10 People From Our "2018 Stories" Series: We Checked Back In Over Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year.
Chinese New Year.
"Recording the actions and everyday lives of ordinary people," Walt Harrington said, "there is far too little of this kind of record in our trade. Stories like these record what people do, what drives them, what they feel, believe, resent, hope for and fear, what they achieve and what they long for, as they look for meaning and purpose in their lives. They help people understand where they stand in the world."
He once wrote a story: "The family's teenage son had killed himself two years earlier. I worked hard to explain to them the kind of story I wanted to write, how deep I wanted to go. The father listened for a long time, and finally said, 'So you want to know what I'm thinking when I pray alone in a quiet room.'"
In its simplest form, Harrington said, it comes down to this: how do people live, and what do they value?
Each of our lives makes up this world.
"2018 Stories" is a new column from QDaily.
Wang Dong spent this Chinese New Year in Kunshan. "The old lady, my son and my daughter all came to Kunshan, and on New Year's Eve we cooked and ate at home, just us. I gave each grandchild a 500-yuan red envelope. It isn't much, but when they need money any other day of the year they tell me and I give it to them. My younger sister back home in Jingdezhen came to Shanghai for the New Year this time, and she's staying with me now."
The place beside the Kunshan high-speed rail station is 150 square meters, and on ordinary days he lives there alone. His wife and children live in two large apartments in Shanghai. Wang Dong was born and raised in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, where he also keeps a home.
At 71, Wang Dong has three homes, and seems to be a lonely man.
"The family all have their own lives — they went home right after the New Year's Eve dinner," he said in a phone call on the third day of the Lunar New Year. "I keep telling an old friend in Shanghai that I have a 65-year-old friend who's always after me to chat: he talks, and I just listen. My friend in Shanghai asked who this 65-year-old was. Ha — it's my 65-inch TV. Right now I'm watching A Great Chancellor of His Time: Chen Tingjing 《一代名相陈廷敬》."
Before the new year, Wang Dong lost the last customer of his tire business. He had already decided to cut his price by another 10 percent, and the customer still wasn't satisfied. Wang Dong closed his warehouse in Nanhui, Shanghai, paid the penalty for breaking his contract and let his workers go. The Jingdezhen porcelain shop he ran with a partner in Shanghai also "lost money across the board."
He plans to start over in tires in 2019, though he hasn't settled on what to sell.
Zhou Cheng gathered with relatives in Qinhuangdao. Over the New Year, nobody talked about cryptocurrency anymore. Neither did he. The friends and relatives who had asked him to buy bitcoin for them were all in low spirits. But like Zhou Cheng, they were all still holding, waiting to see.
Bitcoin, which Zhou Cheng still believed in, had been sliding for years. On November 10 last year it started falling hard, until the price broke through the cost of the mining rigs. Even mining stopped paying. Zhou Cheng couldn't sleep for half a month. In December he also lost an EOSdac election, beaten by candidates who knew the technology, held degrees and had been executives at big companies.
But the New Year still made Zhou Cheng happy. His most recent trip was to Beijing, to pay New Year calls on relatives. More important, things with his father kept getting better. Zhou Cheng is afraid of his father's authority, and he wasn't sure the "Zhou Cheng" story published in November was enough to make his father proud. He had gone years without approval, which made the little he had won from bitcoin precious; he wanted to make it stick, and feared getting it wrong. In the end he sent his father the story anyway. "After my dad read it, he was pretty happy."
At nine on New Year's Eve, Zhou Cheng stepped out of the Indian restaurant he runs. It stayed open through the holiday. Customers have never been many, but Zhou Cheng still goes in every day to taste the dishes and give his Indian cook notes. "All I ask of it now is that it break even."
Xu Ke's mother brought her boyfriend to Beijing for the New Year and stayed in Xu Ke's three-bedroom apartment near Huixin Xijie Beikou. Every door and every piece of furniture in it was made by Xu Ke himself, at his master's woodworking studio, Limu.
