The Views: Rose and Anzai’s Life in the Country Is Full Of Surprises
Handle: While self-identifying as “Rose & Anzai Country Life,” the channel goes by the username @roseinchina1 on YouTube, which seems to be the main channel currently. Their TikTok is under the same handle. Rose also has accounts on Bilibili, Douyin and XiaoHongShu, which were active before her YouTube and Tiktok accounts. Rose also recently started a new Tiktok account, under the handle @roseandwu.
Series: The main YouTube channel has over 1000 videos, but it has very few playlists. Their longest series is named “Returning to Uganda in 2023 after 6 years,” which follows Rose and her family’s journey back to her home country after settling down in China.
Creators: Rose is the face of the channel, as the channel is named after her and her first-born son, Anzai. Her husband, children and on occasion other relatives and friends also feature in the videos.
Platform: Rose is pretty consistent with uploading across multiple of her social media at once, and it is clear that she has a big following whether locally in China or internationally.
Genre/Genres: The content is predominantly composed of vlogs on food and lifestyle, centered around the family’s life in China.
Subscribers/Followers: The channel has 2.1 million followers on TikTok, 627,000 subscribers on YouTube, and around 140,000-150,000 followers on Bilibili, Douyin and XiaoHongShu.
Ugandan creator Adikin Rose Mary, nicknamed as Rose online, first started posting on YouTube in 2022, following the success of her Chinese accounts on Bilibili, Douyin and XiaoHongShu. She lived in Uganda up until she met and eventually married her husband, Wu Jianyun, after which she moved to Zhejiang. She learned Mandarin quickly and to this day tells viewers of her journey of adjusting herself in the community. In Zheijiang, she would give birth to her first son, Anzai and later her daughter, Yue. In the beginning, her videos were shorts of 3 to 4 minutes or less, mainly consisting of cooking new food or trying new ingredients. In the coming years, Rose would post her vlogs to a wider audience and they were extremely well-received. She has lived a life in the country and beyond, surrounded by a loving family and community since then. Rose received the Silver Play Button in June of 2023 after reaching 100,000 subscribers and later that year was sponsored by Uganda’s official tourism brand, Explore Uganda, to take her son Anzai around the country, to visit relatives and to vlog their experiences.
Rose’s content feels very episodic. This is seen the most in how the videos are initially presented to the viewer: the titles on each video are self-explanatory (structured like exact sentences rather than video titles), as in they reveal the theme of each video on first glance. They are phrased like life updates to someone close. That does not take away from the content, though, if anything they add to it. Through her videos, Rose depicts not only the way in which she speaks to her husband, relatives and friends, but also how she communicates with herself, treating the camera in front of her as a mirror. As she treks in the woods trying to find the plant “polygonatum” in a video titled “My friend hasn’t been feeling well, I’m just doing what I can to help her,” she talks to the camera about the specifics of harvesting the plant. The addition of breaks and pauses (in the form of B-roll) in between each of her revelations and interactions help with the pacing and make each video feel grounded to reality. This method of filming makes the videos not feel like they’re too rehearsed or scripted. In each video there is a mention or imagery of community, of life in the country. Her most popular video has her cooking for her son Anzai, the title of the video celebrating eight years of living in and being married in China. It has over 6 million views.
Each video is relatively short, averaging from 3 to 8 minutes in length. This helps with attention retention in viewers, but also with maintaining a regular posting schedule, as new videos come out every 1 to 2 days. In this way, viewers are encouraged to tag along with Rose and her family’s life, accompanied by the inviting video titles (as already mentioned above). Her content gaining immense popularity in China has gotten Rose to connect to her roots in Uganda as well, where she donated apparel to students in her old high school in collaboration with the Chinese sportswear brand ANTA.
In 2023, Rose was chosen as a spokesperson for the “Belt and Road” forum in China, where she announced her initiative to connect African and Chinese culinary and agricultural traditions through her content. Considering the jump in followers between the time she received her Play Button and now, that initiative could be judged as a success. Her philanthropy is only part of what makes the channel special, apart from the online fascination with Rose’s existence as a Ugandan woman, skilled chef of Chinese cuisine, and mother to biracial children in rural China.
To a target audience of predominantly women, or at least adults of college or employment age, her and her husband’s past experiences and present daily routines are enlightening. The couple recalls their past often, as seen in a video during Rose’s second pregnancy, where they reminisce about their marriage and humble beginnings. Though Rose has spoken before on the hardships and struggles that she faced in Uganda as well as in the beginning of her life in China, her channel seems to focus more on the positive parts of her life as it develops and progresses, to the point where it’s become much like a family album for viewers to tune in to. Rose seems truly happy among family and friends, and likewise, her close circle seems happy with her around, all of which is a breath of fresh air in content creation of this type (lifestyle and food vlogging).
