Born in 1980, His Life Went ‘From Fired Up to Burned Out’ | Housing and Our Lives ⑨

A house is the largest commodity a person can buy, and it is also a witness to the changes in an individual's life. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread, to see what happened in the years behind us.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it. Most of the story was written by the generation before.

What we hope to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a faith in progress and development; a belief that society will keep giving individuals better and bigger space; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be won, and that we will get there in the end.

These are, in fact, universal values.

When a word like "history" is set down in front of us, grand narratives tend to bury it. We hope to use interviews at the micro level to sort out what we can.

We are starting this record with housing, the thing people watch most closely in their own lives.

Jia Jia was born in 1980 in Luonan, a small city of 450,000 people in southeastern Shaanxi. His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an editor at the local Radio and Television Bureau. His father wanted him inside the system; Jia went the other way every time. He quit the Radio and Television Bureau after a few days, convinced that if he stayed, his life would end up as gray as the bureau's gray building. His father wanted him to win the Fan Changjiang Journalism Award, to "go deep into the fields and report on ordinary people's hardships." Jia preferred writing the kind of political commentary his father thought was "too dangerous."

In seven years in Beijing, Jia moved seven times. He was editor-in-chief of Tencent's Dajia (《大家》), and an editor at GQ, Oriental Outlook and Phoenix Weekly. He sums up those years in journalism as going "from fired up to burned out."

At the end of the seventh year he bought his first apartment in Beijing, with a down payment of 400,000 yuan. But because he believed one point of a life was knowing "your relationship to the world, and where the country you live in is headed," in 2011 he moved to Hong Kong and joined iSun Affairs, covering Chinese politics as it happened.

His Hong Kong room was far smaller than the Beijing one — under 30 square meters — and the toilet got wet every time he showered. Yet it was there that he began asking how "a godforsaken island without three feet of level ground turned into one of Asia's leading international cities." His answer: an "invisible force," a sense of freedom and a sense of order.

Over the interview Jia said a lot of things in this vein, including that "journalism is the so-called fourth estate." Other things he flagged himself: "You probably can't publish this anyway." He was right.

But he had also reached a conclusion: he could not change the masses, only the elite. "Ordinary people are just blind," he said. The public trusts the facts you give them, not your opinions — and that, he thinks, is the bind news organizations everywhere are in today.

Today Jia runs a company, an immigration agency. It offers Chinese clients what it calls a "complete solution for life overseas," from picking an immigration program to services after they emigrate. Its official account pushes out pieces about culture abroad and the lives of Chinese overseas every day, and a large share of its followers are Jia's own fans, who then become his clients. Jia calls this his fans paying him an "IQ tax" and a "sentiment tax."

He is applying for a U.S. green card. He calls himself a Chinese "intellectual."

What follows is Jia Jia's account in his own words. It is one way to get to know him:

"My Family"

My dad's education was cut short by the Cultural Revolution — he was one of the "old three classes," and missed the restoration of the college entrance exam. He went into the army, and after he was demobilized he moved to the city and got a job at the Radio and Television Bureau, as an editor at the county radio station. He finished high school; my mom had a junior college degree. The way I remember it, my parents were both minor intellectuals of a sort. They liked books, and we had a lot of them at home. I didn't have many toys as a kid, just a toy gun, because things were tight back then, so when I had nothing to do I'd pull books off the shelf.

I'm probably one of the few people born in the 1980s who can still use a four-corner dictionary — back then it was books plus one four-corner dictionary, and that was it. My choosing the humanities later, in middle school and college, is inseparable from all the literature and social science I read as a boy. Ever since, I've believed a room without a bookshelf is an incomplete room.

Until high school we lived in a small town called Luonan, out past Xi'an. That's where I grew up. As I remember it we moved three or four times, from a single room to a small suite. Both my parents were public employees, so whenever someone above them retired and handed back a bigger place, they'd move in. We always lived in housing assigned by the work unit. In 1993 my dad laid the foundation himself and built us a house, and that's when I got a room of my own.

