How a Bangkok stopover sparked a legacy

The plan was New York. Bags packed, eyes on the concrete jungle. But life had other ideas for Steve Lim, who’s now a lifestyle content creator based in Thailand, the very Good Morning Bangkok! guy on TikTok and founder of Sabai Run club

‘Everything was ready except my visa, so I made a quick stopover in Bangkok. What was meant to be a three-week stay stretched into nearly eight months as my visa dragged on and somewhere along the way Bangkok began to feel like home. I started working remotely for a tech company and ended up building a life here.’

Funny how that happens. One day you’re killing time between flights, the next you’re eight months deep and the street food guy knows your order. You’ve got a favourite coffee spot. That thing you thought was temporary? It’s putting down roots. 

Steve didn’t plan to fall for Bangkok. But somewhere in the waiting, he was living too. The city let him in – so warmly, so familiarly. It started feeling suspiciously like a destination rather than a detour. 

Here’s the story of how he realised home isn’t always where you’re headed, but where you stop running.

‘What do I really want out of life?’ 

It’s a story that starts in New Zealand, in the stillness of lockdown. Steve was working at an investment bank, driving Uber Eats in his spare time and asking himself the kinds of questions that surface when the whole world pauses: 

‘What do I really want out of life?... I didn’t hate my job, but I knew deep down that I wanted something more creative and fulfilling,’ 

he recalls. Music, photography, something undefined – his soul was basically demanding more than this rigid desk. 

So he quit. Packed up his life, set his sights on New York. But then another city pulled harder. Bangkok. Messy, magnetic, impossible not to fall for.

‘Growing up, Bangkok already felt like a second home.’

Steve did move cities. He also returned to one he’d never quite left.

‘Honestly, the transition was seamless for me,’ he says when we ask about settling into Bangkok.

 ‘Growing up, Bangkok already felt like a second home. I’d visited about 10 times, my family have close friends here and many of my schoolmates were Thai!’

Trace the map of his life and his roots don’t follow straight lines. They weave across Southeast Asia, with Bangkok appearing again and again.

Steve is a Chinese-New Zealander with Cambodian-born Chinese parents. His mother lived in Vietnam for years, his father relocated to Thailand after the Cambodian civil war. At home, they spoke Teochew, the same dialect that hums through Chinese-Thai families across the city.

Language became the bridge. ‘Many of my friendships now are rooted in that mix,’ Steve tells us. ‘I even picked up the nickname Zek, which means uncle in Teochew. A lot of the conversations I have with my friends are a combination of Tinglish and Teochew!’

There’s a lightness in how he talks about the easy code-switching between Tinglish and his mother tongue. It’s the sound of belonging, unforced and familiar.

‘Compared to New Zealand, where I often felt like an outsider despite living most of my life there,’ 

Steve says, 

‘Bangkok feels like a place where I truly belong. I blend in here and culturally, it just feels more relatable.’

Not an outsider looking in. Just home.

‘When I first moved here, friends back home couldn’t understand why.’

Bangkok can have a one-sided image – seen as a stopover city, a place you pass through or use as a launchpad to ‘find yourself,’ whether that means partying or something deeper. Steve knows this perception well:

‘When I first moved here, friends back home couldn’t understand why. Their reaction was basically: Why Bangkok? Isn’t it just parties and drugs? That stereotype hurt, because I knew the city had so much more to offer.’ 

He’s spent the years since proving them wrong – not with arguments, but with community. 

Which brings us to an interesting question: Steve’s now the founder of what’s been called Asia’s largest weekly social run club Sabai Run Club. Is that success because Bangkokians are just naturally friendly and eager to connect? Or is there something deeper happening here – the way city people actively seek out genuine connection as an antidote to urban loneliness?

‘I lived pretty impulsively.’

When Steve first landed in Bangkok, he was restless. 

‘I lived pretty impulsively,’ 

he admits. 

Fresh into a tech job he wasn’t sure would stick, moving every couple of weeks, trying to soak up as much of the city as possible.

Community eventually found him through touch rugby. Coming from New Zealand, rugby was in his blood and even though touch rugby is niche here, it gave him a tribe.

‘That’s the thing, you just need one common interest to open doors.’

He dabbled with apps, of course, but those connections felt fleeting. What he really craved was something more intentional, more rooted. And that would eventually spark what became Sabai Run Club.

Steve’s ‘Sabai’ state of mind

In July 2024, Steve and two friends, Emiko and Maris, kicked off what they thought would be a modest accountability experiment.

‘None of us liked running, but we thought maybe if we did it together, we’d grow to enjoy it.’

You can catch the full back story here.

Still, there was a bigger gap they wanted to fill. Bangkok had no shortage of nightlife, but where could people go for genuine connection that didn’t involve alcohol or staying out until 3am? The answer: morning runs.

