Young people living in Yanjiao

Yanjiao Town is part of Langfang City, Hebei Province, an enclave of three counties in the north, just 30 kilometers from downtown Beijing.

According to data from the Yanjiao High-tech Zone Management Committee, the total population within Yanjiao exceeded 900,000 in June 2019, while data from the People’s Government of Sanhe City in December 2019 showed that the total population of Yanjiao town was 72,000, and an important component holding up the population base was the mobile population working in Beijing.

In April 2018, I moved to Yanjiao to live there and first learned about this “backyard” of Beijing with a mix of cultural elements. Yanjiao’s low housing prices and convenient living environment offer young people the possibility to “accumulate capital”, but the backwardness of the village culture and the pressure of commuting create new problems. At the same time, young people here are also experiencing a test of identity, with mixed reviews of Yanjiao.

Since October 2018, I have interviewed some young people living in Yanjiao and working in Beijing, recording their daily lives, likes and dislikes, hoping to find a pivot point from outside the center and discover the diverse voices of the “Northern Drifters”.

1

The first day he moved to Yanjiao, Zhou Qiang felt that the place was “chaotic”.

He was reluctantly encouraged by his wife, Luo Xinxin, to surrender his house in Shuangjing, on Beijing’s East Third Ring Road. The house of his father-in-law and mother-in-law in Hunan province is located next to a man-made lake, and the environment is very good, and his wife, who grew up with a sophisticated lifestyle, has the minimum requirement of “good lighting” for the living environment. In Shuangjing, Zhou Qiang and his roommates were crammed into a two-bedroom apartment that was older than they were, with no hood in the kitchen and no sunlight in the bedroom, which irritated Luo Xinxin.

In the days of looking for a house in Yanjiao, Zhou Qiang was out of town on a business trip, and the house was ordered by Luo Xinxin. The company’s main goal is to provide the best possible service to its customers. Zhou Qiang kept reminding her of the red banners that flashed along the roadside: “Fight against the dark forces of lawlessness, build a peaceful Yanjiao!” “Put an end to mob marketing and severely punish illegal fund raising!”

Before this, Zhou Qiang had heard about the chaos in Yanjiao: the pyramid dens, the red-light district for drug addiction and prostitution, and he was told that this was the famous “mistress living area” where some rich Beijingers like to keep their mistresses …… Luo Xinxin was unimpressed by these tirades. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the market. She was so excited that when she was still on the road, she was already looking forward to the six-door closet in her new house.

The day after the move, things were almost packed up, and Zhou Qiang and his family took a taxi to prepay the gas bill. Once they got into the car, they almost screamed with excitement when they saw that the starting price for cabs here was 7 yuan. The taxi driver is a native of Yanjiao, and Zhou Qiang asked him why he saw so many stores named after “Fucheng” on the road. The driver opened his mouth and gave them a lot of knowledge along the way: “You haven’t heard of Li Fucheng? Half of Yanjiao is owned by him. He is the country’s top cattle breeder, you eat beef in Beijing, it is his supply of …… right, a few years ago that Bentley was hit by a van dead young man, remember not? That’s Li Fucheng’s grandson – boy, the van driver can still have a good end? He was offended by the ‘Yanjiao Li Jiacheng’ ……”

The driver bragged about the prosperity of Yanjiao for a long time again. It could be seen that he was proud of living here. Zhou Qiang saw him gushing, so he asked him if he had been running cabs for many years, but to his surprise, the driver’s tone suddenly changed, as if he had been insulted: “Running a taxi? My home is over there, Feng Jia Fu village, I am a professional rent collector. Driving that is to relax, find something to do!”

This driver lives in Fengjiafu Village, one of several villages in Yanjiao Town that rely on renting out cheap housing as a source of economy. Wang Nian once went to the landlord’s house to pay the rent, in Fengjiafu village accidentally found the memory of the campus around the “urban village”: narrow aisles, rough and simple low-rise buildings one after another, the walls painted with advertising; each single room furnished with simple, monthly rent of 500 yuan or less; the yard parked many electric cars, motorcycles The back seat is loaded with delivery boxes, from the handlebars on the oil-stained hand warming, which seems to live a lot of courier boy.

Every time Wang Nian returns to his rented community from Fengjiafu Village, he experiences a magical contrast: the young people in the community are well-dressed, some carrying delivery packages, some holding expensive purebred dogs, and just saw the scene in the village compared to here seems to be a completely different world.

