In west duran village, what you see career are closely related to city operation – express stevedore, delivery, cleaner, mobile phone accessories shop assistant, airport ground, moving workers, they have no choice, most need intensive contact, the floating population to every corner of the city on take-out and delivery, carry passengers to various destinations, they contributed a lot to the flow of the city, but now will flow under cost. Jobs don’t last long. Many people work two or more jobs a day.
You have to keep working like a machine
The village of Sidulan in Shunyi is so small that if you try to walk, you can complete a circle in half an hour. More than 4,600 people live in the brick or cement houses, most of them migrant workers. At six o ‘clock every morning, they came out of the village in succession. Bai Xiaoguang is one of them. He takes his first order without breakfast and works until he can’t get it in the evening, usually around 22pm or even 23pm. One of his roommates works the night shift in a logistics park, and they barely see each other — he goes to work in the morning, his roommate comes home from work, and by the time he finishes at night, his roommate is gone.
In the last six months, these two professions have been in the news in a peculiar way: they appear in the itinerary of confirmed cases published by the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention. During the outbreak that spread from Xinfadi in June 2020, a delivery worker was confirmed to work from 7 am to 21 PM every day, receiving an average of 50 orders every day, and riding an electric bike to pick up his wife back home after work. In the epidemic in Shunyi at the end of December, a patient surnamed Wang worked in a trading company during the day and drove a forklift part-time in a large transfer market in Sf during the night from 12th to 19th. At 10 a.m. on December 20, he accompanied his wife, who had recently been discharged from the hospital, to the hospital for a second visit. That evening, he went to work on the transfer again. On The 21st, my wife joined the part-time job, working from 22pm to 2am. There was breathless exhaustion in a few lines of announcement.
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Residents queue for a nucleic acid test at a sampling site in Shunyi District, Beijing, on the afternoon of January 3, 2021
In The village of Sidullah, it was just a normal, contemporary life. At 3 a.m. on Dec. 26, the village was closed — the previous day, nucleic acid tests had tested positive for four people in The village, including the couple, who worked the night shift in Sf — and Bai Xiaoguang and his roommate, in a rare moment of idling. The same goes for 10 other workers in the house, who share a 120-square-meter rented room. Mr. Bai’s 1.5-meter bed is propped against a wall on one side, surrounded on both sides by adjoining screens, and propped against a table with paddles and a hot kettle on the other. The room was dark, and his personal belongings were nothing more than some personal belongings and a quilt.
Because he changes jobs so often, he has to move closer to his workplace almost every other year. His roommates do the same thing. “Some go away as soon as their faces are familiar, and they don’t know where they are,” said another migrant worker in Sidullah. The epidemic has made life even more precarious — with the closure of the village, Bai and his roommates have had time to chat and communicate, and have found that they won’t make much money in 2020. He returned to work later than usual, “in case of danger and trouble for the country”. He returned to Beijing, quarantted himself, and looked for a new job. “He might not hire or resume work, so he would work here or there for two days.” “It’s not easy to change jobs,” he says. “Temporary workers usually need nucleic acid tests and so on, and it’s going to be tough this year anyway.” When we settled down at the end of the year, we all worked hard and paid the rent to go home to see our children. The virus swept over us again and we were quarantined again, so we could not go back to work.
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Sealand after the closure of the village
In west duran village, what you see career are closely related to works of the city – express stevedore pancake fruit vendors, frequently, cleaner, mobile phone accessories shop assistant, airport, moving workers, they have no choice, mostly need intensive contact with floating population, they contributed a lot to the flow of the city, but now will flow under cost. Jobs don’t last long. Many people work two or more jobs a day. The patient, wang, who was working two jobs, would not have surprised Sidulan.
On Zhihu.com, many people asked whether they should go to the night shift because they were in debt or would not be able to pay the tuition for the next semester. The replies were all “No” and “It’s not something you can handle with mental preparation.” It was a job that was described as requiring “one day off for three days,” but the patient, surnamed Wang, once worked for 10 consecutive days.