Their motto was simple and cheeky – 

‘We run a little and socialise a lot.’ 

From that, Sabai Run Club was born.

What happened next was extraordinary. More than 22,000 people ended up joining their Sunday runs. Strangers meet at dawn and become friends before breakfast. Tourists now fly in just to experience what participants call ‘the magic.’

‘I often sit at the top of the stairs before runs just to take it all in,’ Steve says. ‘It's a beautiful sight.’

But the success of the club isn’t just about timing or riding a global running trend. It's about filling a gap Bangkok didn’t know it had. ‘Bangkokians are naturally warm and curious, but I think the city was missing spaces for organic connection,’ Steve reflects. 

That natural warmth collided with a collective hunger for something real, something that didn’t feel transactional. Sabai Run Club became one of the answers.

‘Oh, you're the good morning Bangkok guy!’

Steve was also deliberate about keeping his own profile separate from what they were building. ‘With Sabai Run Club, I was intentional about not making it about me. I didn’t want the community to grow off my personal popularity. In the early days, people would turn up saying, 

‘Oh, you’re the Good Morning Bangkok guy!’ 

but for Steve, the club was never about him – it was about people connecting, sharing the city and making it theirs.

It’s not the most ‘strategic’ approach, but it’s the one that feels right.’ And slowly, the narrative is shifting. Messages pour in from people discovering a different side of Bangkok for the first time. ‘People message me saying: I didn't know Bangkok had such wholesome, active communities,’ he shares. 

The city Steve loves is finally getting the story it deserves. 

But the runs? They’re just the beginning. ‘Sabai Run Club started as a simple Sunday jog, but it’s grown into a movement. We have a lot of exciting plans for Bangkok’s wellness community – let’s just say we’re exploring ways to make recovery as fun as running itself.’

‘I didn’t want to be seen as cringe. Eventually I got over that.’

Navigating public recognition in Asia has been its own education for Steve.

‘In New Zealand, people are casual around celebrities, but in Asia it’s the opposite. When I first started making content, I’d get DMs from strangers saying they’d just spotted me at a restaurant or shopping mall and it was overwhelming.’

Sharing relationships online created anxiety before he learnt to set boundaries.

‘Over time, I’ve learnt what I want to share and what to keep private and that’s made things easier,’ 

he reflects. 

Still, he considers himself small-time compared to peers navigating much larger audiences: 

‘I still consider myself a small-time creator compared to peers like Joyce Sin or Mike Yu. I can only imagine what they experience!’

His content spans platforms differently. TikTok is where authenticity felt safest from the start – 

‘It felt like the place I could be myself, but I didn’t share that content on Instagram for a long time because I was worried about being judged by people back home. I didn’t want to be seen as cringe. Eventually I got over that.’ 

Instagram is his digital diary: cafes, fashion, friends, runs. 

YouTube offers something deeper: conversations, day-in-the-life moments, the full picture. 

Together, they capture someone living intentionally across economics, content creation, tech work and modelling – a chaotic portfolio that somehow makes sense.

‘It’s chaotic at times, but I enjoy it. No two days are the same and that keeps me excited,’ 

he says. 

Once, he had a boxing match one day and a modelling gig the next, cast as a high school jock. ‘They gave me boxing gloves and makeup to make me look like I’d just been in a fight– it was perfect timing.’ A perfect collision of worlds really. 

These days, he leans into imperfection. 

‘People connect more with unpolished vlogs and real moments than with curated perfection. That’s where the authenticity comes from. It’s real life, not a highlight reel.’

‘The only certainty in life is death.’

For years, Steve carried a timeline: by 28, he should have relationships, career, finances figured out. But life kept teaching him otherwise.

‘The truth is, the only certainty in life is death and that thought has always pushed me to ask: if I left this world tomorrow, what impact would I leave behind?’

Every Sunday at Sabai Run Club, he watches people from different ages, backgrounds and abilities come together organically. ‘There’s something magical about seeing those bonds form in such an organic way.’ 

Messages arrive weekly, online and in person, thanking him and the team for creating space that matters. ‘Those reminders never get old and they mean everything to us.’

We ask if he has any words for anyone considering a big move. Steve says: 

‘I’ll admit I’m biased, because I’ve always done things a bit unconventionally: moving cities, switching industries, taking risks. But I do it because I don’t want to live with regret. Try things. Do things. Life is short. The worst outcome is living with a long list of what-ifs.’

The man headed for New York ended up creating a life here, a beautiful one for himself and others – not because Bangkok was easier, but because his belonging here isn’t borrowed – it’s built. 

Steve Lim made a home in the city that reflects his versatile soul, in Sunday mornings spent building community, in the choice to live without regret.