Editor's note: As Shenzhen prepares to host the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in November, we are inviting young people from around the world to share their views on the city and on APEC. In this contribution, Lana Abramova, originally from Russia, shares her Shenzhen story. She is a content creator who has lived in China for seven years — the past five in Shenzhen.

Most cities talk about the future. Shenzhen lets you ride in it.

I have lived in China for seven years and in Shenzhen for five, since October 2021, and this city is the reason I started my blog. To me, Shenzhen is the most unusual place on Earth.

New technology appears here almost every month, yet you can swim in the sea in the morning and hike a mountain in the afternoon. I wanted to share that with people who had never been here, and to be a small channel between Shenzhen and the rest of the world.

Since then, I have followed one simple rule: whenever something new appears in the city, I try to film it. That is what my audience comes for.

It is harder than it sounds, because the future does not arrive here with fireworks. It slips into daily life so quietly that within a few months it feels completely normal. Looking back over my years in the city, three moments stand out.

The first is a sound, or rather the absence of one. When my family comes to visit, the first thing they notice, even before the skyline, is the silence of the traffic. Buses glide up to the stop without a roar, taxis pull away with a soft electric hum, and you can hear birds on a main road in a city of more than 17 million people.

Shenzhen was the first major city in the world to run its entire public bus fleet on electricity, and its taxis followed soon after. I stopped noticing it years ago. My family never did.

Shenzhen is also home to BYD, and as a BYD ambassador, I have seen this change up close: I was one of the first people to ride in the Yangwang U9, the BYD supercar that set a world speed record.

The second moment was my first ride in a robotaxi. I booked it on my phone, a car pulled up with nobody in the driver's seat, and for the whole trip the steering wheel turned by itself while I tried to film and not look too amazed.

When I posted the video, the comments filled up with questions from people abroad. Is it real? Is it safe? Can a tourist use it? For many of them, driverless cars are still a headline. In Shenzhen they are simply another way to get home.

The third is the sky. Shenzhen is home to some of the world's best-known drone makers, and the city has even given this new frontier a name: the low-altitude economy.

In some parks you can order a meal or a coffee and watch it arrive by drone a few minutes later, landing on a delivery tower like a small, very punctual bird. For a creator it is a gift: a scene that looks like science fiction, filmed on an ordinary afternoon with families picnicking underneath.

What connects these moments is speed. People in China talk about "Shenzhen speed", and after five years here I understand it as more than fast construction. It is the speed at which the new becomes normal.

A technology I film as a novelty in spring is part of my neighbors' routine by autumn. In Huaqiangbei, the electronics market where an idea can become a prototype in days, you can find gadgets that have not yet reached shops abroad. For a storyteller, this is both exciting and humbling: in Shenzhen, you have to keep looking, because the city changes faster than you can post about it.

Over these years, I have changed together with the city. Before moving to China, I worked as a journalist in Russia and lived for a while in the United States and Spain.

In China, I have spent the last five years working as a content creator and marketing specialist for Chinese companies whose customers are foreigners. It taught me how things really get done here: in Mandarin, through relationships, and at Shenzhen speed. The blog began as something I did after work, a way to share the city I was falling in love with. As Shenzhen kept reinventing itself, so did I.

I speak four languages and could have built a life in many places, but I chose China, because it is one of the safest and most comfortable places I have ever lived.

Once, I left my laptop in a taxi. I had not even called the taxi company when they called me themselves, and I had my laptop back the same day. I make my videos in English, so that people anywhere in the world can see the China I live in, not only the one they imagine.

And the city answered back.

The more I filmed, the more people watched. My most popular video, a short clip that begins with the words "I live in Shenzhen", has been viewed around 1.5 million times, shared about 40,000 times, and today more than 50,000 people follow me on Chinese and international platforms.

Shenzhen opened its doors, too: brands and companies began inviting me to work with them, journalists asked me for interviews, and I became a "Shenzhen Ambassador". About a year ago I left my office job to work for myself full time, and that is when my blog really took off. This year alone I have worked on more than 40 collaborations with brands.

Today I also run a small marketing agency. I help factories and brands that are looking for international clients build their social media, and I find creators from abroad who come to Shenzhen to film videos about their products.

When those creators arrive, I show them the city, too: the silent streets, the robotaxis, the sea and the mountains. Shenzhen makes this kind of work possible. Here, the brands I work with, the factories behind them and the creators I invite are often just a short drive apart, and in a city where everyone is building something, people are always ready to try a new idea.

In a way, I am still doing what I started with: being a bridge between Shenzhen and the world, now for businesses as well as for my followers. Most of the people who watch my videos have never been to China, and many still picture it through old images and secondhand stories. Every video of a silent street, a driverless car or a drone over a park is a small invitation to come and see for themselves.

Seeing it in person changes everything. When my mother came to visit me, I filmed her reaction when she arrived, and for a while all she could say was "wow, wow, wow." Today, my followers often write to me asking for help planning a route through Guangdong and Hong Kong, and I am always happy to help.

Shenzhen is also my gateway to the rest of Guangdong. I often travel with Trip.com, and this month I joined their Discover Guangdong trip, which took us to different corners of the province, from the watchtowers of Kaiping to the red cliffs of Danxia Mountain.

I am editing those videos as I write this, because I want to tell my followers not only about Shenzhen but about the whole of this beautiful province. I want even more people to discover Shenzhen and Guangdong for themselves.

When Shenzhen became a special economic zone in 1980, it was a small border town.

Today, it is a place where the future is tested in public, on ordinary streets, by ordinary people on their way to work. This November, Shenzhen will host the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, and the whole city is getting ready to welcome guests from across the Asia-Pacific. I hope many of them will look beyond the meeting rooms and see the Shenzhen I see every day.

My life has become inseparable from this city, and that is exactly why I love it so much. Five years in, it still surprises me, and as long as it does, I will keep filming. If you want to see what Shenzhen comes up with next, come along with me.