The day job of the express delivery industry is to receive and deliver items. Every day at 5 or 6 o ‘clock, the trucks leave from the sales department and usually arrive at the transit area at 6 or 7 o ‘clock in the evening or even later. The next morning, before 6 o ‘clock, the van had to leave again for the next station. What happens in the middle is the work of the night shift workers: scanning, sorting, loading and unloading. There is silence during the day, lights are bright at night, and the great roar of the conveyor belt, the voice of the team leader or captain Shouting at his staff, and the sound of the reversing van make up the bustle of the transit area. In the summer, when the temperature is above 30 degrees, the ventilator is better than nothing, the water you drink turns to sweat, and the foul smell wafts through the air. In winter, Xiao Hong, who once worked part-time for a day, remembers that the transfer market was empty and draft-free. “It was very cold, so I had to work in my down jacket.”
Whatever you do, it’s repetitive in nature. You have to work like a machine. Wang’s forklift truck is more skilled and can earn 8-10 yuan more per hour. Bai’s roommate’s job is purely physical: people trapped in a van a few square meters, arranging the goods on a conveyor belt as sparingly as possible. (At large transfer stations, deliveries of more than 30 kg are common.) If you try to go to the toilet for a while, you’ll come back with a mountain of deliveries, even forcing the conveyor belt to stop working. People come and go here in cycles. Winter brother is a Beijing courier company transfer outsourcing labor company captain, even if a bad temper, he also keep in mind not to easily say harsh words to familiar face this rule, “as far as possible to keep it.” “A group of part-time workers have seen it today and tomorrow,” remembers Zhang Qiang, who worked as a manager at the Chengdu transit center. “The day after tomorrow, they are all new faces.”
There would be a meal in the middle of the night, which would be finished in ten minutes, and they would return to work. The second half of the night was the hardest, and it seemed as if the night would never end. I cut my hand on the edge of a sack or box, my shoulder ached, my back seemed to break, my thigh was senseless, and my will was crushed. Zhang Qiang remembers the expressions on the workers’ faces when they left work in the early morning, just like elementary school students after school. After the agent takes about 30%, the exhausting night is worth more than 200 yuan.
The next day, he went to work as usual
For many workers in Shunyi, it is not uncommon to take a part-time job in addition to your usual one to earn more money. Bai worked as a security guard for two companies at the same time — first as a regular employee from 8 am to 8 PM, staying one hour after work to eat and change clothes, and then as a part-time security guard in another building from 9 PM to 12 PM. The two jobs together earn 7,000 or 8,000 yuan a month, leaving just over 1,000 for himself and sending the rest to his wife in Hengshui, Hebei.
Zheng xiapeng, who also lives in West Tulane, had a stable job, working in marketing for a construction company with a salary of about 10,000 yuan. In April, when the construction industry was in bad shape and a large number of balance payments could not be collected, the company required its employees to be on duty for seven days a month with a half-salary. To support his family, he took a part-time job in a mask factory, 160 yuan a day.
He is 30 years old and has a plain face. He and his wife rent a 15-square-meter room for 1,000 yuan a month. The mask factory goes to work at 6:30 in the morning. Before the bus runs, he gets up at 4:30, leaves at 5 and walks for an hour to get to work. He recorded a video of himself saying to himself, “The early bird gets the worm. A good day starts with gas!”
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Zheng Xiapeng is on his way to work at a mask factory
On the first day, he was responsible for cutting off the rough edges of the mask. Two hours later, his right hand with scissors was red and swollen, and two large blisters appeared on the hands of other workers. At lunch time, he picked up the phone with his aching hand. It always seemed to be out of joint. At 2:30 p.m., he cut off 1,310 masks, which did not meet performance requirements. Some skilled workers could cut more than 4,000 masks. The supervisor warned him that he had cut a lot of masks and would have to pay a lot of money if he reported them. The next day, he was assigned to logo and box masks. It’s the same repetitive work. He and the rest of the team packed more than 200 boxes a day and were eventually told to count each piece separately. That night, he was fired by notice in the WeChat group, and the factory paid him 320 yuan.
He went to the wine sorting job at JD.com, where he was paid 8 cents for each piece, plus compensation if he broke a drink. He thought about it, but didn’t go. The short part-time life made him more clear about his goal, which was that he could never live on manual work in the future. The company resumed full operations in June, but has not yet been paid.
