Unlike traditional cafes, you can tell from the name that these are places where you pay to study, and a good portion of them have the word “dream” in their names. –Build a dream study room, dream study room, dreaming study room …… Except that dreams and reality are often a pair of seemingly disparate brothers. In an era when competition is encouraged and companies are pursuing a culture of hustle, the large number of new paid study rooms means that more people need to recharge their batteries to be more competitive.
In a sense, they want to make their uncertain lives a little more certain through self-directed learning.
1
Reality lies ahead for Chen Zhibin.
“There’s only one chance. “At the end of the first day of the exam, Chen Zhibin went to the paid study room without dinner to prepare for the next day’s professional course exam. He studied here for three months. It was 9 p.m. when I met him in Zhongguancun, Haidian District, Beijing, and I don’t know if it was because he was nervous before the exam or because the study room was hot, but he was sweating.
The reason why he said there is only one chance is because he is 28 years old in the north, “I can only continue to look for a job if I can’t take the exam”. He previously did java programming, resigned three months ago, the pressure to support the family and raise a 1-year-old son all on his wife’s head. The wife’s income is also not high, this time to support him to study.
This year, as many as 3.77 million people took the exam, the proportion of former students rose significantly, and even in some universities occupy 60%. It is not uncommon for people like him to work for seven years after graduation and then turn around and go to graduate school.
This paid study room season card of 2800 yuan is not a small amount for him. The child was born last year at this time. Before that, he and his wife were crammed into a room with a rent of more than 2,000 yuan. When the child was about to be born, he changed to a one-bedroom apartment of more than 60 square meters, “not wanting him to see a very small house when he opened his eyes,” even though the rent had to rise three times for this reason. With his son in the same room, it was impossible to focus on his studies, and he desperately needed to find a quiet place to study. After trying various cafes one after another, he found a paid study room three months ago.
Anyone who has seen the Korean drama “Please Answer 1988” should know what a paid study room looks like. The study room Chen Zhibin chose is on the 6th floor of an office building, and at night the whole office building is dark, but the room is lit up. The frosted glass door of the study room has five words written on it – “Professional Study Room”. But measuring whether a paid study room is professional or not is a difficult task, as there are no uniform standards since the niche industry emerged in 2019.
The main focus of this study room is to study in a dark room, highlighting the word “dark”. The first time you push the door open, it’s like going into a dark tunnel. The only place where people study is a yellow light, like the light at the end of the tunnel.
This little light is a metaphor for “hope”.
The year 2020 is difficult, this class of young people will be how hard to fight. The number of similar paid study rooms is now growing exponentially. Fan Yingzhi, founder of “Zhijima Study Room” on Zhongguancun Venture Street in Haidian District, has made a statistic. Six months ago I found that there were 1,400 paid study rooms nationwide, but now there are more than 2,900. “
Unlike traditional cafes, you can tell from the names that these are places where you pay to study, and a good portion of them have the word “dream” in their names –Build a dream study room, dream study room, dreaming study room …… except that dreams and reality are often a pair of seemingly separated brothers. In an era when competition is encouraged and companies are pursuing a culture of hustle, the large number of new paid study rooms means that more people need to recharge their batteries to be more competitive.
In a sense, people are trying to make their uncertain lives a little more certain through self-directed learning.
Learning is a rather general concept. To put it more finely, there are studies for graduate school and certification, and there are also people who study for IELTS and TOEFL abroad, or sprint for final exams …… anything as if it is tainted with the word “exam”. The word “test”, you have to go to learn it.
At 9:00 on the 26th night, in addition to Chen Zhibin, there are four people struggling in this study room. One is a doctor of Beihang who is thinking about the subject, one is a middle school girl who is preparing for TOEFL, one is a boy who is brushing up on “Xue Ruisi Peiyu”, and one girl who is preparing for an interview with an internet company. A girl was preparing for an interview with an Internet company. On this night, five strangers gathered in the same study room to read at night and become companions to motivate each other. They would study until the study room closed at 10:30 p.m. and then leave.
In order to seize the only opportunity to compete from this year’s 3.77 million people to study for the exam, Chen Zhibin fought. 3 months, he did not rest a day, studying for more than 10 hours a day. In the gaps of the dense notes, he wrote two words “Nirvana”. Especially this year, the number of people studying for the exam is at an all-time high, and two-thirds of them will be eliminated. If he fails, for him, “the worst outcome is to live the same life as before”.
How much crisis in his previous life drove him to study.