Everywhere we'd lived before was small — forty or fifty square meters at the most. With a room of my own I suddenly had a space of just over 20 square meters. A bed, a desk; the bathroom was downstairs. I did every practice paper for the college entrance exam in there. That room is where I got into college. Sometimes I'd sneak cigarettes behind my dad's back — I learned to smoke in my early teens — and after I left for school in the morning he'd clean my room and turn up cigarette butts and dirty novels under my pillow.

It was funny at the time. My sister and I are close in age. She liked Andy Lau; I was a Vivian Chow fan. We each went out and bought posters and slapped them up all over our rooms. My dad didn't understand idol worship back then. He walked into my room, saw Vivian Chow everywhere, and assumed he'd walked into my sister's. Then he checked my sister's room, found Andy Lau everywhere, and assumed that one was mine. We'd each put up the other one's idol.

My dad was stunned. "How did this happen? What is this baffling thing you two have done? Swap rooms!"

My sister didn't stay much longer — she got into Peking University in 1996 and left. I kept living there until 1998. After that I never lived with my parents again.

"Seven Years Drifting in Beijing"

I came to Beijing in 2002 and didn't have a place of my own until 2009. I moved seven times in Beijing, and that really is the bitter experience of Beijing's drifters.

Before I came to Beijing I thought I was going to be rich, you know? I didn't even know what my salary would be. My sister was in Beijing then, and she rented me a place in the south of the city for 900 yuan a month, right by Wanshou Park, in a spot called Banbuqiao, which used to have Beijing's most famous prison next door. I lasted a month before I moved, because I went to report for duty at Guangming Daily and was told: "Your salary is 1,300 yuan a month."

Guangming Daily is a Party paper and I was a fresh undergraduate, so that was the lowest starting salary there was. I moved into a company dorm after that, three young guys to a room, all colleagues from the paper. The dorm was in Taipingqiao, a two-bedroom apartment; the second bedroom had already been claimed by a colleague from Sichuan who moved in first, so a colleague from Hebei and I split the master bedroom, a little over ten square meters. We set up two small beds side by side with a curtain down the middle, like a hospital ward. The slightest movement of the curtain was loud, so I eventually bought a row of bookshelves and used it to split the room, leaving a small gap where I hung the curtain — a wall made of books.

Then something unfortunate happened: my roommate got a girlfriend and started bringing her back to stay. My own girlfriend was in another city, and listening to that every night really wasn't fun, you know? I thought what they were doing wasn't right, but what could I do? That was Beijing — everyone's salary was low, so you shared an apartment, and that was that.

I moved in March 2003. We found a three-bedroom apartment nearby, one room each. The company paid 1,800 yuan and the rent was 2,300, so we covered the extra 500 ourselves. But I finally had my own door, better soundproofing and my own space — about nine square meters.

I put in an oversized bed, 2.2 by 2 meters. Just inside the door was a TV wall; opposite were a window and windowsill, right up against a desk and bookshelf, with the bed in the middle. Nothing around the bed was more than a foot away from it; to reach my computer desk I had to turn sideways and squeeze past. Sitting on the bed, my hands landed on the desk at exactly the right height to work, and the bed was exactly the right height too. There wasn't even room for a chair.

What did that look like? One big bed, and the moment you walked in you had to get on it. When a friend wanted to tell me something they didn't want the other roommates to hear, they'd come to my room. The second they arrived I'd say, "Shoes off, please get on the bed." Everyone got on the bed first, men and women alike, and we'd sit there and talk.

In March 2004 I moved out of the shared apartment and started living alone. It was right on Chang'an Avenue. The location was superb — I watched the traffic on Chang'an Avenue every day. It sat directly across from the Military Museum, in the housing compound of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry, No. 12 Fuxing Road. Open my door and you looked straight at the Military Museum's spire; every day I saw the cannons, the planes, the tourists, the lines.

That apartment had no living room — a master bedroom, a second bedroom, and the living-room function tucked into one side of the master bedroom. In the second bedroom I put a small single bed and turned the place into a study, bookshelves on two walls and a huge desk, 2 meters by 1.2, because I was working as a reporter then.

I lived there until July 2005, when three of us at Oriental Outlook decided we might as well share a place. My girlfriend hadn't graduated yet and I wanted to save money, and the other two had already picked out a dorm in Muxidi — 2,100 yuan, three bedrooms — so I went along.