But didn’t everyone move here for the cheap? How much time do people really have to let go of work and enjoy life? Wang Nian, an avid sportsman, runs along the roads in his neighborhood at night every now and then. He often encounters young people walking their dogs stopping by the side of the road to communicate with each other, and the dogs sizing each other up in the night. He ran through, heard the most phrase is: “no time to walk, our family dog followed me, suffocating.”

2

After moving to Yanjiao, Zhou found that his time had become “worthless”. In the morning, he took the 815 bus from Xingluo City and drove 37 kilometers in traffic, arriving at Langjiayuan, a terminal near the Guomao Bridge on the East Third Ring Road, where he had been on the road for one hour and 40 minutes. After getting off the bus and changing to Metro Line 14 to reach Fangzhuang, it was another nearly half an hour. In this way, he has more than 4 hours in the “transitional space” outside his home and company – compared to the 9 hours in the company, this period accounts for 1/6 of the day, hardly creating any value.

Zhou Qiang tried to read a book or play with his phone on the bus, but soon gave up, because no matter how interesting the video and text, as long as the car is moving, can not overcome the sudden onset of sleep. To be precise, drowsiness is not far from him at all. Even when he is standing in the carriage holding the handle, he involuntarily tries to find a place to lean, and once his body touches the solid railing or the side of the car seat, he automatically closes his eyes and quickly finds the feeling of falling asleep.

Luo Xinxin’s commute is a little better. She works at an elementary school on Changying East Road in Tongzhou District, and the 819 bus stops right near the school. But she also has to endure the same traffic jams as Zhou Qiang every morning. Because the 819 goes straight to the subway CaoFang Station, people who go there to take the subway choose this bus, and she basically has to stand from the beginning to the end every day.

Luo Xinxin heard people say that some people have to get up early in the morning and walk a long distance to Zhugedian, the starting station of the 819, in order to have a seat, and she wanted to try, but she just couldn’t get up in the morning. Whenever you look around after getting on the bus, passengers with seats are falling asleep in the east and west, not caring about their loud snores ringing through the car. This made Luo Xinxin envious, especially when the soles of her feet were painful from the heels of her high heels. When standing for a long time, she grabbed the edge of the seat beside her and closed her eyes to take a nap, obviously sleeping in bed would be insomnia, but on the bus easily find the feeling of falling asleep, drifting into sleep. The more bumpy the car is, the harder she feels, but her eyes never open.

In contrast, Wang Nian thinks he uses his commuting time “very well”. In order to leave a little earlier, he wakes up, usually puts the toast in the microwave or boils the eggs in the rice cooker, and then goes to wash up. After packing, he stuffs his lunchbox with breakfast into his shoulder bag and heads out.

He leaves the East Trade International Garden neighborhood at 6:30 every morning, grabs a shared bike, and rides for 40 minutes to Lucheng subway station – the starting station for all Beijing Metro Line 6, and the closest stop to Yanjiao on the Beijing Metro route map, making it easier to grab a seat. There were many people going to the subway station like him, and he was sandwiched between electric bikes and shared bicycles, occasionally glancing at the pedestrians to his left and right, all of whom also had a lingering sleepiness on their faces.

Wang Nian’s breakfast is eaten on the subway – after all, it takes more than an hour to sit in the subway, which is considered to be saving time. To avoid causing discomfort to the passengers around him, he rarely cooks eggs in the morning, usually two slices of toast with bacon, and sometimes he brings the shredded potato burrito he bought in the supermarket the first night with a bag of yogurt. When he finishes his lunchbox, he pulls a tissue from the side pocket of his backpack, wipes his mouth, and then stands with his shoulder bag on his knees with his legs slightly together. With more than 20 minutes to go before the transfer station on Jintai Road, Wang Nian closed his ears to the noise around him and began to close his eyes for a shallow and short “sleep”, sleeping with his arms wrapped around his shoulder bag, like a pillow. Probably because of the lack of sleep, Wang Nian only needs a minute or two to enter the sleep state, which is very efficient.

Sleep is an endless attraction for young people who live in Yanjiao and work in Beijing. To be able to “sleep all the way”, Wu Qihang, who has already bought a car and a house in Yanjiao, said he would rather “carpool” than drive his BMW 3 series and stop and go in the middle of a bunch of cars.