A cheerful young man, he talked in a lighthearted tone about “no salary for seven months.” Business at his wife’s study-abroad company was similarly lackluster and had not paid her salary for two months. They took out a loan to buy a house in Tianjin last year as a plan for their future children. “Try to raise the starting point a little bit higher,” they said. “We overestimated our ability at that time,” he said. He had read the university, for the future life is full of ambition, home to over 2000 dollars, and after graduation he is building technology worker before, but he think the mechanic ceiling is very low, despite the current income less in sales and marketing, but can often dealing with people in the big company, you can learn more knowledge, he believes that these things will come in handy in the future – even though he couldn’t say for sure what’s the use now.
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Xiao-guang bai
Bai Xiaoguang in high school alone does not have so many choices. In October, the security guard job on the night shift stopped hiring part-timers, and he dropped the first one. Seeing a co-worker making $9,000 a month, he set his sights on the same figure. Listen to people say that delivery to earn more, started the delivery, every morning at 6 o ‘clock to go out, do not eat breakfast directly began to deliver, until the evening to receive orders. In November, a community suddenly refused to let the battery car in. That day he had about 15 orders to deliver, but he had to run with the takeout. “After delivering, my hands and feet were all sour and I couldn’t move. I just thought I would never do it again. Yeah, I feel like I can’t do it anymore. I’m too tired.” But the next day, he went back to work as usual.
So far, two months of delivery income has not lived up to his expectations. In the eight years since he came to Beijing, he has worked as a waiter, lobby manager, traffic assistant and piecework in a hot-rolling mill. The 9,000 yuan still seems a long way off. Recently, he heard that there is a job called ancient architecture decoration, which is to put bricks and tiles on archaize buildings in parks. The income can reach 9,000 yuan. He thought that maybe he could have a try after unsealing. I found him on a short video App. During the closure of the village, his friends told him that if the conversion rate of shooting short videos was high, he could get some income. So he registered an account and occasionally patted it, saying, “There is no money, a dime or two.
Li Zhibo, the migrant worker, was lucky in a way. He is a temporary relocation worker, whose main business is to pack furniture for people who want to emigrate. His remuneration is also relatively high. He can earn 300 yuan for eight hours and 40 yuan for overtime work, which can bring him 8,000 to 9,000 yuan a month. This year, such jobs are rare, and he can only handle some office relocation, about 7,000 a month. But one of the biggest perks of moving for the group was that employers would order them a decent take-out meal after work, and one of the best he remembers was braised pork in brown sauce.
He delivered two boxes of instant noodles to a security guard at the entrance to the village
As of today, six villages in Shunyi district have been assessed as medium-risk areas by the Municipal CDC. A search for the villages’ names on short-video software shows workers snapping pictures of their own houses, several square meters wide and often with a messy background. One man from Dongma Gezhuang likes to lie in bed and talk to the camera. He writes, “I worked for nothing this year, but I’m still a good man. A woman from Donghai Hong village, who photographed the nucleic acid test, said she was homesick. “This year is so difficult. Let’s make some money to buy buns to eat.” In the daily necessities group of nearly 500 people in Sidulan Village, people would sigh “Life is easy, life is easy, life is not easy” between buying food, and someone replied, “All of us will be better, we have experienced the same, come on.”
People have repeatedly lowered their expectations of life. “It’s not easy to see what you can do in this year,” Mr. Li said. Zheng Xiapeng has been wanting to have a child, this year’s various situations let him retreat, the parents are elderly, wages do not pay, not on the mortgage, in July his wife was hospitalized to remove teratoma in the ovary, because of the epidemic, the hospital is not allowed to accompany the bed, he can only let his wife go to the hospital alone.
They recorded the separation on the night before the hospital admission with a video. His wife put toilet paper, water cups and a change of clothes into a black backpack. Zheng xiapeng looked into the camera and felt uneasy, “Since the doctor is not allowed to accompany the bed, it means the risk of operation must be very small.” He asked his wife, “Are you afraid?” She shook her head, joking to ease the tension. “It’s no use to the old man, ha ha ha.” At that time, his deepest feeling was, “We are the only people in this city who can hold each other up.”
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“A person go a person return, what mood?”
During the National Day holiday, he went back to his hometown zhangjiakou to help his parents harvest corn. At home, he harvested more than 20 mu of land, most of which was collected by machine. Seven or eight mu of scattered land had to be broken by hand. A few days ago, my father called, said the price of corn this year is good, more than 90 cents shot, sold more than 30,000, asked him, want to give him some money? He refused even though he had not received his salary for seven months.
