When people think back to the year 2020, they all mention the unexpectedly extended Family Time. Some people miss the warmth of family, while others find their lives have long been in chaos. Organizers, as an emerging profession, are growing vigorously in the land of China. When they walk into a modern urban Home, they see more than just a room, but feel the excess emotions of urbanites in the crevices of objects and objects.
All Now visits dozens of organizers serving in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing. Let’s follow their footsteps and hands, approach those familiar but unfamiliar, similar but different, a hive-like private living space, to understand the subtle and concrete “other people’s contemporary Life“.
From the beginning of the lunar month, the orders of Cai Cai, an organizer, have increased dramatically, from three days after the appointment to a week, ten days after …… until the New Year’s Eve, and she can’t wait for her 72 doppelgängers to come into being this month to cope with the overwhelming orders.
People are always used to a thorough cleaning of their living space before the arrival of the Chinese New Year, a custom to get rid of the old and welcome the new and an opportunity to take a serious look at their living space.
In fact, the entire year 2020 has been a distraction for organizers. Since the resumption of normal work in May, the orders received by the major organizing platforms have increased several times year-on-year. Retention Road alone saw a fourfold increase in orders during the year.
The unending Epidemic of the new crown has finally given modern urbanites time to take a quiet look at their living spaces. The result of that examination, however, is mostly: “I can’t take it anymore!”
The home of a 90-year-old single mother and her two children in Guangdong Source: Photo by interviewee
01 A chaotic space
Before the organizer came to the door, the last piece of Liu Xin’s own space at home was the bedroom bathroom.
In this house in Wangjing, which has a total of more than 100 square meters and two bedrooms and two bathrooms, three adults and a 4-year-old child live, mother, wife, son and himself.
The living room and bedroom are filled with the son’s toys, the daughter-in-law’s musical instruments for early childhood Education, clothes that didn’t make it into the closet. The masks and disinfectant water stocked up because of the epidemic were scattered on the living room sofa and cabinets. During the quarantine period, the daily life of the family of four consisted of the son playing with toys at home and the adults chasing after him to collect them, and the cycle continued. Whenever my son couldn’t find a toy he wanted to play with, everything in the living room cupboard would clatter out and roll around the house.
He especially cherishes the moments when he sits alone on the toilet playing with his phone at 7:00 every day at breakfast. He could hear through the two doors that his son was rummaging through the living room, pestering his mother to play a game, and he thought, “If I can hide for a while, it’s a while,” and if the 4-year-old didn’t have a moment of stillness, if he suddenly thought of his dad, there would be a thumping at the door, “Dad I need to see you about something “, “Dad open the door, I also need to go to the toilet.”
In the past, Liu Xin was often away on business trips, leaving most family matters to his daughter-in-law and mother to take care of. Starting in February last year, during the worst months of the epidemic, Liu Xin and his wife could not go out to work, and the children could not go out to school. It was the first time he lived in a space with his family for so long. Everyone was in a “tight state of mind” at all times, and they would get into arguments if they were not careful.
In the eyes of the organizers, there are many different moments of breakdown in Beijing’s 8.41 million households, and they are always related to the chaos of the space.
One of the villas in Shunyi District is a frequent service location for the organizers. In one of the villas, a large number of mineral water bottles and cartons collected by the elderly had accumulated, and the daughter-in-law couldn’t stand it anymore, but she didn’t dare to contradict her mother-in-law, so she had to ask the organizer to pretend to be her best friend and help clean the house; Chaoyang District is home to many celebrities and net stars because of its prosperity and convenience. One young actress’ house doesn’t even have a closet, and the large living room is full of gantries, where, in addition to her daily clothes, she hangs her dresses for important occasions and some costumes left over from her roles. There are many small school houses in Haidian District. A pair of young Parents gritted their teeth and bought one of them for their children’s education, filling every room with the belongings of three people.
Beijing’s “old and dilapidated” school district houses, which can easily reach sky-high prices.
Jing Fan, 31, is a mother of two and works as an editor and children’s book author for a publishing house in Beijing. Every morning at 5 a.m., her half-year-old second child wakes up looking for her mother, and an hour later, her 6-year-old oldest wakes up too. Jingfan starts taking care of him and washing up. They have to leave the house around 7:00 a.m. so as not to miss the kindergarten bus that leaves from Financial Street at 8:00 a.m. At 9:00 a.m., Jing Fan has to clock in at work, and at 5:00 a.m., she has to rush to pick up the children from school, go home and switch hands with her aunt to take the second child and let her cook dinner. At 8:00 p.m., when the children go to bed, Jing Fan has a few hours of writing time. If he accidentally falls asleep with the kids, Jing Fan has to get up at 4:30 a.m. and write for another hour before Erbao wakes up.
