At the Guanghan snack street at eleven o’clock at night, I was slurping ice jelly when a hurried voice suddenly came from behind me: “Where’s my rabbit head?” Turning around, I saw a man in black squatting beside a trash can, rummaging through it. The boss helped look for more than ten minutes without finding it, and the man muttered, “It was on the table,” his tone gloomy. I casually suggested, “You can’t eat it even if you find it, I’ll treat you to a new one.” He was stunned for a moment and sat down across from me—later I learned that this man, who said he was “born in ’88 and was eliminated by society,” was surnamed Ren and had been unemployed for 18 months.
How long can one million yuan last?
Xiao Ren is from Hebei. Unemployed in 2024, he held on in Shenzhen for a month.
In the first half of that month, Xiao Ren put all his energy into submitting resumes. He spent most of his days lying in bed, using his phone to look for jobs. From morning till night, the pedometer showed no more than five hundred steps. At that time, Xiao Ren still maintained a sense of self-discipline, fearing that if he slowed down a little, he wouldn’t be able to survive in Shenzhen.
At around ten o’clock in the morning, Xiao Ren went downstairs to pick up his takeout, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. Within three minutes of entering the elevator, a neighbor who lived two floors below, leading a dog, walked in and asked him in surprise why he was taking a day off today? Xiao Ren said he had something to do and had taken leave. When he got back home with the takeout, he found that his back and armpits were covered in sweat.
Xiao Ren was afraid of becoming someone who, in the eyes of others, “couldn’t make it.”
Half a month later, seeing that there was no response to his resume submissions, Xiao Ren decisively chose to deliver takeout. At that time, although Xiao Ren was anxious, he hadn’t yet reached the point of lowering his dietary standards. He had to drink water that cost more than two yuan per bottle, and eat meals that cost more than thirty yuan per serving, “It’s too cheap and devalues me.” After five days, after deducting the money for food and drink and renting an electric scooter, he earned a total of thirty yuan. He still used someone else’s account to try out the job. Xiao Ren, filled with anger, seemed to have only one path left: to return to his hometown in Hebei.
Xiao Ren didn’t want to go back to Hebei; he liked the South, where life was rich, and he could go to bookstores, cafes, or the seaside when he had time. What was there in his hometown in Hebei? His weekend rest would probably be filled with his parents’ pressure to get married and take the civil service exam.
Xiao Ren spent three or four days making a decision: to conceal his unemployment and continue to stay in the South. Supporting this decision also included a careful calculation: his annual income in Shenzhen was around 350,000 yuan. He could give his parents 100,000 yuan each year, and he could still save about 120,000 yuan. Adding it up, he also had a million yuan in savings.
“For a while, I was my parents’ pride.” Xiao Ren felt that he had given enough back to his parents. Not just financially, but also spiritually. His parents often told their neighbors that their son worked in Shenzhen and had an annual income of hundreds of thousands of yuan.
Next, he wanted to find a place that could make this money support his life as much as possible. The first place he thought of was Chengdu.
Chengdu, however, disappointed Xiao Ren somewhat. First of all, housing was expensive. With a rent of two or three thousand yuan a month, it would be okay if he had a job. But living on savings was a bit scary. Before leaving Chengdu, besides spending two days in the city, he decided to go to Sanxingdui. The museum had always been a place Xiao Ren liked.
Sanxingdui is in Guanghan. After visiting the museum, Xiao Ren hadn’t decided where to go next, so he casually glanced at the rent in Guanghan, and a single room in an old house was only 400 yuan. Although the community was old, there was a second-hand air conditioner in the house.
Xiao Ren’s rented house. Now he has moved to another place, which is brighter. The toilet is next to this room, and the monthly rent is 550 yuan.
Rent was originally the largest part of his daily expenses. With a rent of 400 yuan, Xiao Ren could control his monthly expenses to between 900 and 1000 yuan. This meant that, without getting sick, Xiao Ren could live for at least fifty or sixty years, and he wouldn’t have to worry about being asked, “Why aren’t you working?”