I lasted one month in that apartment, because those two had terrible hygiene habits. I'd regularly find the toilet unflushed and paper thrown on the floor. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, and both of them took forever in there in the morning; there was no competing. I swore to myself I would never share an apartment again, even if it meant admitting I'd been had.

In July I moved to Qiaojianli, originally the compound of the Ministry of Civil Engineering, later renamed the housing compound of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. I was in unit 408 of that building; Chai Jing was in 1708, which made her my upstairs neighbor with the same floor plan.

My girlfriend was about to graduate by then, and later the two of us split the rent. We lived in Qiaojianli for over a year, and in the summer of 2006 we moved into the CCTV compound — people called it the "Color TV Residential Community" — which was essentially CCTV's dormitory housing. That is the place I lived longest, and the one I remember best.

The apartment was under 60 square meters: two bedrooms and a living room. The living room was tiny, barely distinguishable from the hallway, big enough for a dining table and nothing else. The bedroom had two large windows; the bed faced east, the sofa faced south, and to the south you looked out over the roofs of the CCTV compound. In the big bedroom I had a desk, a sofa, a big bed and a rosewood bookshelf I loved, which I'd used since 2003 and only threw out once I'd bought my own apartment.

That apartment matters to me for two reasons. First, I lived there longest, more than three years. Second, it's where I lived through the March 14 unrest, the Wenchuan earthquake, the Olympics, the tainted milk powder scandal, Charter 08 and more. On the night of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony I took my parents to watch. On the night of the Wenchuan earthquake it rained in the disaster zone but not in Beijing. I kept refreshing the Tianya forum, where a user in Chengdu posted updates without stopping; I sat in the living room wanting to cry and unable to, stifled and heartsick.

While I was living there I moved to Phoenix Weekly to cover Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. In 2008 I went to Taiwan to cover the presidential election. I remember this clearly: I brought back something signed by Ma Ying-jeou and put it on the bookshelf, and my girlfriend said, "What is this junk?" and threw it out. Those things were such novelties then. I hauled back a whole bag of little Taiwanese flags and campaign material of every kind, thinking they held lessons for China's democratization and were worth keeping. She threw out nearly all of it.

North of the Color TV Residential Community was Yuyuantan Park, and I liked walking there back then. You basically can't find a place like that in the city now, because the best locations in Beijing are all held by the state ministries. My cousin is inside the system, on China's manned space program, and lived in the space administration's compound. His work unit was on the north side of Yuyuantan and I was on the south side, so while I lived there we saw each other fairly often. After I moved I barely saw him again — partly our values, partly that it just felt far.

"My Dad Couldn't Understand My Way of Thinking"

My cousin doesn't have to worry about a thing. His housing and transport are almost entirely covered by the state, and on top of that his is a special department. All my other male cousins are inside the system; I'm the only one outside it. My father thinks I have a rebellious streak. I simply won't stay inside the system.

When I was at Guangming Daily and Xinhua, my dad was thrilled, because he was in propaganda work himself and thought those two carried real weight. When I went to Phoenix Weekly he thought it was so-so, and GQ he found harder still to understand. I told him, "Condé Nast is the number one magazine group in the world, okay?" My dad said: "Who's heard of it? Who's read it?"

My dad wanted me to become a famous reporter. What he hoped for was that I'd win a Fan Changjiang Journalism Award; we had plenty of anthologies of Fan Changjiang Award winners at home. His whole understanding of journalism was Fan Changjiang. My dad is deeply a man of the system, an old-school journalist and an old Party member. He believed in going deep into the fields, reporting ordinary people's hardships, and then writing a piece that changed their livelihoods, that transformed life for some place or some class of people — iron shoulders bearing moral duty, a deft hand writing the essay, as the saying goes. His idea of journalism was those star reporters of the 1980s: Liu Binyan, Qian Gang…

My dad's greatest regret is that after college I took the civil service exam, placed second in Jiangsu Province, and got a post at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in Beijing. I worked there a few days and never went back. Within those few days I felt my whole life would turn as gray as that building. I had nothing to do all day but gather the day's briefings for my superiors. The Administration's building was laid out like a figure eight — a ring on the outside with another ring inside it, so two courtyards. I worked in the gray building in the corner of the first courtyard, and the whole place felt gloomy.