After leaving his master and giving up furniture, Xu Ke switched to making billiard cues. The business has gone well enough; this year his workshop moved to another building in the same village, bigger, "room to work in." Xu Ke still can't play billiards, and has no intention of learning.
His master moved the studio to Hebei and comes to Beijing once a week to teach, but he is busy and they rarely meet. A senior apprentice who moved to Anji to open his own woodworking studio started a Bilibili account called "I Want a Woodworking Studio," now at 20,000 followers.
The biggest change in Xu Ke's life is his daughter. Two grandparents are living in the apartment to help with the baby, "and every day we get really good food." Since he doesn't have to sit in an office, Xu Ke plans to take his daughter to his wife's hometown in Shanxi after the holiday.
Wang Jing's New Year was nothing special: she stayed with her parents and her three-year-old son. She plans to go through with the move to a new apartment once the holiday is over. Her daigou business — personal shopping abroad — keeps getting harder, which sometimes wears on her.
On February 1, Yang Lin and her parents flew from Shanghai to Hawaii. They spent the New Year there.
All winter, this young investment banker seemed to spend most of her time on vacation. Over the Christmas break she went skiing in Nagano, Japan, then flew to Okinawa for another holiday. Wherever she was, her parents never forgot to push her to marry. Yang Lin is 28. She read economics and finance at the University of Hong Kong, went into investment banking, and became one of the elite. Work is a headache now and then, but never for long. Her textbook middle-class life is missing only a good match.
Ren Tao watched Crazy Alien over the holiday. He seemed to hate it, and wrote on Moments: "If I ever trust these people (domestic directors) again, I'm an idiot."
Barely two months earlier, in an interview, Ren Tao had said something else: "I used to curse domestic films all the time. I don't anymore. If a game as dumb as mine runs into this kind of problem, then for something that's trying to express ideas it must be even harder — wouldn't they have to revise it hundreds of times?" He was complaining then about how absurd and cumbersome it is to submit a game for review, and about the sudden freeze on game license approvals.
Not long after that interview, Ren Tao, a first-time game publisher, stopped paying salaries and disbanded his team. "It's fine, it's not that sad a story," the 29-year-old told us over the New Year — everyone had seen it coming, and everyone had somewhere to fall back on. License approvals resumed at the end of December 2018, but Ren Tao had lost his enthusiasm. He thinks "doing business in China" is a problem at every step.
With the publishing company closed, Ren Tao's plan for the new year is to "keep starting companies, keep failing." Once again, though, he doesn't appear to have considered failing: his side project is now a blockchain game — "anonymity and decentralization, everyone answers only to himself, it's anarchism" — no license needed, nothing needed, only "consensus."
Ren Tao says they are already making money. He wouldn't say anything else about the game.
Wang Xuan went back to her hometown for the New Year, and for a while didn't have to live in a room partitioned off from a living room. She rarely went out, staying home with her parents most of the time. Taking them to see Pegasus, Wang Xuan noticed that more cinemas had opened in her hometown.
Before the Lunar New Year, Wang Xuan renewed her lease in Beijing. The building manager stopped bringing up the "partition," but couldn't promise anything either. Everything in Beijing had grown more expensive over the past six months; at least the rent went up only a "symbolic" 30 yuan.
The biggest change may be that the "tenant" line on the lease now carries her name instead of her ex-boyfriend's. Wang Xuan used to register apartments under her boyfriend's name. Now she wants to leave that life behind entirely. She doesn't plan to buy any new figurines, and means to start working out again when spring comes, but "I don't have much drive or desire (to find a boyfriend)."
When we reached Ming Jue over the Lunar New Year, he was out paying New Year calls in his village. The village still keeps the old rites: at six or seven on New Year's Eve, the men of each household go out into the fields to burn incense and paper ingots, inviting the "ancestors" home for the holiday. The next morning the men, before breakfast, and the women, after it, kowtow to the village elders and to the elders of the old production team.
