In Cuigezhuang, outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, Ma Chuang’s family of three generations lives here. A few months ago, Ma Chuang’s family attracted attention on the internet because of a photo of the whole family wearing delivery rider uniforms. In this home, besides his granddaughter, who is only 4 years old, his parents, eldest son, and daughter-in-law all make a living by delivering takeout on the streets of Beijing during the day. The second son also came to Beijing to deliver takeout for a few months.
Behind such a rider family is the self-replication of the social grassroots.
The Rider Family
When Ma Chuang got up to get ready for work, it was already bright at 10:30 in Beijing. The room was still dim, and in the low houses of Maquanying Village, which were crowded together, the sunlight that this small room on the first floor received was mostly blocked. Even during the day, most of the light in the room came from that incandescent lamp.
It was empty and dim. At around 7 o’clock, the hostess Pan Mingyue went out to send her daughter to kindergarten, and then started running orders on an electric bike. Ma Chuang washed his face in the toilet, put on his coat and went out. Pushing his motorcycle out of the narrow alley, he opened his phone, and the system dispatched the first order of the day. After he saw the address of the merchant, he rode his bike and set off.
In Maquanying Village, Cuigezhuang Township, outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, Ma Chuang’s family of three generations lives here. The skyscrapers of Beijing’s CBD stand tall on the distant skyline, and the village is full of dense two-story buildings. The small buildings, which look similar, are separated into small single rooms, filled with out-of-town renters who come to Beijing to make a living, many of whom work as waiters, logistics delivery personnel, or food delivery personnel. When Ma Chuang’s family of three and his parents came here to settle down, they unfortunately couldn’t find two rooms in the same building that were vacant. Therefore, they rented a room in two buildings that were hundreds of meters apart.
Inside the rental housing group of Maquanying Village, the personnel are complex and the flow is frequent. In the alleys that crisscross, the slightly surplus space is occupied by the various vehicles of the migrant workers in Beijing, mostly electric vehicles and motorcycles. In front of Ma Chuang’s house, three cars surrounded it. Ma Chuang and his wife each have a motorcycle, and there is also one for Ma Chuang’s cousin. Recently, he returned to his hometown in Henan to accompany his pregnant wife and temporarily stored the delivery car at Ma Chuang’s house. After taking care of his wife for a few months, he will return to Beijing to deliver takeout.
Figure | The alley where Ma Chuang’s house is located
Ma Chuang joked that his home in Maquanying Village is a “rider’s home.” A few months ago, Ma Chuang’s family attracted attention on the internet because of a photo of the whole family wearing delivery rider uniforms.
In this three-generation family, besides his granddaughter, who is only 4 years old, the adults all make a living by delivering takeout on the streets of Beijing during the day.
Occasionally, Ma Chuang will meet his parents on the way to deliver food. Sometimes it’s when picking up meals at a food stall. If they have enough time, they can sit together and chat for a while, mostly talking about the negative reviews or the bad-tempered merchants they received that day. In early December, Ma Chuang’s daughter fell ill in the Beijing infection wave. Recently, when Grandpa Ma Guobao met Ma Chuang, they were talking about his granddaughter’s recovery. Several times, Ma Chuang met his mother, Zhao Huaqing, who was riding a bike to deliver food on the way to deliver food. Both of them were in a hurry to deliver food, so they just honked the horn a few times as a greeting.
The family is like eggs placed in a basket, squeezed together, and time collides. Taking care of the children and other housework can only be left to his wife, Pan Mingyue. She runs part-time orders, earns less, but has free time, and can be responsible for picking up and dropping off the children, going home to cook, and other logistical work every day.
Often at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, the sound of Pan Mingyue riding an electric bike will appear at the entrance of the alley. She parked her car at the door of the rental house, washed her hands, and went into the kitchen to prepare the dishes. Before marrying Ma Chuang, Pan Mingyue didn’t know how to cook. In the process of the whole family running around for life, she took on the various affairs of the family and also learned to cook. Ma Chuang came home at around two o’clock and helped Pan Mingyue bring the steaming dishes out of the kitchen. His daughter didn’t get out of school until after four o’clock, which was one of the few times the two of them had alone time.