One winter morning, because she had just started kindergarten, Dabao refused to go out and scratched Jingfan’s combed hair into a mess. Seeing that the time for the school bus was approaching, Jing Fan did not care to comfort the child who was still angry and went out first. Although the school bus stop is only 5 kilometers away, traffic jams often occur during the morning rush, so if you don’t get a drop or a taxi before 7:00, you probably won’t arrive on time, and at the most exaggerated times, this section of the road can be jammed for an hour.
So she hurriedly opened her closet, saw the stuffed closet, but could not find a suit jacket to go out, she could not stand it anymore.
Unlike a housekeeper, an organizer’s job is not simply to tidy up and clean. Rather, they provide comprehensive and holistic services for home space solutions, such as selectively discarding items that don’t work according to customer preferences, finding storage solutions that suit the homeowner, and organizing them. Sometimes, they also offer consulting services and training businesses that instruct and teach professional organizing techniques.
This is not an inexpensive service. Usually, it takes 2-3 organizers together to organize an average 3-bedroom house. Based on the workload of 8 hours per day, it takes about 3 days to complete. The fee is calculated to be over 10,000 RMB. There are also many people who choose to do only the bedroom or closet organization, the price also needs several thousand.
But anyone who can still hold out a bit, will not “spend a lot of money” to buy this service. This also means that the choice of an organizer to come to your home must be a bad mood to reach the extreme, behind the chaos of the room there is a deeper frustration and collapse.
02 Life in a consumer bundle
The development of organizing and storage as a profession originated in a life salon in Los Angeles, California. The two women who came to the salon were not interested in the parental aspects of the salon, but rather in the discussion of organizing, which turned organizing into a business as new people who loved organizing joined.
It was only later that organizing became popular in Japan and Korea.
The development of organizing in the United States has its own background. In the 1980s, the United States became a big consumer country, credit cards and mail-order companies became popular, everyone was buying, homes were full of stuff, and the number of people struggling with organizing and organizing increased rapidly.
Today, China is also repeating the history of the U.S. In 2019, China’s total retail market for consumer goods exceeded 40 trillion yuan for the first time, a 42% jump from 2015, and is about to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest retail market for consumer goods. The rapid development of e-commerce and logistics has made shopping easier and easier, and you can get items from the courier with a click of the mouse. Everyone’s life is marked by the “618”, “double 11“, “Double 12” and “New Year’s Day” shopping festivals. The shopping festival is marked.
The “2020 China Organizing Industry White Paper” (hereinafter referred to as the “White Paper”) jointly released by the organizing platform Staying Road and Sina Leju Finance shows that more and more Chinese families are expressing the need for organizers.
In the past three years since she started her career, organizer Liangzi has entered more than 1,000 Chinese families. Each household was found to be facing its own different crisis of excess items.
Clothes are the most common hoarder. A full-time wife whose closet pulled out over 100 white T-shirts is still buying similar styles. The girl who owns 300 pairs of jeans uses shopping as a way to release stress from work.
Not long ago, Ryoko received an order from a young girl for a “robbed room”. 40 square meters of self-contained one-bedroom apartment, with a kitchen full of clutter on the left hand side of the door, a small bathroom on the right hand side further in, a bed in the living room, a dresser, a sofa, and a floor, and no place where clothes were not piled up. The girl sat on the bed and let Ryoko open the door herself with the code. She didn’t want to get out of bed and open the door because there was no passage on the floor to walk on.
In the process of helping her to do away with her clothes, she said, “I can’t wear this dress and I can’t wear that dress. ……” She knew that many clothes she didn’t need, but she couldn’t stop buying them, which was her “only pleasure after work. “
In Chongqing, organizer Li Li served a three-generation family living in a villa, each family member has their own checkroom, the mistress of the house has four checkrooms, a total of 200 square feet, a total of about 15,000 pieces of clothing, each type of clothing are more than 1,000 pieces of clothing, all areas of the home have clothes placed at hand. The garage, the guest room, the children’s room, and the tea room were all occupied by clothes. That time, a team of 8 people, with 3 waves of team members replaced, took 14 days to finish organizing the 8 checkrooms in the entire villa.