At that time, it had been almost two months since he lost his job, and Xiao Ren still had a strong sense of purpose. His thinking was still accustomed to breaking down his expenses into each month and even each day in order to achieve the goal of “not letting his savings be overdrawn.” Xiao Ren didn’t realize this at the time; at this moment, he said to me in a joking tone, “This is the typical ox-horse mentality that has been trained.”
His days in Guanghan began with learning to be lazy. When Xiao Ren was in Shenzhen, he almost had to consider what to wear every day, even if he had to work overtime or attend social events and didn’t get home until the early hours of the morning, he would still wash and dry his clothes. Xiao Ren didn’t have many clothes, and they were all trendy brands, and he had to wear different outfits every day, which could only make him work hard.
Before he left Shenzhen, he got rid of his shirts, suits, and leather shoes, and kept his casual wear and sneakers from big brands. There was a pair of slim-fit trousers he bought for eight hundred yuan to match his loafers, but they were stained with coffee from the tea room after wearing them twice. He didn’t want to bother with dry cleaning, so he threw them directly into the bottom of the closet, and only found out they were moldy when he was getting rid of them. In Guanghan, he didn’t need to work and didn’t have many acquaintances. Xiao Ren could wear clothes for a week without washing them, as long as they didn’t smell of sweat.
But Xiao Ren also had a period of rapid decline in Guanghan. When he was delivering takeout in Shenzhen, he still felt like he was striving, and he had to eat and drink “decently.” When he got to Guanghan, Xiao Ren couldn’t help but start to be thrifty: he tried not to buy bottled water and boiled tap water to drink. He also started to cook for himself.
After Xiao Ren accidentally broke the glass cup he used for brushing his teeth, he was both angry and resentful, resenting his bad luck. He simply used a mineral water bottle for a while. A few days later, in the morning, without his glasses, Xiao Ren, with his eyes half-closed, went to brush his teeth and knocked the mineral water bottle to the ground. At that moment, Xiao Ren actually felt a pang of heartache, and then a shock, “How could I have fallen to the point of feeling heartache for a used mineral water bottle?” What’s the difference between a life dominated by fear in Guanghan and a life dominated by anxiety in Shenzhen!
That day, Xiao Ren went to the Bailun Department Store in Guanghan and bought a ten-yuan resin cup, which was clean and comfortable to use. Xiao Ren said that he “opened up at that moment.”
Don’t block my sunshine
At five o’clock in the morning, on the walking path of Jinyan Lake Park, Xiao Ren ran hard for a few minutes, panting. He switched to walking. More and more people were around him, and everyone was running hard. Getting up early to run had become a consensus for “urbanites” from an unknown time. Even in Guanghan, many people lived “active” and “regular” lives. Xiao Ren had just managed to let go of his anxiety about spending money, but he still couldn’t escape the propaganda about the so-called “good state of life” he got from various channels.
The Duck River at night
Running is a kind of self-expression. Most people’s equipment is in good shape, with headphones, sweatbands, professional clothes and shoes, and the trajectory and route of the run generated on their phones… Xiao Ren felt a bit of an anomaly. After running for four days, Xiao Ren felt that something was missing. He used to post on Moments after running, and he felt a little joy in his heart when he saw his colleagues’ likes. In his current life, there were no more big promises from the boss, nor the insincere praise from his colleagues.
Xiao Ren pondered while staring at the running shoes on his feet, which were a bit worn out and not so comfortable to wear. He considered buying a pair of professional running shoes and saw that the online price was nearly two thousand yuan. In the past, he would have felt a brief pain and then placed an order, always feeling that he could earn the money back. Now, it wasn’t just a matter of money, “Am I running to make others envy me and think I’m healthy, or am I running to make myself comfortable?”
Now that he had no income, he had more time. Xiao Ren found that many track and field athletes online wore a brand called Duowei, and a pair of shoes cost around two hundred yuan, and they were said to last for five or six years without breaking. Xiao Ren suddenly felt that so-called professionalism was just a commercial trick for ordinary people. Shoes that cost two hundred yuan felt just as comfortable on his feet as shoes that cost two thousand yuan.
