Even though 27-year-old Quincy resident Mandy Situ is thousands of miles away from her mother in China, the two stay close through regular use of the app WeChat.
“We talk about everything,” said Situ with a giggle, as her mother listened on a WeChat video call. “We can talk every week for like three or four hours, so we cover a lot of topics from food and work, to friends’ updates and family, or just what happened in our lives.”
Situ moved from China to the U.S. for school nearly a decade ago and said she has kept in touch with family back home using the Chinese super-app, which is something like an ApplePay, GroupMe, Uber, FaceTime, Skype and Instagram all rolled into one.
The Chinese-owned WeChat, and the more widely-known TikTok, have both recently come under the sights of the Trump Administration as alleged national security threats, making their futures in the U.S. unclear. While TikTok is an entertainment platform for sharing short videos, WeChat users in the U.S. say losing the app would have more serious consequences, like the loss of the ability to send and receive money and to communicate with loved ones abroad via text, audio and video messages in a centralized platform.
To hear the full story, click on the audio player above.