In another room a few hundred meters away, Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing were also having lunch. Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing are both full-time and have their own schedules and fixed working hours. Cooking is still the responsibility of his wife. In order to prepare the meals as quickly as possible, Zhao Huaqing always has to take a period of time without orders before leaving work in the afternoon and evening to go home and prepare the dishes.
Why do they gather together? In the final analysis, the logic of the development of this family’s roots continues the way of acquaintances bringing acquaintances. Working in areas where family members and relatives have worked is the only network and resources they can use, and it is also the most basic springboard for many such families to work hard in big cities.
For the Ma family, this step is Ma Chuang’s cousin’s family. The first person to be brought to Beijing was Ma Chuang. In 2016, he was not very satisfied with his job in a Guangzhou hardware factory. After asking his cousin for help, he followed his cousin and entered a Western restaurant in Beijing as an apprentice. Before leaving, he was worried that his English level was not good enough, that he would not be able to learn the high-end Western food, and that he would not be able to integrate into the high-end city of Beijing. His cousin, who was working hard in Beijing, comforted his initial anxiety about coming to Beijing.
After working, he dispelled this doubt among people who were at a similar level. Ma Chuang’s parents, Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing, also gave up their jobs in Guangzhou and came to Beijing with their son. At that time, his cousin’s family had already settled in Beijing. With the help of his cousin’s family, Ma Chuang’s family quickly settled down. They also found work. His father, Ma Guobao, followed his elder brother to deliver express, and his mother followed his aunt to work as a cashier in the supermarket.
After the “passing on, helping, and leading” of his cousin’s family, Ma Chuang’s family quickly started to operate independently in their respective positions. In Beijing, the family quickly settled down, and also quickly encountered some embarrassing moments that they had to face alone.
Not long after independently delivering express, Ma Guobao accidentally drove a tricycle loaded with express on the overpass of Beijing’s East Fifth Ring Road. In order to expand more space and provide more room for traffic flow, overpasses may be built everywhere within the Sixth Ring Road of Beijing. Sometimes when entering an intersection, the road will suddenly tilt upwards after hundreds of meters, and the subsequent road will be supported in the air. This is one side of the complexity of a big city. In his hometown, the village is flat, and Ma Guobao had never walked such a road. That afternoon, he only knew to ride his bike cautiously forward. The cars on the highway next to him kept speeding past him, and no one stopped to give him directions. He soon dared not go forward, and cautiously parked the tricycle on the side of the road and sent a message to his elder brother for help. Finally, his elder brother came to take him down.
The Ma family later flowed into the food delivery rider industry, which was an opportunity for Ma Guobao in 2017. At that time, he had been delivering express for more than a year, had figured out the route, and had mastered the navigation. At the dinner table, he heard his former colleague, who had switched to delivering takeout, talk about how the income from delivering takeout was higher than before. So, he quit his job delivering express and followed his former colleague to learn and became a rider.
In retrospect, Ma Guobao’s career transition provided a method and a safe exit for the family to solve the problem of survival for a long time.
In the autumn of 2020, Ma Chuang’s pizza shop closed down due to debt. He was unemployed at home for a month, lying in bed every day, staring at the job search software on his phone, trying to stay in the catering industry and find a job as a chef. However, the positions he could find were either too far from home or the salary was not high. His daughter was less than a year old, and he needed to spend money in all aspects, and there were debts to be repaid. Ma Chuang’s unemployment plunged the operation of the family into difficulties.
At that time, the food delivery industry was booming, and his father became the pillar of the family. Ma Chuang’s family of three often relied on his father for support, and his daughter’s formula sometimes had to be bought by Ma Guobao. In order to help his unemployed son cheer up as soon as possible, Ma Guobao suggested that he come to deliver takeout. At that time, Ma Chuang was penniless, and the first motorcycle he used to be a rider was bought with his father’s help.
In 2022, Zhao Huaqing’s job also encountered a bottleneck. After Zhao Huaqing worked as a cashier in Beijing for two years, she decided to return to her hometown to try to be a micro-business because her younger son, who was still in high school, needed to be looked after. In order to obtain a higher agency position, she purchased a large number of goods, and eventually lost most of her money within a few years.
