Reporters／AN-QI ZHENG,JIA-YING YOU,CHAO-TZU CHEN
“We are the most familiar outsiders of the community.”
That motto has won him Taipei City’s Best Community Manager award four times in six years from 2018 to 2023. But he was barred from participating in the contest thereafter. That regret was compensated when he was awarded in 2024 Taiwan’s Golden Award for Excellence Community Manager, the first ever this award was granted.
Huang Qi-Chang, who has predominated the “Taipei Excellent Apartment Building Evaluation” competitions, is the community manager of the Fashion Star apartment complex located in the Datung District, one of the oldest areas in Taipei.
“I’ll keep doing this job until I can’t do it anymore.” And now, he is turning himself into a web celebrity, regularly providing advice on virtually everything he has learned from his work over the years to anyone who wants to know about housing caring.
A Life Spared and Reborn
But, he has not been in this profession for too long though he looks like a natural-born housing manager given his credentials. Instead, he was a businessman in traditional Chinese medicines, helping out with his long-run family business in importing and trading Chinese medicines, only to change his career route after the unexpected life change.
Back 20 years ago in 2005, Huang suffered a life-threatening heart attack and was admitted to the ICU because of nonstop overwork. “I realized that it is useless to make more money because I don’t have life to spend it on.”
Huang’s family has been in the Chinese medicine business for generations. He effectively succeeded the family business in 1990, traveling frequently to-and-fros between Taiwan and Mainland China, trading wholesale medicinal herbs. Huang explained that, in 2002, during the SARS pandemic, Chinese medicine became a popular treatment, catapulting sales and demands. That also dramatically doubled up his workload. “I worked from 7 a.m. and only got home at 11 p.m.,” Huang said. Working six days a week, commonly for 14 hours a day, eventually led to his health breakdown.
In 2005, one night Huang felt unbearable chest pain and instinctively took a taxi to the hospital.
When he collapsed and fell ill at that moment, his wife, Zeng Jia-en, was right by his side. “I was so worried about him. I cried during work and cried after work. As soon as I was off work, I took the train from Xizhi to Taipei Veterans General Hospital to see him,” Zeng recalled. “Those days were so difficult and horrifying for the whole family.”
Huang said he lost consciousness before arriving at the hospital, and doctors had to revive him with four electric shocks. Through their unremitting effort, the then-36-year-old former Chinese medicine trader survived. He spent seven days in the ICU and another eight days in a regular ward. “God spared me. The one extra electric shot given by the caring doctor saved my life.”
His wife nodded, “I feel that God has really been kind to us and brought him back to life. The people around us at that time were also very kind.”
Huang noted that he now has three stents in his heart and needs to return to the hospital every three months for follow-up checkups, as well as take medication regularly.
After being discharged, he couldn’t return to work immediately and became addicted to online gaming to cope with his loss of purpose.
Rediscovery and Determination toward a New Career
In 2011, after six years of gradual recovery, Huang realized that his life was becoming unmanageable and that he had lost his connection to society. He decided to make a change, returning to work and trying to regain a normal life. At first, he returned to his roots, taking a cleaning job at a traditional Chinese medicine clinic. “Being out of society for so long, I lost confidence and had to slowly adjust,” he added.
Refusing to settle at the bottom of the social echelon, Huang switched a career a year later.
His wife persuaded him to work as a security guard at Stanford Community which has 70 households located in the southern area of Taipei City. It was not smooth at first. “I wanted to quit the next day because I felt so frustrated. My career changed from being a boss to becoming a security guard, a job I once looked down upon.” With her encouragement, Huang got promoted to be a team leader after two months. At the same time, he learned about the roles of a community manager. To become one, he had to pass an administrative management exam, for which he studied using his free time. “I had no experience, so I learned on the job by observing other managers.”
His wife said he carried that little examination textbook all the time even when going to the bathroom.
He successfully passed the exam, and after three months of on-job training, he officially became a community manager at “Geneva” complex, which has 54 much larger two-story-unit households across the alley in 2014.