**2
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There are various reasons for going to self-study, and a significant portion of them are feeling the squeeze from the outside world.
“I’ve been in Beijing for three years and have put in one or two thousand resumes. “Chen Zhibin has an inch cut, wears black-rimmed glasses, and speaks in a calm tone. He may have been numb. According to this amount, in 3 years he has to cast an average of one or two resumes every day. In Beijing, basically all the Internet companies that can be named have received his resume, only to turn him down.
“Effort is not always rewarded. ” he concluded.
His first attempt to change his fate was to take a college entrance exam and choose a part-time undergraduate degree. The lesson was painful – because in the face of a part-time undergraduate degree, many employers probably wouldn’t even look at it. In one case, after easily passing the initial resume screening and passing four rounds of interviews, he was holding the pen ready to sign the contract before HR said, “Your education does not meet the requirements. If you don’t meet the requirements, why didn’t you say so during the interview? He was going to theorize, but thought it wouldn’t help.
“After all, you don’t meet anyone else’s standards. ” he said.
Studying for the exam was the only way he could think of.
On the night of the 26th, I also met another girl who had been looking for a job for a year, and she came to the paid study room for self-study java and transition to an Internet company. She had previously studied business administration at a second-tier school, and the jobs she found after graduation were all in sales. Coming to Beijing for almost a year, she hadn’t heard of Houjian Village. After the factory village of Baidu, Tencent, Sina and other large Internet companies, she did not cast a resume, “my education does not work”.
That night, she was preparing for an interview with a small 20-person company, and was reluctant to go back until late at night. Her roommate likes to shop online and has more than 10 couriers delivered to her home every day. Staying at home jobless, she had a feeling of “being destroyed by life”, as her roommate went to work and she had to open the door, collect the delivery, say thank you and close the door over and over again.
Not all stories are as frustrating as this. In the vortex of competition, the desire to excel is the same. To win the battle, there are minors who go to paid study rooms, such as Cheng Sha, who just graduated from a top key Beijing high school.
It was last year, and she was in her senior year of high school. At that high school’s international department, every student was preparing for study abroad. They finished school at 4 p.m., and “the only thing that could make a difference was the time after school. She tried studying at home, where the walls were pink and the bed was across from her desk, and she “always wanted to lie down on it. A 100-day planner hung on the wall next to the bed, and the glue on the back of the paper dried and came off, symbolizing the failure of studying at home. Since then, she has also become a regular visitor to the paid study rooms.
If the total amount of resources is limited, then competitors who are in the middle of it will inevitably get into white-hot competition. Classmates are also in competition with each other, and whoever participates in social practice activities has to keep it a secret from the other one, “or else they lose their competitiveness, because these have to be written in the application materials This is known in international student circles as “social practice”. This is called “black activity” in the international student circle. It is impossible to guess what activities your classmates are participating in, so the result is that everyone has to participate in as many activities as possible.
She got caught up in it and could not help herself.
Similar to “black activities” is “black standardization This refers to the need to hide standardized test scores from others, such as TOEFL scores. In order to get the desired TOEFL score, she took the test four times, and some other students took it six times. Since each person didn’t know how much the other person had scored, each person repeatedly went to the test, like participating in a running race where they couldn’t see each other’s tracks. Finally, the 4th time, Cheng Sha scored 112 out of 120, which was high enough to apply to the top 5 schools in the U.S., before she finally felt relieved.
She said it was thanks to the hard work put into the paid study room.
**3
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Everyone will have a lot to say about competition. The group that paid for the study room had a surprisingly consistent attitude: finding a job was uncertain, and studying was probably the only thing that could be certain.
There is no more competitive place than school and the workplace. This means that paid study rooms usually open near universities and in areas with dense office buildings. Beijing’s Zhongguancun is a special place that has grown the largest number of paid study rooms in Beijing because it has both. If you draw a circle with the Zhongguancun subway station as the center and a radius of 2 km, there are at least 7 study rooms.
Zhijima Study” is located on Zhongguancun Venture Street. In the minds of some entrepreneurs, this street can be said to be a “holy place”. Fan Yingzhi, 24, was one of the first entrepreneurs to open a paid study room on the street, as reported in the Beijing Daily, which has incubated 3,451 teams in five years. In addition to Beijing, Shanghai and Xi’an have more than 80 paid study rooms, while Shenyang has the most in the country with 137.
