the computer game “Call of Duty.”

Although he was an intelligent boy, nothing in school sparked his interest and he did not perform well academically. He worked at 15 different jobs, including waiting tables, retail and even pest control, between 16 and 21 years old. Before coming to China, his most recent job was going house to house killing wasps and rats.

When he was about 20, three years into full-time jobs, he had the realization that he had no purpose in his life, lived from paycheck to paycheck and was also in debt. He then went to college to take a cybersecurity course; however, that lasted only for about a year because he found no interest in the subject. At that time, he realized that he had to do something to change his life. “Or else I will go down a bad road.”

His father told him that he could visit China for a short stay. Thinking it over for a few days, he decided to “take a big step” — quit college and come to China.

Oli had planned to stay in Shenzhen for a few months, recalibrate and then go back to the U.K. He changed his mind and decided to stay put in Shenzhen on the day of his flight back home.

The father and son started the YouTube channel and that gave the young Barrett a purpose in life. The channel grew slowly in the first six months. After coronavirus began to spread in January 2020, he and his father spent all their time making videos. In February they decided to stay put in Shenzhen despite a call by the U.K. Government for its citizens living in China to return to their home country. And they saw the channel grow exponentially as their contents expanded.

The Barretts are now “in almost every corner of the country.” Oli said his life “has been completely changed.”

“Follow the path of life and it will take you to wonderful places,” Oli’s grandmother once told him. That has become his perception of life.