After learning about Zhao Huaqing’s losses, Ma Chuang and Ma Guobao, father and son, began to persuade her to return to Beijing. What to do, of course, was also a food delivery rider. Zhao Huaqing was ashamed of the losses she had caused to the family and finally agreed.
One generation passed on to the next. Ma Chuang, like his father taught him, took his mother and gradually familiarized her with the delivery process. Not long after the New Year, there were not many orders. His mother sat on the back seat of his motorcycle and followed him for two days. On the third night, he took his mother to buy an electric bike, and then followed her from seven or eight o’clock to eleven o’clock. In two or three hours, his mother earned two hundred yuan. This was the first time in two years that Zhao Huaqing saw a positive growth in income.
In the middle of 2022, Ma Chuang’s younger brother graduated from a university in Henan. He couldn’t find a job, and he also failed to pass the civil service examination. Finally, at the suggestion of his family, he also moved into Maquanying Village in the first half of the year and put on a rider uniform to deliver takeout for a few months. Ma Chuang’s younger brother is introverted and rarely reveals his feelings to his family. Ma Chuang vaguely felt that although his younger brother was satisfied with the income brought by labor, he was still not satisfied with the job of delivering takeout, but he had no other way for a while, so he had to make do.
Imagination of Breaking Through the Circle
Sometimes, Ma Chuang would joke that his family is a “kangaroo family.” In this family, the members share a nightmare. Except for his daughter, every family member had dreamed in the first month of delivering takeout that they were riding a bike and frantically rushing between different stores and communities, and the scenes kept changing and shaking. They watched helplessly as they rushed towards the result of being overdue.
The family revolves in a predetermined orbit, and such a trajectory and experience ultimately failed to satisfy the ambition and ambition of Ma Chuang’s younger brother. After only a few months, Ma Chuang’s younger brother returned to Henan and enrolled in a programming course at an institution in Zhengzhou, attempting to seize an upward springboard.
If possible, Ma Chuang also wants to get out of the life of delivering food in Cuigezhuang every day in the wind and sun. He has a wish, hoping that he can live a stable life like a white-collar worker, sit in the office of a building, and engage in some mental work. Compared to the work in the wind and rain at the moment, the work in the office building has buildings to shelter from the wind and rain, is more regular, and does not need to overdraw physical strength and time. But he dropped out of school too early, wanting to get out to such an end…
For half a century, this family has absorbed limited family resources and moved forward slowly on a fixed track. Ma Chuang’s grandparents were farmers and spent their lives rooted in the rural land. Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing completed the first step of leaving the land. They got married and had children at the age of twenty. When their eldest son, Ma Chuang, was five or six years old, they took a few hundred yuan and went to Nanyang City next door to wholesale and sell vegetables, and walked out of the village of Zhumadian.
Ma Chuang witnessed the tools his parents used to purchase goods changing from a foot-pedal tricycle to a motorcycle tricycle, and then to a large truck. In the early 2000s, his parents built a two-story building with a front yard and a back yard on the side of the county road in their hometown, and took them out of the old bungalows.
After graduating from high school, Ma Chuang didn’t get into college. His parents wanted to teach him the business of selling vegetables, but Ma Chuang refused. During the winter and summer vacations of junior high school, he often went to his parents’ vegetable stall to help. He had seen his parents’ hard work, and he felt that the days at the vegetable stall were not the life he wanted.
He went to his cousin who was working in Shanghai and entered a hardware factory, where he was responsible for baking paint on the motor in a high-temperature workshop. After 12 hours of shifts, he could have 24 hours of rest. On the first night shift, when he walked out of the workshop after work, the sun had already risen. Carrying a bag of sauce-flavored pancakes he bought on the side of the road back home, Ma Chuang fell asleep while chewing the pancakes. When he woke up again, the pancake was still in his mouth. The work in the city was not as easy as he imagined, and the salary was not as high as he imagined. Ma Chuang felt tired.
Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing’s vegetable business also fell into a predicament. Selling vegetables is also a kind of investment, and investment will face risks. Since Ma Chuang was in high school, his parents had made several mistakes in choosing vegetables, and they kept losing money. His deepest impression was a carload of Shanghai green, which was not sold out until the New Year’s Eve, and could only be thrown away, losing tens of thousands of yuan. The continuous losses kept eroding the confidence of Ma Guobao and his wife, and the idea of giving up became increasingly strong.
The fate of the family of three converged again. At the end of the year, Ma Chuang returned to his hometown from Shanghai for the Spring Festival. At the beginning of the following year, the family of three went to Guangzhou together and went to work in the factory. A year later, they came to Beijing as a family and started the prelude to the rider family.
From a Western food apprentice to a head chef, Ma Chuang only took three or four years. In the first few months, he was lost in the more than twenty seasonings in the back kitchen of the Western restaurant. The difference between rosemary and thyme, the amount of seasonings, and the order of multiple combinations. Cooking at home didn’t use these seasonings. These were new attempts that went beyond his past life experience. After a long time, he learned to take notes and wrote the knowledge points that needed to be memorized and distinguished densely in his notebook. For more than a year, from being able to stand by the high-temperature oil pan and fry fries all day long, to successfully serving dishes without being returned, he finally graduated.
In the following two or three years, he moved from kitchen to kitchen, learning different cuisines from different countries, and his skills became more and more proficient, and his titles were constantly upgraded. At his peak, he was the head chef of a high-end Western restaurant in Chaoyang Joy City.
At that time, Ma Chuang realized that although this was not a top chef position, it was already the highest place he could reach. The company had the opportunity to study abroad, and those who returned from abroad were inlaid with the gold edge of Michelin stars and were promoted to executive chef. But the fact that he couldn’t speak English blocked Ma Chuang. If he wanted to achieve the same achievements as them, he would have to stay in this position for another twenty or thirty years.
Figure | Ma Chuang records his first time making a Halloween pumpkin lantern
Perhaps entrepreneurship is the best chance for ordinary people to turn around – 25-year-old Ma Chuang decided to give it a try. In July and August 2019, a new food city opened near Maquanying Village. Ma Chuang and Pan Mingyue opened a pizza shop there.
The business was booming in the first half of the year. Pan Mingyue, the hostess, was still helping in the shop when she was eight months pregnant. During the week or so that Pan Mingyue returned to her hometown to give birth, Ma Chuang supported the shop alone, and the various processes of frying, stir-frying, and baking were carried out simultaneously. The high temperature of the oven baked him with a full back of prickly heat.
After half a year, they encountered the epidemic. By the following year, the business still did not improve, and they continued to lose money for the next six months. His father heard that he had been losing money and advised him to close the shop. Ma Chuang refused. This was the first time he had opened a shop in his life, and he wanted to persevere with all his strength. His savings were emptied, so he borrowed money from others. If he couldn’t borrow, he would swipe his credit card. When he really couldn’t fill it, he gave up.
Opportunities for Ma Chuang’s family are like going through a revolving door. It seems that they have gone in, but they often return to the same place.
Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing made their first money selling vegetables in Nanyang when they were young. They decided to use this money to improve their housing. At that time, many people in the same village who were doing business bought houses near the airport. A distant relative was afraid that they would miss the opportunity to move into the city and advised the couple to buy one as well. However, Ma Guobao wanted to go back to his hometown to build a house himself, and firmly disagreed with this proposal.
It is difficult for Ma Chuang’s family to balance opportunities and feelings. In the early 21st century, the rise of housing prices in China had just begun to show its momentum, and many people at that time could not imagine how fast housing prices would rise in the future.
Ma Guobao built a new house in the village as he wished. A distant relative who lived in the next village also spent 100,000 yuan to buy a house near the airport. Within two years, the land near the airport was demolished, and the relative’s house was demolished and received millions of yuan in compensation.
And as the children grew up, Ma Guobao began to find that young people now like to buy commercial houses in the city when they get married. The house he built in his hometown was gradually useless in the children’s marriage and love.