Trapped at home, they now have a simpler wish: to feed themselves. Zheng Xiapeng and his wife in the village supermarket before the closure of some Onions, white gourd, sweet potato, cabbage, “no meat?” I asked. “We’re ok with meat. We don’t like it very much,” he replied. Bai’s roommates bought three boxes of instant noodles in the supermarket, which constituted their meals during the quarantine period. They had to budget carefully, “If they only eat one meal a day, they will cook three bags, and if they eat two meals, they will eat two bags for each meal.” The heating temperature in his house is about ten degrees, and the electric plate consumes a lot of power, so he seldom willing to turn it on.
On the evening of December 31, Li Zhibo decided that he had to eat something good for the New Year. He bought some pork, stewed it with potatoes, scrambled an egg, and made one or two old village elders “not drunk”. After dinner, he found a party on a video website and played a video to his wife. When he was tired, he fell asleep. Zheng is running out of food. The thermometer at home shows 16.3 degrees. He and his wife are wearing down jackets. At noon on the last day of the year, the two men cooked noodles in clear soup and ate no vegetables or eggs. In the evening, they welcomed the New Year with a pot of sweet potato porridge.
In times of trouble, they are still considerate of others. One 58town-based south French migrant worker declined our request for further interviews, but wrote in response, “It’s good that our test results are negative. It’s also innocent that we’re positive or close contacts.” Zheng xiapeng ordered 5 jin of bananas and 3 jin of oranges. When the bananas were delivered, they were all black. He stressed that “the staff is very hard, maybe there is too much stock.”
Li hopes we can help him find out how to donate money to the security guards who guard the village for them. “We still have the heat inside the house, and when we are comfortable, people are still on duty outside for us. It’s not easy for us to work outside. I think they are working very hard. Is there any telephone service? Or just donate cash or buy some supplies.” The next day, he delivered two boxes of instant noodles to a security guard at the entrance to the village.
Anyway, the New Year is here at last. 1 early in the morning, The west Dolan village to each family gave dumplings and dumplings, “finally have meat to eat”, Zheng Xiapeng regrets, he boiled two bags of pork shepherd’s purse dumplings, feeling like the lunar New Year, “the dumplings eat more than any time have a feeling. On The 3rd, the village issued another 300 yuan voucher to each person, who could go to the designated place to receive cash after being unsealed. Every New Year’s Day, Zheng Xiapeng and his wife would go to yonghegong Temple to pray for happiness. This year, they had to stay at home. His wife’s New Year’s wish was that the unpaid wages of the company could be paid as soon as possible.
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Zheng xiapeng and his wife are eating dumplings made in the village
His 8-year-old son is Li Zhibo’s spiritual anchor. Before call, the son always noisy ask, father when come back? Slowly, the question became, Is Dad finished? “It feels like the kids are growing up,” he said. He talked about the summer vacation in 2018, when his wife brought their son to Beijing to see him. They went to the aquarium to see a dolphin show, and the son took many pictures with dolphins excitedly. That night they did not return to The village of Siduran. Instead, they found a hotel nearby for two hundred dollars. The next day, they went boating at the Summer Palace and their son played happily in the water, which formed his shining memories of Beijing.
Novel Coronavirus is the New Year’s wish for his wife and child to be safe. Bai xiaoguang posted his year-end summary in a short video: “This year is also very sad, except for the epidemic, even the epidemic, every day there is no real job. In fact, I’m thinking that I won’t be in Beijing next year, and I’ll either have to find a job in my hometown or do something about it.” Immediately he thought of, the salary at home is not high, do small business customer flow is not good, “more headache”. Finally, he encouraged himself, “Come on next year when the epidemic is over!”
On the afternoon of January 1, the information Office of the municipal government held a press conference on epidemic prevention and control, calling on shunyi residents not to leave shunyi unless it is necessary to spend the Spring Festival in Shunyi. Seeing this news, Zheng Xiapeng said with his own humor that he wanted to give himself a song named “Cool Cool”. But Li Zhibo was full of sadness. He knew that if he did go home, he might have to go to the hotel for quarantine, and thousands of yuan would be gone. He was willing to answer the government’s call, but “My heart is sour, I don’t know how to tell my wife and children”.
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