“Why did I become a philosopher!” Xiao Ren said to me in a half-joking tone. Running, buying shoes, equipment… Xiao Ren felt for the first time that he had been seriously domesticated, a type that had been trained by modern civilization to be what businesses wanted. “To put it bluntly, it’s about using some concepts to brainwash us first. Professional is good, running more is healthy, and so on. Then let us consume.” Xiao Ren was a little happy about this discovery.
But it will take some time to completely break away from “consumption-driven.” Xiao Ren’s phone had been used for five years, and he had bought the mini version at the time, and it had been bumped many times in the past few years. Recently, it started to crash, and the battery also drained quickly. Apple 17 came out, and Xiao Ren started to look at Apple 13, a second-hand one. He told his good friend about it, and his friend advised him to get the latest model, but Xiao Ren was still hesitant, “A phone that can make calls and see information is enough, I don’t need the new features, there’s no need to spend money on things I don’t need.”
Xiao Ren gained an ability to distinguish “things he doesn’t need.” Besides the expensive running shoes and phone, this also included the books he liked to read. This was the only hobby Xiao Ren had retained from his student days. He used to buy them online, and they were generally not expensive, twenty or thirty yuan a book. Now, he would first go to the community library to read, and only buy second-hand ones if he really liked them. The result was that after reading most of the books, he didn’t want to buy them.
When it came to food, Xiao Ren no longer thought that the discounted meals in the shopping mall were cost-effective, and he started to eat instant noodles seriously. Speaking of instant noodles, Xiao Ren was full of excitement and even wanted to demonstrate how to cook noodles for me at this fried hot pot restaurant. I hurriedly declined, “I’m already full.” He seemed to be showing off, “My noodles have vegetables and eggs, and I can also add shrimp balls, which are very nutritious.” “Won’t it be unhealthy to eat like this all the time?” I was a little puzzled. Xiao Ren told me that when he was in Shenzhen, he also felt wronged by himself: everyone around him was talking about how to eat better, and he ate instant noodles all day?
But now, after eating it for more than a year, Xiao Ren felt very comfortable. Anyway, there was nothing urgent to do, so he used a small electric pot to cook noodles or cook multigrain porridge. “When I was in Shenzhen, I would hide in the house when I ate instant noodles, for fear that others would see me and say, ‘Why are you so miserable?’ Now I eat under the skylight, and it’s so comfortable when the wind blows!” In Xiao Ren’s eyes, eating instant noodles wasn’t “wronged,” it was “I want to eat.”
“Commercialization always makes us feel that ‘having’ is happiness, but ‘being comfortable using’ is more important.” Xiao Ren said that he finally understood the dialogue between Diogenes and Alexander the Great. When Alexander asked Diogenes what he needed, Diogenes replied, “Don’t block my sunshine.”
Turning oneself into an orphan
In Guanghan, what woke Xiao Ren up in the morning was, in most cases, the sunshine, and in some cases, his parents’ nagging. When Xiao Ren first arrived in Guanghan, he slept very well. After half a month, the calls from Xiao Ren’s parents increased, and Xiao Ren’s dreams also began to increase.
“You just don’t want to suffer.” After Xiao Ren’s parents said several times, “The children of the neighbors are all married” and “Your elementary school classmates are all having second children,” the old couple also learned internet slang and used it on their son. “Every time they call, they ask me two questions, one is why I don’t get married properly? The other is why I don’t find a job properly? Finally, they just say, you’re living too wildly now.” Xiao Ren smiled wryly, “I feel like I have ‘parental phobia’ now.”
The Hebei province where Xiao Ren grew up was particularly competitive. Although the high school he attended was not Hengshui No. 2 High School, the competition was comparable. When Xiao Ren first went to university, he finished his lunch in fifteen minutes. A Beijing student in the same dormitory asked him why he ate so quickly? Xiao Ren said that he had already eaten very slowly, and he used to finish his lunch in three minutes in high school, and he had to memorize words while eating. Once, he ate too quickly and choked so hard that he stomped his feet. But Xiao Ren’s parents said that this was a sign of hard work.