A year after I left, the Administration allocated housing to everyone from my intake year, right by Fuxingmen, on the Second Ring Road. For the next ten years, every time my dad passed Fuxingmen he'd point at that building and say: "Look. If you'd stuck it out, you'd be living there."

I later bought an apartment in Beijing for 1.25 million yuan, with a down payment of 400,000. My dad couldn't understand my thinking on this. What was my thinking? That your present circumstances should be earned by your own effort, and that the effort has to line up with your values and your position. You can't say, "I'm a hitman, I made money killing people and bought a house" — how would you live in it with an easy mind? So what was my effort? Writing stories, writing columns, making money on news commentary, over and over. I wanted a market solution.

My parents spent their whole lives at one work unit. They had doubts about market solutions — they thought it was unstable, and asked, "Why do you keep changing jobs?" I said, "Isn't it a good thing if every switch gets me two or three thousand yuan more a month?" They asked: "Where's your personnel file? Where's your social insurance? Where's your pension?"

"That Sense of Order and Freedom"

I went to Hong Kong in 2011 and lived in two places there. The first was North Point. In Beijing I was forever hearing people sing red songs, and then I got to Hong Kong and found people singing red songs at night there too. There was a small plaza downstairs, and every day someone would sing "Dear Chairman Mao, may you live ten thousand years." I asked around and — damn — it was a DAB district, the pro-Beijing party, full of old leftists.

There was something else interesting downstairs: an unremarkable bus stop sign. Guess what was written on it? Fuzhou. Chaozhou. The long-distance cross-border coaches stopped right there. You could board a bus outside my building and ride it straight to Fuzhou. That was the first time I grasped how close Hong Kong and the mainland are.

The room I lived in was 320 square feet, just under 30 square meters. It was empty when I moved in, so I bought a full set of furniture. I read, wrote and cooked in that little room. The kitchen was so small it was a real nuisance, and the bathroom was tiny too — the kind where showering is guaranteed to soak the toilet.

The apartment was small, but there was something in it you couldn't see. You could feel Hong Kong's particular sense of order and freedom, unconstrained.

Hong Kong's architecture is a jumble of everything, run-down shantytowns included, but that jumble is exactly the product of a hundred-odd years of liberalized capital. At least it's private property, which feels more solid. The mainland's 70-year land-use rights have always bothered me. Everything in Hong Kong has a sense of rules. My lease with my landlord ran two years — one year rolling, one year fixed — and the rent couldn't be raised in either of them. In Beijing, a landlord might well raise the rent every six months with no warning at all. And in Hong Kong a tenant has the same rights as an owner: your kids can go to school in that school district. If you rent, you automatically join the building's body of owners, and any significant decision about the building has to be discussed with the tenants.

Behind my building was a street called Marble Road — sewage running everywhere, street stalls and wet markets of every kind, and some nights you'd walk past and smell the blood from slaughtered chickens. At two in the morning, cleaners hosed the sewage off the street with thick water cannons. Downstairs there was also a Jockey Club hall, and some nights you could hear the cheering below when the numbers came in; in the morning there were hawkers calling out, children crying, garbage trucks sweeping…

That kind of life felt real — down to earth, as we'd say now. It's not like being in Central, staying at the Courtyard Marriott, where you see only Hong Kong's most glamorous, most photographed face. All that dazzle and neon isn't the real thing.

At night as I slept, ships came in through Lei Yue Mun to Victoria Harbour with their long horns going, "wooo, wooo, wooo, wooo," sometimes for five minutes. Sometimes I'd see a beautiful cruise ship more than ten stories tall; standing at my window I'd watch this enormous thing cross the harbor. Sometimes I'd use binoculars to look at the people on board. It was quite something.

My windowsill was big, so I'd sit on it with a cup of coffee and watch the sunset — several times the whole sky over Victoria Harbour turned purple, or a deep reddish brown. It's gone now; that plot of land was sold off two years ago at the highest price ever.