Responsibilities and Challenges of Community Manager
In 2017, Huang made another move, taking over as the community manager of a large community, “Fashion Star” complex, with 172 big households in Taipei City’s most traditional Datong District. His job involved managing, maintaining, repairing, and carrying out tasks to keep the community operating smoothly.
Ms. Hsia, a resident, said, “We all know each other very well. He’s our good friend, just like a family.”
Ms. Hsia is appreciative of Huang’s immediate assistance on several occasions. She said, one night the community’s water supply system unexpectedly broke down in the late night. Upon receiving the call, Huang immediately rushed to the community at 11 p.m. to resolve the problem, staying until 2 a.m. when it was repaired.
Gratefully, Ms. Hsia said, “Saturdays and Sundays are supposed to be his days off, yet we often still see him around. And whenever there’s an emergency, like when the elevator breaks down, he’s always there as soon as we call him.”
But Huang thought he’s not just the community’s manager; he sees himself as part of the community. He builds a close tie with the residents as he considers the community his second home. Speaking with his usual easy-going manner, Huang said, “he is just lending a helping hand—it is no big deal.”
Huang also explained that after taking care of the basic tasks, he focused on the higher envision and goal of “community building and community governance to help effectively connect the complex residents with the larger community, setting me apart from other managers.”
In addition to maintenance, community managers normally work under the aegis of the community complex’s management committee. Huang said that he once had disagreements with the committee over maintenance expenses, but after continuously proving his professionalism and dedication, he gained the trust of the residents, making operations much smoother ever since. “We are the most familiar outsiders of the community. ” Huang proudly emphasized the importance of mutual trust between the manager and the residents.
“I want to find a sense of accomplishment in my work,” Huang said.
Even though the management was improving, he didn’t rest on his laurels. He believes that a community manager’s job is vast, and it’s important to keep looking for new elements and turn ideas into actions. He has been driven by a sense of pursuit of excellence and spent eight years at Fashion Star. As a large-size community manager, he had won the Best Community Manager award four times in 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 along with several other community responsibility awards. He has even been invited to serve as a judge for the annual competition because of complaints from other property managers that he had been monopolizing the competition award. “I’ve already achieved everything in this industry,” he joked, smiling.
Expand Frontiers and Share Knowledge
Maintaining such a high level of performance is not easy. By chance, Huang teamed up with Xu Yuan-De, an instructor from the Ministry of the Interior’s Apartment Building Advisory Service, to launch a video channel where they regularly film videos together about property management.
Huang and Xu met at a conference and quickly hit it off and decided to start a show together and make videos. The show, “The Property Management Classroom,” officially aired its first video on Oct. 12, 2024. Their original intention was to share knowledge and offer advice on property management.
They insist on an extremely simple production style—spending no money, doing no post-production or editing, and relying solely on mobile phone filming. Even the props are donated by viewers. The videos are usually unscripted and unrehearsed, featuring a dialogue style between the two co-hosts similar to comic cross-talks, using opposition, conflict, and humor to enhance the videos’ appeal and interactivity.
“There was a fan from Kaohsiung who said he was going to participate in an Excellent Apartment Competition in that city and happened to come across our show. He ended up watching every single episode,” said Xu.
Seeing the comments under their videos, they felt deeply that their effort had not been in vain and were very moved that the knowledge shared in the videos was being accurately conveyed. “As long as our health allows it, we’ll keep going because there are new and endless issues to explore every day in the field of property management.”
Huang explained that the purpose was not only to achieve a sense of personal accomplishment but to give back to society. He also collaborates with public agencies to produce educational content, combining self-growth with social responsibility. “Maybe one day, I will have a new career as a web celebrity.”
Having worked in this community for over eight years, Huang said, “I’ve often met people who helped me grow quickly along the way.” Success, in his view, is not achieved by one person but by many factors coming together. He said he enjoys finding joy in his work and approaches challenges with a problem-solving attitude.
“I often wonder if I could have achieved what I have now had I not stepped into this profession and worked from the scratch.”
“I’ll keep going until I can’t do it anymore,” Huang said confidently of the future.
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