Two years ago, when he was still a senior at Beijing University of Technology and Business, he joined a few of his university classmates to open a 24-hour bookstore called “October” on Venture Street. Several times, when he saw people studying overnight in the bookstore, he ran over to them and asked them if they were either taking the exam or studying for it. The result of external competition on a person is that people try to improve their education and take various certificates, lest they fall behind. Especially in 2019, investors tightened their money bags, Internet makers laid off employees one after another, and the coldness of “winter” spread, so more and more people came here to study, and the bookstore There were not enough seats to sit.
Fan Ying Yi slapped his thigh, why not open a paid study room?
It took five minutes to walk from Peking University to Venture Street. Fan Yingzhi’s team investigated the study rooms and libraries in nearby universities: first, there were no outlets, and second, they couldn’t grab a seat. The library on campus is a carrot and a pit, and you have to rely on inheritance to grab it. “When I saw that my sister was graduating, I rushed to ask her if I could inherit the seat to her”.
In a sense, this street is also a microcosm of the times. In the entrepreneurial street, garage coffee is a landmark, people come here not to drink coffee, but to “talk about the project”. Some people have no money in their wallets, but they also come to pursue their dreams. Waiting until 2017, the entrepreneurial fever waned, to the street, the taste has changed a bit, the street can see small ads like banners – to help people find investment, charging service fees. Then in 2019, it’s even harder to find investment, and even the banners are gone.
December 26, 2020 was a Saturday, and at 3 p.m., there were almost no pedestrians on Venture Street. In contrast to the coldness of the whole street, Fan Yingzhi’s paid study room was full of people.
Everyone who couldn’t grab a library seat, those who were quarreled by their dormitory roommates, those who took the exam again after working, and those who needed to use the computer during self-study …… used to be scattered in cafes and McDonald’s, but now they can go to the paid study room.
“I hope this is an island where people come to study and will feel they are not alone. That’s why he named the paid study room “Island of Knowledge,” Fan said. “.
4
Despite the brutal competition, there is a warm side between people.
Basically, you can’t see any study room with a score lower than 4 on Popular Review. What can people expect from a study room? There are tables and chairs, not too messy, not too noisy, just. When one guy found a paid study room, he was like discovering a new land, “Finally, I found a place where I can’t smell coffee”.
No matter how luxurious the study room is decorated, what people really need is company. Even people who have been studying together all day at the same table and don’t know each other may get encouragement from each other. In the study room at Zhijima, there was a guestbook, and a girl with the pen name “Bunny” left a message. “Hello next door, sorry for leaving a message on your note, after writing it, I remembered that I shouldn’t have …… encourage you! “A day later, the rabbit received a reply:” rabbit shoes hello ah, I’m sorry so late to see your reply, cheer! “Signed Sun Tuo Tuo.
Paid study rooms have their own characteristics, but one by one, the message wall is essential. Standing under the message wall, looking at the dense wish and inspirational words, will feel a huge impact, behind each handwriting is a not so easy life.
With this year’s epidemic, many people’s fortunes may have been transformed. Zhang Chong, one of the planners of the 116°39°Frat study room, is an international student who is supposed to be attending university abroad right now, but as a result, he cannot leave because of the epidemic. When asked in the WeChat group, everyone couldn’t get out, they were all taking online classes, and there was no place to study. Zhang Chong set up a study room in the international student group and charged a fee to pay the rent, “but we don’t aim to make a profit.
In addition to studying, these international students are in the study room more often than not for group warmth.
Chen Zhibin has had several regrettable choices. He was born in Henan, a province with a high school entrance exam, and his parents, who were farmers, always thought he should go out to work early to make money, “What’s the difference between going to college and earning a few thousand dollars, and not going to college and earning a few thousand dollars? “
It was also his parents’ idea to go to college part-time in order to work and get a degree at the same time, but as a result, he couldn’t do both. Now he is 28 years old, in two years he will be 30 years old, this time he decided to hide from his parents to fight once. After coming to Beijing, he learned a lot of new words, such as in-roll. Job hunting itself is a process of experiencing competition, “I feel like I’m being rolled around”.
For him, the hardest thing is not to be rolled, but to jump into it even though he knows he is being rolled.
In this city, traces of competition can be seen anywhere, even regardless of age. From the moment they are born, people are caught up in a long-lasting competition, and on Dec. 27, at the new Zhongguancun Starbucks we visited, a couple of parents sat next to me and questioned their 5-year-old son like a siege: “Think about it, why didn’t you do as well as the other kids last time? good? “
The 5-year-old boy, somewhat unconvinced, opened a book in English and read it in a childish voice.
(At the request of the interviewee, Chen Zhibin is a pseudonym in the text)
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