Going home and facing relatives puts no great pressure on Ming Jue, who is 31. He was married once, and his parents know he is gay. The villagers don't; when they ask how he's doing, they sometimes urge him to marry again. "I just say I have a girlfriend back in Qingdao, that we're still together."
Ming Jue rather likes seeing relatives now. In the six months since he was fired, most of his income has come from direct sales of health supplements, and direct sales always starts with friends and family. This New Year, he found supplements were already common in the village, and planned to talk to people about them once he had finished his rounds.
"My plan this year is to make 200,000 yuan. Part of it, of course, goes into the kindergarten fund, but the bigger part is to support the family — and I'm planning to buy an apartment in Qingdao."
Soon after he won his labor arbitration case last November, Ming Jue found work again as a preschool teacher. A student's parent referred him to a children's education center in Qingdao. Ming Jue repeated what his future employer had told him: "he said several people at his place are gay too." The employer thought being fired over one's sexual orientation was "unbelievable."
Mengbao Wangguo Kindergarten has stopped operating, but its principal, Wei Wenquan, who lost the case, has appealed, and the second hearing is set for February 27. When Ming Jue saw the filing notice at the court, he was preparing another "equal employment rights" case. Compared with the lawsuit, though, Ming Jue says his finances worry him more.
The New Year made Chen Jia, a Wenzhou man, think of Hainan again. He wrote online that during his years there, "every year I'd say I wasn't going home for the New Year, I really hated that damp cold back home." "Often, around the 28th day of the twelfth lunar month, I'd see the newsroom half empty, most people already gone, and suddenly I'd want to go home too. So I'd rush out and buy a ticket." "The first thing I said when I got home was almost always: I'm never coming back to this godforsaken place again."
This year he saw the year out in his damp, cold home village, and didn't get back to Wenzhou until the second day of the Lunar New Year. The weather was good over the holiday, and the village had just built a new covered bridge — good for walking, good for photographs. Chen Jia has been putting most of his energy into photography lately, the trade that fed him when he first arrived in Hainan in 1989.
As for Hainan, it turned out that, just as before the property bubble burst in the 1990s, the new policies issued on the island's 30th anniversary moved nothing but housing prices. And once purchase restrictions came in, fewer and fewer people talked about it.
Chen Enxian's household of five — his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandson — all spent the New Year in Beijing. Since his parents died, they haven't gone back to their hometown in Xi County, Henan, for the holiday in several years, going instead at Qingming to sweep the graves. "The countryside has declined until it's basically left-behind children and left-behind old people, nobody else — everyone young and able-bodied has left. So not many people go back to the village for the New Year anymore. Families that are doing well have bought places in the county town or the city and moved there. The village is falling apart."
Chen Enxian's family moved to the county town back in the 1990s, into a flat of just over 40 square meters assigned by the county school. In July 1998, without telling his family, Chen Enxian quit teaching, took a few thousand yuan and went to Beijing to open a school for migrant workers' children. His relatives and friends followed him to Beijing, opened more migrant schools, and stayed.
In past years Chen Enxian would go out and about with relatives and friends over the holiday. This year he didn't feel like moving, because he was "not in a good place." Over the past few months, planning to rebuild the school, he has driven to Hebei to look at sites, settling into one county at a time and looking around. He says he has gone more than ten times.
When we spoke with Chen Enxian by phone before the holiday, he was still writing to higher-level authorities about the closing of Huangzhuang School. He had been writing since August of last year. Beyond that, no agreement had been reached on compensation.
The call ran more than an hour. Chen Enxian repeated much of what he had said before, taking apart the education problems facing migrant children and left-behind children and pointing out how unreasonable the various rules are. He still believes it is because "the people up top don't know what things are really like down here" that it has come to this. He is pinning his hopes on the 2019 sessions of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
The next day he seemed to remember again that migrant children, left-behind children and a closed school did not fit the New Year — this "joyous holiday the whole country celebrates" — and asked that when we raised the matter again we be a little more "gentle" about it.
Cover image by Yiran Ding on Unsplash; still from the film Tokyo Family, via Douban
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.