People are always trapped.
White collar workers are trapped by the cubicle, delivery riders are trapped by the system, workers are trapped by the assembly line….
Most of those young people who return to work in the county after graduation are trapped in the “establishment.
There, the “establishment” became a complex symbol, symbolizing not only a job, but also the hope of parents for half a lifetime, social status and a jump in class. The illusion and the possibility of a better life ahead. But some days, for the young people in them, it’s more like a birdcage that holds them captive, physically and mentally, from beginning to end.
Although many of them are aware of the reality of being trapped, they are like birds in a cage, filled with panic about what life will be like when they fly out.
Only the “test” is called a job.
Xu Jia felt tired, from the time she graduated and began to test for jobs to now work are.
In October 2019, she finally got a job with “establishment”. For her, the word “finally” is necessary to add. It was her eighth job test, but her first successful one.
Xu Jia is now working within the system in a small border county in Yunnan province. She doesn’t like it, but it’s a job that her parents expect her to have and that people around her recognize. It took Xu Jia more than two years to get the job.
Looking back on the experience, she doesn’t know how she persevered. She had many sleepless nights, and experienced countless moments of denial and doubt. But it seems that after many things have come to fruition, the difficult moments of the process are not so clear.
In Xu Jia’s initial post-graduation plan, going home to take the “establishment” exam was the last choice, and continuing to study was at the top of the list. But when it was time to choose the next stage of my life in my junior year, my parents’ opinions came pouring in, “My family said I’m too old, so I should get a job first. Xu Jia’s parents had been small business owners all their lives, and felt that life was tiring and unprotected, so they wanted their daughter to have a stable and secure job.
She seldom mentioned this to anyone, but the fact that she was too old really poked her, and she began to think that if she studied for three more years, everything would be fine. It was too late. Also, the family’s financial situation was a little tight at the time, and my sister was going to college and needed money. Considering this, Xu Jia complied with her parents’ wish.
After thinking about it, Xu Jia poured her heart into the “establishment” exam. As soon as her junior year ended, she went home and enrolled in a tutoring class for the national exam. The tuition was very expensive, but her parents and she both bit the bullet and paid it. Originally, she still had classes during the first semester of her senior year, but she took a long leave of absence in order to get a job. And so, after more than a year of preparation, she entered the exam room.
“I don’t remember how many points I scored, but I didn’t pass the exam anyway. Xu Jia told me that after she lost the national exam, she quickly took the next exam, but she still failed, this time in an interview.
The local tobacco group that hadn’t hired her in that field for years suddenly had a job offer this year. The job requirements were listed, and they were exactly what she was looking for. At that time, getting into the tobacco group became Xu Jia’s most urgent desire and goal, because it was known as a good company.
After the written test, she was successful in the interview, but failed again. After the result, Xu Jia checked her overall evaluation score, and she was only 0.04 points away from being hired. In her limited experience, she had never heard of such a small, almost negligible, difference.
Xu Jia felt that all the hope she had at the beginning had turned into a boulder of pressure, and it hit her body piece by piece. “I lay in bed for almost a week without pulling myself together. “She said she had lost all confidence in herself. “I’ve tried so hard, and I’ve never tried so hard, and I haven’t succeeded, so am I never going to succeed again? ” she asked herself.
But she didn’t stop taking the exam. In a state of deep self-doubt and “malaise”, Xu Jia took the provincial exam that year and the public institution exam afterwards.
She failed all the exams.
The first year of job hunting passed in this way. The identity of the freshman, which was somewhat advantageous, was also lost.
After failing again and again, my parents could not eat for several days. Although they didn’t directly blame the student, they would always mumble, “Why did you miss the mark every time? What’s wrong with me? Xu Jia said she felt her parents’ disappointment and frustration when she was most upset.
After that, Xu Jia went to the city where her mother did business for two months. After feeling better, she enrolled in a tutoring class to prepare for her second “national exam”. Everything started all over again. During those days, except for the short time for eating and sleeping, Xu Jia’s day was filled with training classes, brushing up on real questions and memorizing knowledge points.
But Xu Jia still lost the exam, and the provincial exam too, and still fell a little short. Up to this point, her parents had resigned themselves to their fate and started to talk to her about taking over the class. She also went to her mother’s small business for a month as an “apprentice.
Luckily for Xu Jia, she received a notice of re-admission to the national exam. Finally, she was hired by a government unit in a border county three hours away from home.
Looking back over the past two years, “I think of it as the foundation of my life” is what kept her going, Xu Jia said.
