On August 22, Li Yun, the head of a freight company in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, posted on WeChat Moments:
Please call me back, the owner of the vehicle with the license plate number MengXXXXX.
The owner of the vehicle with the license plate number MengXXXXX is Hao Yuzhu, a driver in Li Yun’s team, 41 years old.
Three years ago, Hao Yuzhu mortgaged his car and borrowed a loan of 280,000 yuan from Li Yun’s company. The two parties agreed to repay the loan in two years, with Hao Yuzhu paying 13,200 yuan per month.
Three years later, Hao Yuzhu still owed 130,000 yuan.
Every month, Li Yun would call Hao Yuzhu. Hao Yuzhu would call Li Yun ‘Third Brother’ and explain why he couldn’t pay the money this month, ‘He never plays tricks, and even if he can’t pay the money, he always answers the phone immediately’.
Li Yun usually expressed understanding and told the finance department:
Xiao Hao is really in trouble this month, just forget it.
However, this honest Xiao Hao suddenly disappeared in August. Li Yun contacted several friends of Hao Yuzhu’s usual team, and they all said that they couldn’t get in touch with Hao Yuzhu either. They thought that Hao Yuzhu might be hiding from debt in another place.
Also unable to contact Hao Yuzhu was his brother-in-law. Hao Yuzhu has two older sisters, his father passed away last year, and his mother suffers from underlying diseases, making it difficult for her to take care of herself.
On July 12th, the second sister’s husband received a call from Hao Yuzhu, saying that he hoped his brother-in-law could give him some money.
I transferred him 300 yuan, that was the last time I contacted him.
The family thought Hao Yuzhu had gone to run a truck. Usually, Hao Yuzhu rarely called home, and only talked about important matters. Because he ran the Sichuan-Tibet line, the signal was sometimes not very good, and the family didn’t think much of it.
Hao Yuzhu was not on the Sichuan-Tibet line, but in a large parking lot in Kunming, thousands of kilometers away. Since June 8th, his car had been parked there and had never moved. No one knew how he had spent the past few months in the parking lot.
It wasn’t until National Day that they received his message.
He passed away in his car.
On October 2nd, Lao Wang, a truck driver from Jiangsu, parked his car in a parking lot in Chenggong District, Kunming, for repairs.
At 3 p.m., Lao Wang was going to buy something, and when he passed a Liberation truck with a Inner Mongolia license plate, he suddenly smelled a foul odor, and there were flies buzzing around.
The car seemed to have been parked there for a long time. The windows were covered with sunshades, and Lao Wang couldn’t see the situation inside the cab, so he left. The next morning, the truck was still parked in the same place, and even his friend smelled the unpleasant smell, so Lao Wang contacted the parking lot security guard.
The parking lot security guard and the boss called the police. The arriving police used a strong flashlight to shine into the cab, and everyone found:
There was a highly decomposed body inside.
The body in the car was Hao Yuzhu. No one knew when he passed away, it was estimated to be at least a month ago.
The next day, the family received a call from the Kunming police, asking them to handle the aftermath. According to the police’s autopsy, Hao Yuzhu was not a suicide or a homicide, but died of a sudden illness. His brother-in-law said:
He passed away in his sleep.
The body was highly decomposed, and including Hao Yuzhu’s mobile phone, they could not be restored. The brother-in-law could only know through the surveillance that on June 8th, Hao Yuzhu drove the car into this parking lot called Ping’an.
After that, the car never left.
Why he stayed in the parking lot for so long, the brother-in-law later heard a saying that Hao Yuzhu’s car was broken, and he didn’t have money to repair it, so it was parked in the parking lot.
Last December, Hao Yuzhu fell ill and was hospitalized in Tibet for 3 months. Another brother-in-law of Hao Yuzhu went to sign for him. After being discharged from the hospital, Hao Yuzhu only rested for a month and returned to the road. Li Yun, the team owner, advised him to rest for at least half a year.
Sichuan-Tibet line, worried about his health.
The environment of high altitude and lack of oxygen is prone to induce cerebral edema during sleep. There are not a few drivers who have died in their sleep.
But Hao Yuzhu still went back to work.
He had to work. In addition to the car loan, he also owed some money outside. The height limit and the judgment documents showed that Hao Yuzhu had small loans and online loans. Even his neighbors provided him with guarantees.
These money and favors, he probably couldn’t pay off.
In 1982, Hao Yuzhu was born in a small mountain village in Karaqin Banner, Chifeng.
When he was a child, Hao Yuzhu was a leader among children, with a lively personality and a love for making friends. After graduating from junior high school, he went out to work.
In 2005, he obtained an A2 driver’s license and became a freight driver. At first, Hao Yuzhu and another friend ran together. Later, the friend withdrew, and Hao Yuzhu ran alone.
It was then that Hao Yuzhu got married, and his wife was also a local. Soon, a daughter was born. If there were no accidents, they should be like many ordinary families, the couple working hard, and the daughter growing up slowly.