Because of the love of watching live, a kindergarten teacher in Beijing squats every week to buy new products in the live room of her favorite anchor. Last year, after the stay-cum-do organizer came to her home and hung out 750 pieces of clothes, sweaters and sweatshirts were iterated in 8 boxes and put away in the closet. This year, when the autumn and winter change of season, she called again, “my house is now broken down again, I feel like I’m changing season every day, you can understand me right, double 11 and double 12 I bought a lot more sweaters and sweatshirts, before a few big boxes I did not move, now again can not put.”
All Now interviewed dozens of organizers who believe that there are almost no households in China that don’t have an excess of items, and even fewer who can say roughly how much of different items they own. The White Paper notes that 85 percent of Chinese don’t know how to space plan, and 91 percent of them suffer from hoarding disorder and can’t get rid of their clothes; 83 percent have more than 500 pieces of clothing in their closets.
Ryoko feels that “many people’s homes actually reflect their hearts.”
Li Ang, an associate professor of psychology at Beijing Forestry University, told All Now that due to various pressures brought about by real-life work or life, a person may pile up a lot of bad emotions, at which point he may compensate for his negative emotions by shopping, just as some people will improve their negative emotions by watching movies or other entertainment activities.
On the other hand, a person’s sense of control over certain aspects of work life is missing, buying will give a stronger sense of control. And this sense of control can actually make up for its loss of that sense of control in real life.
However, the pleasure that comes with this kind of consumption ends up throwing people’s lives into chaos.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Esslin Terrighena, a psychiatrist in Hong Kong, said that chaos can make people feel frustrated and that for many people, houses are safe spaces. But when we don’t know how to get rid of the clutter in our houses, we can feel helpless and overwhelmed, which increases frustration.
Science supports this, and a study published in Psychiatry Research in 2010 confirmed a strong link between clutter and depression, rather than other disorders. David Tolin, a psychologist, noted that hoarders were more depressed than OCD controls.
03 The emotion of hoarding
The first step in an organizer’s work is usually to spread out all the items in the home. In the gaps between objects and objects, organizers feel the excess of urban emotions, loneliness, depression, past glories, tattered childhoods ……
In the depths of a man’s closet, there were three white t-shirts that had been torn and tattered, and when the organizers found them, he treated them like jewels. He said that they were the “battle robes” he used to wear when he played games. Now he has a stable job and family, but occasionally he still remembers the days when he used to be obsessed with one thing, day and night.
Another man’s closet depths, is quietly stuffed in a pile of clothes in the private money. Cai Cai, the tidier, hesitated for a moment, but decided not to tell the mistress who had invited him to his home, and after the clothes were iterated, the money was tucked back into place.
The orthopedic surgeon treasured his notes and, awards, and journals from the past 20 years in his study, and he kept them as long as he had studied, including the access cards used for training. Although the past notes will no longer be flipped through, he is adamant about keeping them, “These are the youth I once struggled with.”
The insurance salesman’s home has a variety of slogans cultural shirts, the company’s custom-made peripheral gifts. Towels and four-piece bedding sets used to give to customers. The couple had to pick apart the clutter on the table to make room for their meals.
The female entrepreneur in her 50s has an elaborate kitchen. There are a lot of cake-making molds in the kitchen, neatly arranged from large to small yards. From what the hostess said, her husband loved to cook, and because her daughter loved cakes, he had learned a lot about how to make them. But her husband died in an accident, and she never walked into the place again.
Soon after, the news of her own cancer came. She told Ryoko, who came to the door to sort it out, that in the first half of her life, she had worked hard and earned a lot of money, and her body had never been taken care of. She wanted to live her life over again and see all parts of the world. She wants to have an organizer with her to make her house clean and also rearrange the memories she had in this house.
Tidying up a house also brings many warm moments, and those moments make up the reason Ryoko chose this profession. During the epidemic, she was working when she found a baby’s blanket and other items that the owner of the house had used more than 40 years ago. The lady of the house was excited to call her daughter, who was studying abroad, and tell her the story of her and her husband’s childhood.
The retention and abandonment of objects, often covered with a mantle of emotion. A tea store owner kept a whole closet of cheongsams, these cheongsams were handmade by her mother, and now can no longer wear. If these cheongsams are not taken away, the closet will not fit other clothes that can be worn. Ryoko suggested that she sell them. Seeing her hesitation, Ryoko then tried to suggest that the lady say a simple goodbye to the clothes, “pat them, touch them, or even smell them,” and then discard them.
It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was shining through the large window in the room. The hostess pondered over the bed of cheongsams for a while and decided to keep them all.