Sometimes looking into the distance, Ma Chuang can see how another circle of families stretches and develops the branches of the family.
A large area of villas surrounds Maquanying Village. The buildings there are arranged as neatly as the low-rise buildings where Ma Chuang lives. The difference is that the villas where the rich live, because of their exquisite design, each household can enjoy the greenery and sunshine.
The spacious space and the fully protected privacy are the conveniences enjoyed by the villa owners, but they have become the trouble of the riders.
Ma Chuang doesn’t like to deliver food to the villa area. Motorcycles cannot be driven downstairs. The security guards always stop the riders at the entrance of the community with the people and the cars, and they have to wait for registration and confirmation with the owner before they can be allowed to enter. You can’t ride a bike into the villa area, you can only walk in to deliver the food. If it’s far, it will take nearly half an hour to deliver the food in and out of the community.
Last year, Ma Chuang received an order, and the information indicated that the customer had bought wine worth five or six thousand yuan. He thought it would be a large order, but when he picked up the goods, Ma Chuang found that there were only five or six bottles of wine in a box, which meant that the price of a single bottle of wine was more than a thousand yuan. Moreover, the delivery fee reached 160 yuan, and the amount calculated for him was enough to offset the income of his orders for one or two hours during the peak hours of the afternoon.
When Ma Chuang delivered food, he saw a real estate agent displaying the selling price of these villas, which was more than 20 million yuan for a building. Ma Chuang thought that a bottle of wine cost more than a thousand yuan. Although he could afford this money, the key was that for people living in the villa area, this was not an expensive wine. It was estimated that it was not much different in nature from the wine and white wine they ordered at a party for more than a hundred yuan.
In this circle, currency exists in an inflated way.
Ma Chuang wondered what kind of people could afford such a house and such wine. What kind of circle do they live in, and how are their life paths different from his? Perhaps because of their high education or other conditions, they performed well and had rich experience in the company, and then they had millions or even tens of millions of annual salaries.
Ma Chuang admits that his imagination is limited in how to obtain wealth. Besides doing a small business or live e-commerce, he can’t think of any other good choices. The top anchor with an annual salary of tens of millions has an experience that is difficult to replicate. Moreover, that is an industry that the people in the family are not familiar with. Without the guidance of relatives and friends in an unfamiliar industry, it is difficult to succeed.
The Unstoppable Gears
How to have more wealth is a trouble that many people find difficult to put aside. Ma Chuang is also one of them. Even if he is not greedy for great wealth, Ma Chuang also knows that he needs to earn a lot of money.
In 2021, when Ma Chuang’s daughter was more than a year old, she fell ill. She had a fever, and the medicine didn’t work. After being sent to West China Hospital, the examination showed that the child was about to develop pneumonia and had to be hospitalized as soon as possible.
The 10,000 yuan deposit for hospitalization almost overwhelmed Ma Chuang and his wife. At that time, Ma Chuang had just started delivering takeout not long ago. Although the debt was not paid off, his mentality was still relaxed. He only ran for six or seven hours a day, and he was happy to get more than two hundred yuan and get off work. The salary barely covered the expenses of the family of three in Beijing, not to mention saving money. So when it came time to pay the deposit, Ma Chuang only had two thousand yuan in his hand. There was no way, the couple started calling around to borrow money from relatives and friends, but they couldn’t raise enough money. Finally, they called Ma Chuang’s grandfather, who was far away in his hometown, and they were able to raise the money.
Ma Chuang said that if he hadn’t found that he couldn’t even afford his daughter’s 10,000 yuan life-saving money, he might not have realized that he had entered a situation where he had to find money everywhere: “If you don’t work hard, when your family is hospitalized or needs money, the moment you have no money is the most embarrassing.”
After his daughter recovered from her illness, Ma Chuang worked desperately. He went out at ten o’clock in the morning every day and didn’t go home until two o’clock in the morning.
This year, Ma Chuang was selected for the “University for Riders” project, and he is studying for a logistics management major at the National Open University for free. After graduation, he can obtain a junior college diploma. For this reason, he specially bought a laptop and watched online courses for a while after getting off work at night. At first, he was very passionate and kept thinking about this matter. When there were not many orders, he would take out his phone to take a class.
