A year without work

I once read an interview with Wutiaoren Band. Lead singer Renke said that they only started writing songs about Haifeng when they left their hometown of Haifeng. I think "time" is the same. We have to leave for a period of time before we can truly write about it.

It's like a year has passed since I didn't go to work. Only then did I start to feel it, and then I remembered to record something, record some touched moments while walking through the woods in summer and autumn, bitterness and even regret. moment. From this, I realized that it was no longer an ordinary day, but these days combined into a year of not working.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, China has been in lockdown for three full years. It has yet to fully adapt to the quietly opening up in 2023. Many people have not learned to use and state the facts that have already happened at this time. There is news that the Spring Festival holiday will be adjusted in 2024 and there will be no holiday on New Year's Eve. It first hit the hot search list, and public opinions filled with complaints flooded all major social media. Because I don't go to work, I no longer angrily curse this reality that is more terrifying than the passage of time itself. This sounds a bit mean and cunning, or like gloating, but it is obvious that my misfortune is something else, another year of unemployment. I just narrowly avoided this one, but one was bound to land on top of me.

In the last year of the lockdown, I traveled more than 2,000 kilometers from Tengchong, Yunnan, to Nanchang, Jiangxi. The number of nucleic acid tests I experienced in just one week exceeded the total number of nucleic acid tests I experienced in the two years in Yunnan. You don’t need to think about it, because I traveled thousands of miles to the hinterland of the motherland, which is closer to the political center than Yunnan. If the command of power is given, the city will follow at its own pace.

After living in Nanchang for a while, even if you walk into a shopping mall on a Monday, you will find young people wandering around everywhere, as if everyone is not working, or there is no class. I realized this early on, because at that time I was already suffering from the fate of unemployment and unpaid wages. Going out to eat on the street is to listen to young people in a hurry complaining that they don't have weekends and that overtime work is far more common and fierce than where I come from.

In fact, until then, I still held out hope that it would be enough to find a job that could support my future, or to survive barely. But the limit of self-depletion reaches earlier than in the future. We have no reason to believe that we are the lucky ones. If we look around a little, we will find that everyone is falling at full speed, sooner or later. So we returned to the county seat. The future was once again thought of in a conversation so solemn that we thought of leaving the country.

In August this year, a friend returned to Yunnan from Shenzhen and stopped by Jiangxi to meet him. He is my classmate in the journalism department and a fellow from Yunnan. After he was also owed wages, he chose to leave Yunnan and look for opportunities outside. Later, I went to work for a media company in Shenzhen. Almost as soon as the lockdown was lifted, I was thrown into a wave of layoffs in companies. He was an upright and kind person, so much so that he gave up the final struggle and entanglement with cunning, but he also left the sad place almost in embarrassment.

He said he might continue to look for a job after the Chinese New Year. I thought of our parents who migrated to the city to work. They used to be called migrant workers. At first, they would go to the city to work after the busy farming season was over. They would come back near the end of the year and wait for the new year to find a job again. They would only be able to do manual labor. Later, farming was also abandoned, because nothing could be grown at all, and it was impossible to keep up with the rapid changes in modern cities. In order to survive and raise future generations, I had to repeat this kind of life year after year, devoting all my youth and strength to City. As their next generation, we also left Yunnan in a similar way. We left a small place, got a job in a big city, and suffered layoffs within a year and a half. We comforted ourselves by going home to celebrate the New Year, and then looking for a job after the New Year, and the cycle started again. Does this mean that we are just repeating the path our parents took to work in the city?

We are migrant workers in the new era. I heard even sadder stories from my friends. They were still our classmates in the journalism department. After graduation, they handed out flyers in the gym and worked in a furniture cleaning company. They broke their arms and had to leave their jobs without receiving any compensation. compensation. My friend said that he miraculously met this classmate on the train and had the opportunity to talk about these experiences. I imagined their chance reunion in the noisy carriage, so similar to when our parents went into town. The time on the train has remained unchanged for decades in China.

Not long after that, I saw the situation of a friend who was working in the media industry in Beijing. She was forced by the company and hoped to leave her job voluntarily. This has become a common phenomenon in China. Companies want to lay off employees to protect themselves, but do not want to pay compensation as promised, so they often exert despicable pressure to get employees to resign.

Is the time of our graduation special? It just so happened to be the beginning of the pandemic. But looking back at that time, it was already the best year. After I graduated, I found a job easily. After I got out of that job, I even got unemployment insurance while I was looking for my next job. Although it was insignificant, it showed that society was barely functioning.

But later on, I saw with my own eyes that my younger sister had not found a job since graduation; in order to avoid employment, the children of my relatives stayed at home and "gnawed at their old age" under the pretext of "taking the public examination, editing and postgraduate entrance examination". Even my friends who graduated at the same time as me chose a second degree, or went to graduate school, and then went on to study for a Ph.D.—they admitted that they were afraid of not finding a good job.

When the official youth unemployment rate reached 20%, the Central Bureau of Statistics announced a suspension of publication. According to accurate estimates from Caixin, China's youth unemployment rate has reached as high as 46.5% as early as March 2023.

This is not a year I endured and wasted alone, we are all still in it. Only by using time as an interval can we briefly separate them, so we can identify what kind of year this is.

And looking at those individuals who are still moving, this year is: furloughs, salary reductions, bonus cancellations, bus suspensions, a county's financial debt is evenly distributed to every citizen, and each person has to spend 500,000 to make up for it. vacancy. Unexplained infrastructure construction is still going on. Some people even discovered that temporary hospitals for epidemic prevention are still being built earlier. Such massive condemnation failed to follow up.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything beautiful, the world is at war, and I’m unemployed at home. Seeing everything may collapse, relying on nostalgia to connect the past and the future. We are a weak, fragile generation.