Victoria Harbour was full of life, but was I part of that life? I used to say half and half. I tried to fit in, observing even as I tried to belong. After work in the evening my bus stopped at North Point Pier, which was lined with seafood stalls — you could take in everything at a glance. I'd buy six queen scallops for 12 Hong Kong dollars and take them upstairs. Scallops with soy sauce and shredded ginger, a fish steamed for a few minutes as soon as I got home and doused in black bean sauce: that was dinner. That struck me as a very Hong Kong, very local way to eat.

Going to Tsim Sha Tsui or Kwun Tong, I usually didn't take a bus or the MTR across the harbor. I'd take the ferry from North Point Pier, ten minutes and done. The ferry was filthy, decades old and worn, and full of vivid smells — fish, dog, chain metal, seawater and so on…

In that setting I felt every organ in my body switch on. The moment you stepped ashore you smelled the seafood, and you could tell what kind of fish it was by smell alone. Fishermen and locals would buy white fish with few bones straight from the market, scrape off the scales with a knife and toss the scraps aside to feed the dogs — scenes I hardly ever saw in Beijing.

A city with a harbor like that, water like that, feels alive, feels three-dimensional, nothing like Beijing's sluggishness, congestion and anxiety.

Those two years in Hong Kong changed me a great deal. I found an answer to a question: what kind of force could turn a godforsaken island without three feet of level ground into one of Asia's leading international cities?

Hong Kong was (once) Britain's most unusual colony, and the one the British themselves considered their most successful. What is the real lesson of Hong Kong? The answer is an invisible force, not a visible one. You have to rouse the local people's initiative, give them autonomy, make them feel they really own the place — only then does a piece of land have vitality. Hong Kong was a British colony, but it moved toward private ownership. It didn't matter that you were Chinese: if you had money to buy a piece of land here, it was yours.

Given that little bit of freedom, Chinese people turned Hong Kong into this. Are Chinese people stupid? Not in the least. Creative? Yes — otherwise how did Hong Kong and Taiwan develop the way they did?

Later, in Shenzhen, plenty of taxi drivers told me Shenzhen became what it is because it was governed lightly, or not governed at all. Hong Kong was the same. The British governed Hong Kong loosely; before 1940 they barely governed it. And before 1940, where was Asia's center? Shanghai, not Hong Kong. Hong Kong only rose after the Second World War, when the Cold War and other forces sent Shanghai's capital fleeing south. They rebuilt a little Shanghai there; in the 1940s Hong Kong was called "Little Shanghai." So when you study modern Chinese history, you should examine Hong Kong and Shanghai side by side. You'll get a lot of answers that differ from the standard ones.

I'd never made comparisons like that before Hong Kong. Even when I was editing the Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan section at Phoenix Weekly, I only knew things in outline, never from the inside. In those two years in Hong Kong I felt unencumbered. The biggest thing Hong Kong people did to me was show that a person can live truthfully, without the feeling of pretense I always carried on the mainland.

"Whatever You Do, Don't Go Into Journalism"

But the moment I came back to the mainland, I slid right back into the old habits.

On the mainland I was deeply disappointed — a powerlessness and an anxiety I couldn't change. The work in front of me, the things that needed doing, felt enormous, so enormous that in the end you doubt you can do any of it.

I started in journalism in 2001. More than a decade later, what was the outcome? The outcome was getting knocked bloody. You think there was no sacrifice? Fifteen years of my youth was the sacrifice, the biggest one there is, and look how miserably it turned out. I now tell young people: whatever you do, don't go into journalism. That's the verdict of an old media hand who spent a dozen-odd years crashing into walls and losing heart, and is passing that negative energy on to the next lot.

Along the way I struggled through it twice. The first was in 2009. I'd been at Phoenix Weekly for nearly three years covering Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and I kept discovering how tangled those places are with contemporary China. It felt too complicated, too hard to handle.

Then GQ launched in China in 2009 and invited me in as a features editor. I couldn't take covering sex, lifestyle and leisure, and I left in under a year and a half; none of it had the charge of doing news. The women there compared whose bag was better; the men compared shirts and belts. Is that interesting? At first it felt novel. Over time it just felt further and further from what I wanted.

I covered the U.S. presidential election for GQ, which fit the American and European editions' register perfectly — and fit China not at all. I had brought the expectations of hard news into a fashion magazine, a men's magazine.

