Yuzu (birth name Song Zhiyou; often credited on social media as “Song Yuzu”) is Raymond Hou’s (Raymond’s) wife and the co-founder of the “Raymond Thirty” and “柚智夫妻” brands. In Raymond’s business, she has long handled the people-facing areas of community operations, membership, and customer support, complementing Raymond’s focus on products and content production. Yuzu is two years older than Raymond, and they have publicly described their relationship as a “cougar relationship.”
Background and Career Before Meeting Raymond
Yuzu graduated from the Department of Drama at the National Taiwan University of Arts and began her career as a stage actor. At age twenty, she took a leave of absence during college and went alone to Brisbane, Australia, on a working holiday. She also worked in an international internship program at Busch Gardens in the United States and traveled independently in Europe for three months. She describes herself as oscillating between emotion and adventure: she may tear up in a second, but is also willing to try skydiving or sleep in a Spanish train station to save money. When she graduated, she once had an offer to become a flight attendant for Emirates, but ultimately chose to enter internet marketing.
Outside theater, her work shifted toward content and community. She first worked for about two years in content marketing and community operations at a digital-marketing media agency, then went to Beijing to manage a large co-working space for the brand Ucommune as a community manager. She liked discovering potential actors and creators around her, and friends called her an “underground agent.” This thread of building interpersonal connections later developed into her role as Raymond’s manager.
How She Met Raymond
The two met through work in 2017. At the time, Yuzu was responsible for finding instructors at a media agency. Raymond’s content was highly visible, so he made her list; at first she was cautious about an instructor who had achieved a lot as a student. The turning point came when Raymond published an article compiling high-quality online learning websites. Yuzu contacted him because her company’s site was not included. They moved from interactions on Facebook and Instagram to dating. After a period of romantic ambiguity with “him in Tainan and her in Taipei,” Raymond invited her to develop their careers together in Beijing, which became the key moment when they committed to the relationship. Yuzu once described Raymond as “a man who is actually very thoughtful but doesn’t understand social conventions,” a line that became the theme of the “Yuzu Says” segment.1
The couple are restrained in what they share publicly about marriage and family, focusing instead on their joint business and relationship. They married in 2019, planning to develop their careers in Beijing first and hold a banquet after returning to Taiwan. They expected to spend several years in Beijing, but the pandemic brought them back to Taiwan within six months in 2020. This in turn gave rise to the Raymond Thirty podcast and the later company-of-one business (see The 2020 Retreat from Beijing to Taiwan and the Birth of Raymond Thirty).
Her Role in the Brands
Yuzu is the principal writer of the “柚智夫妻” brand story (see 柚智夫妻 YouTube Channel). Starting in 2018, she ran a WeChat public account using a “days-to-go” countdown format, with content about community operations, women in the workplace, travel, and independent thinking. In Raymond Thirty, the “Yuzu Says” segment uses her first-person voice to discuss relationships, emotional intelligence, and how couples get along, filling a gap in Raymond’s content, which focuses more on workplace methods. The two treated the podcast as a product and the community as an accumulating asset, describing themselves as “operators” and listeners as “allies.” In the division of roles, Yuzu has long handled community work, membership, and customer support—areas that require interpersonal sensitivity.
A Complementary Relationship
Yuzu often describes their relationship as complementary and mutually educational: Raymond is direct and focuses on the issue, while she is emotional and attentive to feelings and social conventions. This initially caused friction when they first got together, but they gradually arrived at a shared understanding: “At work we can be direct; in life we have to remember social conventions.”2 She also offers a pragmatic view of partnership: the point is not to find someone with whom one never argues, but someone willing to communicate after an argument and keep moving in the same direction. This attitude of separating “the matter” from “the person” has been foundational to their years of working together.
Further Reading
- Related concepts: Super Individual, Remote Work, and Communication and Expression.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “[Yuzu Says] What Is a Shared Goal for a Couple? For the First Time, I’m Publicly Telling the Story of How I Met Raymond,” podcast, 2020-05-13. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “[Yuzu Says] Are There Benefits to Low Emotional Intelligence? What I Learned from Raymond,” podcast, 2020-10-26. View original ↩