Ma Chuang slowly found that taking classes could not be rushed. He still found it difficult to understand complex principles, just like in junior high school and high school. He was confused when the teacher talked about the binary system of computers. The difference is that this time, he has a reason to learn it.
Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing also cannot stop. The couple, who have been rotating, have accumulated wealth and continuously flowed to their two sons. In 2017, Ma Guobao and Zhao Huaqing took out their savings and borrowed some money from relatives and friends, and raised more than 100,000 yuan for the down payment, and bought a school district house for their eldest son, Ma Chuang, in the county town of their hometown. Two years later, Ma Chuang got married, and they also prepared the betrothal gifts. The 20,000 yuan tuition fee for the programming training class for his younger son, plus the cost of renting a house in Zhengzhou, had to be paid by the old couple. In the future, when he gets married and starts a family, he will also need the help of his parents.
The old couple are still the indispensable pillars of this family. After the granddaughter was born, they couldn’t spare time to take care of the children for Ma Chuang and his wife, who were new parents. What they can give is only economic assistance.
Now, Ma Guobao still asks Ma Chuang from time to time if he has enough money. Seeing the red envelopes or transfers in the chat box, Ma Chuang feels uncomfortable. He also wants to be tough and not accept it directly, but the gap in life is clearly in front of him.
The monthly rent is 2,000 yuan, the mortgage is 2,000 yuan, the living expenses for a family of four are 2,000 yuan, the tuition fee for the daughter’s kindergarten is 1,500 yuan a month, the motorcycle refueling is 1,000 yuan a month, plus other miscellaneous expenses, it will be nearly 10,000 yuan a month. Such a life cannot withstand the test of any unexpected expenses.
Figure | The family photo of Ma Chuang’s family that caused a heated discussion on the short video platform
“The next generation may still deliver takeout.” After the video of Ma Chuang’s family of five, who are all riders, caused a heated discussion on the short video platform, a netizen commented like this.
Ma Guobao could not accept such a conclusion and speculation. Ma Chuang and Pan Mingyue were also unhappy that their daughter was involved: “Even if my child really delivers takeout one day, I don’t feel ashamed. She decides her own life, and we can’t interfere.”
One day in early summer this year, Ma Chuang completely broke down once. At that time, it was just getting dark. Ma Chuang, who usually delivered food everywhere along the evening rush hour, rode his bike home. As soon as he got home, he rushed into the toilet, closed the door, and hid inside to cry. The crying echoed in the narrow toilet and penetrated the thin wall panels and passed outside the door.
Before going home, Ma Chuang sent a message in the work group: “What is the purpose of living in this life? Is it just to deliver food every day?” Ma Chuang is usually optimistic. The people in the group felt abnormal and urged Ma Guobao to go and see his son.
Life is afraid of comparison. Ma Chuang occasionally envies his peers around him. His cousin, who is only a few months older than him, didn’t graduate from high school and went out to make a living. He opened a breakfast shop near Maquanying Village and now has a second branch. Nowadays, his cousin’s family is all in the two shops. His uncle and aunt bought a car for his cousin, and his cousin and his wife don’t have children yet, so the pressure of life is much less.
Pan Mingyue saw the message he sent in the group before Ma Chuang came home. She opened the door of the toilet and stood at the door to comfort her husband, “If you earn more, eat more, if you earn less, eat less. Don’t compare yourself with others. It’s good for the family to be safe and sound. You don’t need to have so much pressure.”
Figure | The card and gifts that his wife gave him on Ma Chuang’s birthday this year
It seems that Ma Chuang can only comfort himself in this way. Even if it is self-comfort, Ma Chuang understands that he needs to get rid of these pressures and persevere in order to live.
He wiped away his tears and let his emotions pass. The next day, Ma Chuang was once again immersed in the sense of accomplishment of the constantly fluctuating and rising income. When he was active in the WeChat group again, he had already restored his previous positive appearance, “Brothers, look how much money I earned from this order, can you do it?”
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