Losing Yourself in the Trivial
The joy of “getting” a job didn’t last long in Xu Jia’s life. The lack of weekends, the discipline, and the meaningless work chores made her feel like she was losing her own life. She didn’t think about such profound philosophical propositions as the meaning of “existence,” but she felt that after working, she had no choice but to work. The meaning of “being” seems to be just to go to work. The oft-mentioned “self” seemed to have been lost.
Xu Jia wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Ah Q also felt that the “self” that had been held up so high when she played in the band had also disappeared after she had been pushed into the system. She specifically asked me to refer to her as “Q” because she felt that she was now deceiving herself and others. “reveling in her own world, trying to save herself.”
Ah Q didn’t expect that she, who played in a rock band in school, would join everyone else in the system after graduation.
Like Xu Jia, she struggled to get this job. It’s just that she didn’t go through the “experience” seven or eight times. She wanted to go to Shanghai to make music and work hard in a shopping mall,” is what she had envisioned for her life. Music was out of love, and working in shopping malls was because her family had been in the jewelry business for generations.
But her parents didn’t want to, they just felt that entering the system was the best place for a girl. Q’s reason for choosing to give up her ideal life is only five words, but she has ten times as many words to say about her job situation.
Q doesn’t hate her job as a teacher. However, “I don’t really have more than ten percent of my time to devote to teaching,” says Q. Most of her time is spent on “Too many messy things.” She describes her role as “babysitter, parent, housekeeper, and form filler,” according to the things she has to worry about on a daily basis. Because in addition to being a teacher, she is also the teacher of her freshman class.
She spends a lot of time every day dealing with the many trivial things that the dormitory administrators tell her about. For example, clothes are not hung up neatly in order of length, shoes are not placed in the order of slippers on the right and shoes from high to low, blankets are not folded neatly and do not show eight sides, etc. In addition, classroom hygiene is checked three times a day.
In addition, classroom sanitation is checked three times a day by checking door frames, window frames, and blackboard seams. No trash is allowed in classroom or dormitory trash cans. When students fail, the classroom teacher evaluates them and deducts points. Deducting points means deducting pay.
Q is a straightforward person who expresses her emotions directly and says when she is unhappy, sometimes with dirty words. But after work, she felt that she had lost this freedom. She had to hide her discontent and negative emotions, and she had to pretend to be happy and happy. She once confided in a friend about a series of meetings, with words that looked like curses but were actually bantering Internet gibberish. Then she was criticized because a colleague made a small report, saying that her words mapped out the school leadership.
Q used to have her own circle because she played music. But now, because of her work, Q often stands them up, and she was almost kicked out of the “group chat”. Q said that she used to play rock and roll to pursue her own freedom, “but now it’s hard, let alone within the system.
Ye Yu has the same sense of self-lostness as Q. She works as a civil servant in a county town in Chongqing. She worked as a civil servant in a county town in Chongqing. She thought that life in a small county town would be less stressful and more stable and comfortable. However, looking back on the past two years of work, the pressure that accumulated bit by bit was like a mountain on her heart, and she came to understand that “life is never just a piece of fur, and no one can stay out of it! “.
Ye Yu had no choice but to go home and work. In the first semester of her senior year, her father passed away unexpectedly, completely disrupting all of Ye Yu’s life plans. She put away her desire to go to the big city and work hard, and returned home to take her father’s place.
Ye Yu is not a person who takes the initiative to please, but she has just graduated and is passionate about her work, “Although she is not very good at talking, she wants to work hard and leave a good impression on the leadership. But Ye Yu’s gentle personality and serious work ethic brought her more and more work rather than any other kind of favoritism. The unit all the materials are pushed to me to write, overtime has become a routine, a mountain of documents, dense work notes, endless work social, home time from 8:9, slowly become 11:12. “Ye Yu said.
Her family and friends thought that work was a way for leaders to show their respect for people. So, she got the most comfort from family and friends is “young people have to work a little more”. Once they even worked overtime for half a month to catch a pilot program, but only two or three of them were doing something that seemed very important. In the end, the final draft that was sent at 4:00 a.m. was called back the next day when they woke up.
At that time, my mother had not yet moved from the town to the county. Ye Yu lived alone in the second-hand house that the family had bought by biting their teeth, with no sense of home at all. Every time I came home late at night after working overtime, I was greeted by a tired and lonely house. When I came home alone, I had no one to talk to about my worries at work, and often I could only cover my blanket and cry. That’s how, my good expectations for the future, a little worn out. “Ye Yu said.
