Mainland magic

"But you have to trust yourself and proceed with resilience," he says.

Lee engaged mainland culture through Chinese micro blogs and learned to input pinyin on electronic devices to write the simplified characters used on the mainland.

He kept meeting investors and potential business partners. He even learned Beijing dialect.

Lee cofounded QFPpay, a global mobile payment service, solution and technology provider from China, in 2011.

"I want every transaction to be more convenient and efficient," he says.

The sector has exploded over the past half decade.

The mobile-payment market reached 38 trillion yuan last year－about 50 times that of the United States－compared with less than 1 trillion in 2012, internet-research company iResearch reports.