This kind of competition continued until Xiao Ren came to Shenzhen to work. It was even worse than his life in Hebei. Xiao Ren became the project team leader after a year of hard work. As the representative of the B party, he not only had to fully cooperate with the needs of the A party, but also had to provide emotional value. Once, the A party flew over to communicate about the project and raised many questions that needed Xiao Ren to take the lead in adjusting, and the completion time given was five o’clock the next afternoon. Xiao Ren was a little embarrassed and told the A party that he wouldn’t go to the dinner party that night. The A party’s face changed, “It seems that we have found many problems, and you are not satisfied!” Xiao Ren was thinking that he had already done three-fifths of the work, and if he made the A party unhappy at this time, the acceptance in the future would probably not go smoothly. Xiao Ren couldn’t let go of his work, and he had to put on a smile on his face and attend the dinner party. After drinking in a daze, he stayed up all night with his brothers to adjust the data and the follow-up processing plan.
Thinking of this, Xiao Ren was not suffering in Guanghan. Without income and without being passively competitive, this was a luxury and relaxation for him. He didn’t have to rush to finish his meal, nor did he have to rush to do anything. He could eat a meal for an hour.
Xiao Ren gave up all the previous “active lifestyles.” He no longer rushed to run in the morning, and even if he woke up, he could lie in bed for another half an hour, or even an hour. It was best to lie in until after ten o’clock, and he could eat breakfast and lunch directly.
But exercise couldn’t be less. Xiao Ren still had a gym membership card from Shenzhen, and now he had changed his fitness routine to a combination of park walks and push-ups. The only person who knew about Xiao Ren’s situation was a university classmate and fellow townsman. The university classmate stayed in Beijing to work, and it only took a little over an hour by high-speed rail to get to his hometown in Hebei. The two of them used to say “meet at the summit” to encourage each other, but now this university classmate said that Xiao Ren had completely given up. Xiao Ren didn’t reply, and after a while, he deleted the chat records of the two of them.
“Living wildly” and “giving up,” Xiao Ren couldn’t control others’ evaluations of him. Now, his standard for judging the state of his own well-being was condensed into two things: monthly expenses and weight. After arriving in Guanghan, Xiao Ren lost fifteen pounds. The fat on his waist also decreased, and the money on his account book didn’t increase. He believed that this was a reward from his body, “Eat well, sleep well, and don’t overdo it even when exercising.”
His parents still kept calling him to go home. But Xiao Ren often treated himself as an orphan. Once, his mother asked him why he didn’t say anything after a few words when she called him. Xiao Ren joked that he had set a standard for himself, not to speak more than five hundred sentences a day.
“You’re crazy!” After his mother said that, she hung up the phone angrily. Xiao Ren thought that he was just not living the way most people do. But why was he living so comfortably?
Xiao Ren’s photos of the streets of Guanghan day and night
No longer rushing for time
“I beg you.” A week later, Xiao Ren answered his father’s call and heard this sentence. Xiao Ren’s father had not spoken to Xiao Ren for more than three months because his son had not returned to Hebei and had gone to Shenzhen to work. It wasn’t until Xiao Ren’s first remittance of 10,000 yuan arrived that the father and son re-established contact. But this time, his parents used threats and scolding, and Xiao Ren still hid far away. He didn’t even tell his parents which city he was in. His father softened.
Xiao Ren held the phone, feeling a little sad. What he wanted was not to force his father to lower his posture. His father’s tone changed from pleading to impatience, “What do you want! Don’t take the right path, you have to take these unmotivated paths!” His father’s voice cracked when he said the last few words. Xiao Ren couldn’t help but laugh. His father hung up the phone in anger. That night, his mother sent a message asking Xiao Ren to go home and see, saying that his father was upset by him and his heart was not feeling well.