04 Boundaries and Order
More often than not, organizers need to take care of the whole space, sorting out the relationship between the owner, the space and everything else, and then develop an overall solution. But what they often find is that it is the relationship between people that ultimately needs to be addressed.
Xiaoyu, a Shanghai girl, lives in a hotel many days a month and does not want to go home. That 54-square-meter two-room apartment where mother and daughter live together, the living room and two bedrooms are all filled with items, with no floor or sofa in sight, while passing through the aisle, mother and daughter have to stagger to pass.
In the mother’s eyes, as a woman, she and her daughter do not need to maintain boundaries, often hanging her own clothes in her daughter’s room, or wearing her daughter’s clothes and forgetting to put them back in place. The daughter feels her space is being invaded, but not knowing how she should communicate with her mother, she simply gives up on repositioning her belongings. She likes to shop and the more things she buys in the house, the more messy it becomes.
Organizer Chien-Ching Zhao described Xiaoyu’s home as “like peeling back fruit, and it took two days and two nights to reveal the color of the furniture, the gray sofa, the white cabinets.”
Li Yin, a trainee from Shandong Province who trained at Finishing World, told her story about her father, a soldier who was away from home for years, and her mother, a retired nurse. The family of three lives in the army family assigned house, about 50 square meters, each space is the mother collected “garbage”, as big as a cardboard box, as small as a piece of paper is definitely not thrown away, “can be padded table feet”, plastic bags and the streets to receive brochures stuffed in Plastic bags and street brochures were stuffed in almost any cabinet in the house where they could be stored.
Li Yin once quietly threw away some of his mother’s hoarded pieces of paper, and when she found out, the two had a big fight. “To my mother, those things were especially important, and throwing them away was like the sky falling.”
Since childhood, Li Yin has not invited her classmates to play at home, and the 32-year-old is still afraid to have a relationship because she is afraid that the other party will know how messy her home is.
Bian Lichun, one of the first Chinese organizers, believes that Chinese families lack a sense of individual boundaries. In her opinion, the space of a home should also be divided into public and private space. If there is no an independent space between family members and no boundary of existence, there will be accusations and complaints, which will also lead to frequent family conflicts.
Bian Li-Chun remembered that a wife fell into silence after the finishing. In the past, she often blamed and complained that her husband could not make money, and he could not take care of his life, so the house was always in a mess. However, after finishing all the things in the house, she found that in the large checkroom, her husband only occupied one compartment of clothes. But the family laundry, cooking and cleaning up the house with the children are all undertaken by her husband. She realized that she had been encroaching on each other’s space.
Before and after comparison of a shoe closet for a family of four Photo source: Interviewee’s photo
In May 2020, the district was just unsealed, and Liu Xin called an organizing organizer. He just couldn’t stand another day of such a messy day.
Li Yin’s parents bought a new house of more than 120 square meters in Jinan, no longer crammed into the small house previously allocated to the army. Knowing that her mother would never let a stranger organize her home, she decided to learn how to do it herself, wanting to say goodbye to the chaos of her past life.
In Shanghai, Xiaoyu was more willing to go home, and she told organizer Zhao Qianqing that she had figured out what she could do when she got home from work.
Then a friend of Jingfan’s switched careers and became an organizer, and she quickly booked an appointment with her and invited the person to her home. Organizing helped Jingfan regain a sense of control over her life. The organizing was done according to similar categories and wearing order. After the makeover, Jingfan’s bags and hats were also put into her closet, and she felt like she had fewer anxious moments when she could find what she wanted whenever she wanted it. But she couldn’t say if the difference between her ideal life and her ideal life was just one “organizer”.
Separating from long-stored items is an emotional process, but forming new spaces can promote creativity and happiness,” says Esslin Terrighena, a Hong Kong-based psychiatrist. We may feel more organized and proud of ourselves. Because we’re not distracted by chaos, we become more productive. When we can focus on one thing at a time, people become more calm.”
However, not everyone is willing to pay to organize for the sake of stability. In Cai Cai’s observation, not many people in Beijing have the will to “enjoy life” because everyone is working hard. For example, the number of clients in Haidian is particularly small, but Cai Cai feels that their environment is the one that needs the most improvement. Whenever she raises this point with them, they often think that organizing a home is not their main conflict and that they would rather spend the money on an extra course for their children.
What they often say is, “I’m not fit to enjoy a comfortable life yet, I don’t deserve this service yet, I have so much to do.” (At the request of the interviewees, Li Yin, Liu Xin and Jing Fan are pseudonyms)
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