Savings, marriage and the future
In many stories about first-tier cities, small counties are a retreat for those fleeing the north because they have low consumption, a slow pace of life, and the ability to save money.
But Ye Yu doesn’t think so.
In the past two years, I haven’t saved much,” said Ye Yu. Ye Yu said that with a salary of more than 4,000 yuan in hand, there is no way to save much in January. We have the impression that the county is a symbol of low prices, but Ye Yu’s county, a takeaway an average of 20 yuan, of which the delivery fee of 5 yuan. It’s not much different from some big cities. When you have dinner with friends and colleagues, it’s more than 60 or 70 yuan each time. In the county where Ye Yu’s family is located, there is a strong supper atmosphere, and the stalls are still crowded with people at one or two o’clock in the morning. A supper down the general not less than 200 yuan, this kind of invitation not less than three or four times a week, once or twice can be rejected, more also embarrassed.
But the most difficult thing for them to accept was the local housing prices. Ye Yu himself does not know, an eighteenth-line county, why the prices can rise to the average price of 8,000 yuan. Looking at the rising house prices and wages, Ye Yu felt a sense of belonging was missing in this county that she lived in but was not familiar with.
Q also feels that the housing prices in her county are too high. She has a monthly salary of more than 3,000 yuan, but the prices have reached an average price of 8,000 yuan. Ye Yu says she saves up to more than $1,000 a month, but Q is sometimes in debt. She loves to “play,” going to music shows, drinking, traveling, and buying are ways she relaxes. Others may think it’s a waste of money, but Q thinks it’s her favorite way of life, and it makes her happy.
She used to run a micro-business on her own, but after becoming a teacher, “no time” has declared the old way of life obsolete. “The death penalty”. And this seems to ask her the question that many people have asked her – “Why did you choose to go into the system? “No answer.
It’s close to home, and there’s a lot of pressure to get married. It’s not just from my parents, but from almost everyone around me. Ye Yu describes this as, “In a small town, there is malice toward single girls everywhere. “
The first job, there are colleagues competing to introduce Ye Yu object, and repeatedly give her “brainwashing” girl’s golden age is 25 years old, after this age is not easy to find. The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you are looking for. “Her unit has a 28-year-old colleague who has been working for 5 years has not fallen in love, every day for the relationship anxiety, worrying that they can not get married.
Ma Yongqing has been in love with his girlfriend for a long time, but he is just as worried about not getting married as Ye Yu’s colleague. After graduation, he entered a hospital in his hometown, a county-level city, to work in administration, which fulfilled the wishes of his family and himself. But the love affair that had lasted for several years and was set on marriage had a change of heart because of work. Ma Yongqing’s girlfriend and he went to the same school in the same hometown, but after graduation, she did not get a job like Ma Yongqing, and this is where the problem arose. Because of this, Ma Yongqing’s family began to feel that the relationship didn’t match.
In the tradition of the minority areas in the Northwest, at Ma Yongqing’s age, he already had children of his own. So, his family wanted him to start a new relationship and get married as soon as possible. He was also a bit wavering and concerned about whether his partner had a stable job. He couldn’t be sure when or if his girlfriend would get a job, and he wasn’t sure if he could afford to wait. Right now, the relationship is causing him some pain.
In the county, the best “home” is indeed a paid job. Xu Jia, Ah Q, and Ye Yu also admit this. But life itself was like a walled city. While others envied them for being in the system, they imagined the life outside the city. This also made Xu Jia and her friends both love and fear the future. They love the stability and comfort that “everyone” recognizes a job within the system can bring after decades, but they are also afraid of the trivial and depressing present of the job.
Xu Jia didn’t think too much about the future; she just wanted to do her part in the present. Q still misses the freedom of her old life, but she knows that she can’t just leave now. She is now the first year class teacher, and no matter where she plans to go in the future, “the least she can do is to take this one out. Ma Yongqing feels that her life right now is like a mess, and she doesn’t have the strength to think about the future. Even if the emotional problems are solved, the most dreaded problem of buying a house comes next. Compared to the two, he prefers to unravel the emotional mess more slowly, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.
Ye Yu had thoughts of leaving, but only to leave the workplace rather than the system.
“Sometimes when I walk down the road and look at the gray sky, anger, anxiety, depression, frustration, decadence, all kinds of emotions are inevitable, and I often wonder if it would be better to leave here. This September, I tried to take the city’s selection test and didn’t make the cut. Next year, I’d like to try again to see if I’ll have more options if I leave here. Will I have more space? Will I be able to breathe more freely? “Ye Yu asked.
(At the request of the interviewee, the characters in the text are pseudonyms)
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