In my last two or three months at GQ I went whole months without pitching a story. I didn't know what to do. Wang Feng, the editor-in-chief then, gave me a lot of room; he said it was fine not to pitch, that I should think more and build up more. He was very tolerant. But I felt it really wasn't a fit. After I gave it up, in 2011 I went to Hong Kong to work at a very hard magazine, iSun Affairs, where the topic of every cover story was "the most important political issue in China right now."

My second loss of heart came in 2015, when I left Tencent's Dajia. Toward the end of my time at Tencent the team I managed was so efficient that I could sleep all day and the copy and the pages would still come out fine, no surprises. I felt I contributed nothing and had no presence, so I went to Sun Yat-sen University as a visiting scholar.

"Changing a Person Is So Hard"

Those six months in Guangzhou I was very free, and I thought back over more than a decade in journalism. Combined with how circumstances had shifted, I saw the arc I'd travelled: fired up at the start, all fight gone by the end. Working that through made me see how small my own power was. There were other things too. I met students at the university who were very stubborn. Debate them, chat with them, and you find that even talking face to face barely shifts a person, on opinions or on values. Of course, maybe those of us who write for a living are too confident in our own words and the values we carry, assuming that whatever we say, people will believe. Because in the past, working at a news organization, what you wrote was simply taken as fact. But the moment you jump from facts to opinions, you find that people trust only the factual part of what you do. Start talking opinions and it's very hard to convince anyone.

Once a person's value system sets, it's very hard to reverse. So I began to doubt the word "enlightenment": can intellectuals, or journalism, publishing and education, actually change what ordinary people think? My conclusion was that they can change only the elite. Ordinary people are just blind. In that sense I'm an elitist. I only respect people who've read widely, who reason rigorously, and who see clearly how their own lives relate to the world outside. Those are the ones willing to take in views that are plural and different.

Confucius said long ago, "Delight in hearing of your faults" — when someone criticizes you, be glad. That's the intellectual tradition, right? But in Guangzhou in 2015 I discovered — damn, changing one person is so hard. He was my student and my fan, and even talking to him took that much effort. Imagine the general public. I came around to thinking only facts can do the talking: if someone's house is suddenly demolished by force, that does more than ten thousand sentences you'd said to him before. That's when I started doubting my own worth in journalism.

So I decided to stop doing journalism. And then what? I wanted to do something that actually benefited ordinary people. Business, say — but what business? I turned it over and decided immigration was the business that combined values, sentiment and commerce best, because the effect is plain to see: with your help a whole family can get away from the smog, the gutter oil, the exhaust fumes, all of that mess. Their quality of life genuinely improves, and that struck me as something that could make me happy. I'd found meaning and worth in it.

Some people say running this business is just conning people out of money, that I'm only in it for the money. So what? I am in it for the money. But along the way I found meaning, and that meaning is something I gave myself. Nobody has to tell me I have a passion for this business; that passion rose out of me.

Take Luo Yonghao's Smartisan phones. Those phones were different from everyone else's — why? They had sentiment. What is sentiment, exactly? Why does a phone with sentiment sell for a thousand yuan more than one without? Luo Yonghao couldn't explain it either. But his fans believed in him, believed in his speeches, and figured: fine, I'm paying Luo Yonghao an IQ tax and a sentiment tax, so what? My fans come to me for immigration services — you could call that an IQ tax and a sentiment tax too, couldn't you?

My biggest struggle of the past decade has been whether to leave this country. I've had to choose between so-called intellectual responsibility and the reality of everyday life. I'm not optimistic about the prospects here, so I want to go. But at the same time I feel this has to do with identity: if I were an ordinary citizen I'd probably have left already. Instead I flatter myself as half an intellectual of this country, or at least someone in the know. You feel you owe this land and its people a certain responsibility, that you ought to fight for them.

I run this question through my head almost every day, and in the end it becomes: is there anything in your life more valuable and more meaningful than staying here? My answer, eventually, was yes. Living in one particular place is an accident of your life. I'm a citizen of the world — I want to take in the scenery and the lives of different countries. The length of my life is fixed; as the saying goes, few live to seventy. But I want to keep stretching its breadth.

Illustrations: Lin Yuyao

Cover images all from Unsplash