In 2016, the China Execution Network added an execution information. Hao Yuzhu was on the execution list because he owed a small loan. Subsequently, two more such execution information were added.
Also in that year, Hao Yuzhu divorced his wife. The family said that Hao Yuzhu was away from home all year round due to freight transportation, and long-term separation led to the breakdown of their relationship.
A friend said that part of the reason for owing money was that Hao Yuzhu was once cheated into gambling, but after 2013, he quit gambling; the main reason was that his parents were ill.
Hao Yuzhu’s parents were both local farmers. Seven or eight years ago, his parents both suffered from serious illnesses, and his mother was even unable to take care of herself. In order to take care of his parents, Hao Yuzhu stopped going out to run trucks. He had no income and owed a lot of money.
After his parents fell ill and he owed debts, Hao Yuzhu, who was once cheerful and optimistic, began to become depressed and listless. His brother-in-law said that Hao Yuzhu had almost no hobbies, and since then, his mind was to make money:
He just wanted to pay off the debt as soon as possible.
He scraped together more than 400,000 yuan and changed to a bigger and newer Liberation truck, hoping to haul more goods. The route of running trucks was also changed from the past all over the country to the Sichuan-Tibet line, which was more dangerous and easier to make money, and he often spent the Spring Festival outside.
Hao Yuzhu’s daughter suffered from congenital asthma and needed medication every month. His ex-wife was an ordinary worker, and Hao Yuzhu had to bear a considerable part of the medical expenses.
Shouldering the burden of his parents, children, car loans, and debts, Hao Yuzhu was honest and reliable in the eyes of his friends, didn’t smoke or drink, and could be considered a very honest person. According to the relatives’ memories, he rarely told his family about his situation outside. They repeatedly emphasized to me that Hao Yuzhu didn’t cause much trouble to the family.
It was just that on the long journey, he would occasionally make a video call with his daughter.
In 2018, the court wanted to auction Hao Yuzhu’s most valuable thing other than the truck, a dilapidated Jili car. This car was put on the Ali auction website, but it was not sold.
In 2020, perhaps because he was really desperate due to the debt, Hao Yuzhu sold the car to the current company in the form of selling first and then renting, totaling 280,000 yuan, and then paid monthly installments to regain the ownership of the car. However, the brother-in-law’s family questioned this.
“If he really mortgaged the car, why didn’t he tell me?”
In the family’s view, since Hao Yuzhu was a driver of the company, why didn’t the company come to the family to see what happened, and Hao Yuzhu’s funeral was not attended.
Before his death, Hao Yuzhu had called a truck friend and asked for 200 yuan. He told his friend:
I haven’t eaten for a day.
Later, the brother-in-law also learned that when the car broke down in the parking lot, Hao Yuzhu tried to drive someone else’s car to haul goods, intending to earn money to repair the car, but he didn’t succeed after many attempts.
This was his last effort.
Hao Yuzhu’s funeral was held at 11 a.m. on October 12. When he returned to Chifeng, he only had a handful of ashes. There were 20 to 30 people who saw him off, including his uncle, elders, and brother-in-law, sisters, and other relatives. The funeral cost several thousand yuan, mainly some wreaths and the like.
According to local tradition, the person who presided over the funeral burned a lot of burial objects for Hao Yuzhu:
Including a horse-drawn carriage.
Because he died in a foreign land, Hao Yuzhu could not be buried in the ancestral tomb, he could only be buried 100 meters away from the ancestral tomb. It’s also a coincidence that the person who presided over Hao Yuzhu’s funeral also presided over his father’s funeral last year.
In recent years, the freight business has not been easy to do. The total volume of freight transportation reached its peak in 2019 and then plummeted, from 4.16 billion tons in 2019 to 3.7 billion tons last year. At the same time, the freight competition is even more intense. The total tonnage of trucks increased from 108.27 million tons in 2011 to 170.99 million tons in 2021.
According to the statistics of the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, in July this year, the price of China’s road logistics transportation was even lower than during the epidemic last year. The freight rate from Anhui to Shanghai was even lower than 10 years ago. Some truck friends said that some short-distance freight even achieved five consecutive drops in the first half of this year. From 20 yuan per ton to 15 yuan per ton.
Now, a single trip can hardly make a profit, and drivers must ensure that they have goods coming and going to earn money. In the case of more cars and fewer goods, everyone also has to fight a price war in front of the cargo owners.
Even if everything goes smoothly, drivers also have to face rising oil prices, the tightening of law enforcement in some areas, and other problems.
Li Yun said that about one-third of the people in Hao Yuzhu’s team could not pay back their loans. Unlike a mortgage, once the car loan is stopped, the car will be confiscated. So many drivers have to go to the bank to talk about extensions.
I saw a driver running a green channel cold storage on Douyin, who ran 3,700 kilometers in 66 hours. The daily sleep time was only 4 to 5 hours.
According to the driver who found Hao Yuzhu on the spot, Hao Yuzhu’s car was tightly covered and also covered with a sunshade.
Perhaps, he just wanted to have a good rest.
Discover more from 自由档案馆
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.