Xiao Ren hesitated for a moment and still made a video call. The first time, his mother didn’t answer. The second time, it was still hung up. Xiao Ren knew that his parents were just deceiving him. “If it was a mistake the first time, then the second time should have been answered too. Not answering means one thing, that my father is not in any serious trouble.” In Xiao Ren’s view, they just wanted him to go home.
The calls from his parents began to decrease in the sixth or seventh month after Xiao Ren arrived in Guanghan. They seemed to realize Xiao Ren’s determination. After his parents’ calls decreased, Xiao Ren woke up every day and looked at the empty room. In Shenzhen, he was urged by KPIs and dinner parties every day, and he felt that “freedom” was a luxury; now that he was truly free, he didn’t know what to do.
At around eleven o’clock in the morning, Xiao Ren walked into the community and found a notice for a free community health checkup posted on the wall. Xiao Ren’s heart moved. When he got to the community, he learned that the free health checkup was only for the elderly, and he still needed to go to the hospital for a checkup.
Xiao Ren followed the doctor’s instructions and had all the basic items checked, which cost seven hundred yuan. Xiao Ren took the report to see the doctor, and the doctor said that his blood lipids had decreased a lot compared to last year. He smiled and said, “Now I eat ‘earthy flavors,’ but it’s more nourishing than the ‘refined meals’ before.” The doctor saw that there were not many patients and chatted with him for a few words. “Young man, are you in Guanghan yourself? You still need to make some friends, and a good mood can also make your body better!” The doctor’s words touched Xiao Ren.
If he were in Shenzhen, or in his hometown in Hebei, Xiao Ren would probably not be happy to hear this. Making friends was a private matter, why should a doctor make a suggestion? But in Guanghan, Xiao Ren found that this suggestion was quite important to him. In the past, in order to report on a project, he would get off the subway, carry his laptop, and run two or three hundred meters with gritted teeth, and his shirt would be soaked in sweat. When he sat in front of the customer, he would sneeze several times because of the air conditioning, and the customer’s face would show displeasure, as if these sneezes were a huge mistake. Now, living here alone, he no longer rushed for time.
Without chasing, it seemed like he had no goals, and the whole person seemed to have lost his rules and discipline. “It’s like a horse that has been artificially trained for so many years, and it has to pull cargo every day when it opens its eyes, and it has a destination. Now, suddenly, there is no cargo, and there is no destination, and instead, I don’t know what to do.”
At this time, the doctor suggested that he make friends, and Xiao Ren understood it as a way to allow himself to find the concept of time again. For example, he could arrange to meet with a netizen at a certain time and place, and walk or have a drink together. Occasionally, he could also make himself rush for time.
Once, Xiao Ren arranged to meet a girl he had been chatting with for almost a week. The girl “suddenly remembered” and asked, “What kind of work do you do?” Xiao Ren answered honestly, “I haven’t been working recently.” Before they parted, Xiao Ren asked if they could arrange another time to meet, and the girl’s answer was, “Let’s wait for later!” This was an answer that seemed vague but was actually clear.
Xiao Ren made it his goal to go to the Guanghan library regularly. He put on his bag and wore clean clothes, just like he used to when he went to work. But he didn’t have to rush for the subway, didn’t have to make reports, and didn’t have to look at the customer’s face. The library was full of retired elderly people, and Xiao Ren sat among them reading books. Suddenly, he felt that this was the “freedom” he wanted: not being idle, but having a regular but not oppressive life; not being unmanaged, but managing himself. Xiao Ren thought, is he retired too?
The author treated Xiao Ren to night market coffee, which he couldn’t bear to drink usually, so he took a photo to commemorate it
After finding his so-called goal, life itself became the most important part of Xiao Ren’s heart again. Xiao Ren saw a TV show from a long time ago online, and in one scene, a crane was injured and healed by people. When it was about to be released back into nature, the crane lingered on the ground for a long time, seeming to be afraid of nature. But after a long time, the crane finally took off, circled the people’s heads a few times, and then spread its wings and flew away.
Xiao Ren stared at the screen, feeling like a domesticated animal, and now he needed to return to the wild world.
Discover more from 自由档案馆
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.