In the summer of 2012, he hired a minivan from his school’s supermarket owner, and he nestled in the car with a stack of books he bought from an online campaign under his buttocks and his girlfriend in the passenger seat. Before dark, the minivan bumped to Yanjiao town. At that time, they were living in the newly-opened Tian Yang City, which was called “30 kilometers east of Tiananmen Square”, not far from the Tian Yang City main station, which is “one of the important stations of Beijing’s transportation network”.

At 5:45 a.m. every morning, before it was fully light, Wu Qihang and his girlfriend went to the station to line up for the bus. The bus stop of No. 818 to Langjiayuan was always bustling with people, and Wu Qihang was a bit puzzled at first to see many elderly people in the front of the queue, but later learned that some parents got up early to let their children sleep a little longer and came to the queue for them.

In 2016, the medical reagent company founded by Wu Qihang and some friends became profitable and his girlfriend became his wife. He bought a 108-square-meter house in Yanjiao, and six months later brought up a BMW. But he rarely drives on weekdays – it’s more comfortable to carpool than to get stuck in traffic all the way and then struggle to find a parking spot next to the office. He has three “Yanjiao carpool groups” in his cell phone WeChat, which are self-organized mutual aid groups of young people who live nearby. Every night, someone in the group will yell.

“The first one is the one with the most important thing.

“Seoul Sweet City, leaving tomorrow at 7:00, destination CaoFang subway station, no waiting for people.”

Those who need it just contact the owner directly, the price is usually $10 or $15. All transactions are done in the group. Wu Qihang carpool for more than 3 years, did not add a “friend”, and never ask those car owners after the car what name, what is the origin. He only knows that after the car can lie down and sleep, how the car condition, where the car out of the highway, are not his concern. Other carpoolers do not communicate, the car arrived at the destination, everyone grabbed the driver handed over the QR code, sweep the money, even if the journey is completed.

Wu Qihang enjoys this more “shared” nature of commuting, he rarely worries about not getting on the bus, because even at 10 o’clock at night, there are still people in the group asking: “Is there a return to Yanjiao now? I’m going back to Bawangmou East.”

Zhou Qiang, who does not have a car, also searched for other ways to “go to Beijing”. A netizen who lives in the family compound of the China Railway Bureau said that he could also take the train to work – every morning at less than 7 o’clock, there is a K train to Beijing East Station from Yanjiao Railway Station, and the journey only takes 26 minutes. It takes 26 minutes and the ticket costs 9 yuan. In previous years, once you get off the train, you have to walk for a quarter of an hour to get to Bawangmou, and then walk for 10 minutes to Dawanglu Station on Subway Line 1.

Zhou Qiang was a bit moved, but then he looked at the fact that a taxi ride from his home in Xingluo City to Yanjiao Railway Station would cost him almost 20 yuan, and the family home of the Third Bureau of China Railway is just to the east of Yanjiao Railway Station.

3

The first thing you need to do is to get rid of the problem.

Wang Nian studied computer science in college, after graduation in an Internet company as a network engineer. He usually leaves work at 5:30, eats dinner near his unit, and returns to his residence in Yanjiao at around 8:00. In Yanjiao, he doesn’t have a friend, so he comes home at night and curls up on the sofa in the living room to play games. The sound of cats downstairs and the sound of speeding cars on the road came through loud and clear. He subconsciously felt that the night was one of the few times when he had his own time and he should hold on to it rather than give it to sleep.

The night’s resistance turned to remorse and irritation in the morning, when the alarm clock started ringing at 6 a.m. He got out of bed and needed to sit for two minutes with his eyes closed, like a computer just starting up, waiting for the parts to work.

With less than 7 hours of sleep a day, Zhou Qiang and his family are always in a state of sub-health. The bathroom sink strainer is tangled with both of their hair, which has to be cleaned every few days. Luo Xinxin often cries in front of the mirror, saying that her hair has become less again. In order to grow hair, they have bought black sesame, nuts and hair growth spray online, only no one has changed the habit of sleeping late. “

When I used to live in Shuangjing, the road only takes half an hour, and it’s not late to get up at 8 o’clock.” Zhou Qiang mentions the past with a wistful look on his face. But houses in Yanjiao are even cheaper. They spent only 1,600 yuan to rent a two-room suite, which is unimaginable in Beijing.

In addition to the cheap price, Luo Xinxin was more concerned about the quality of life. She didn’t like the state of the original shared room, “the living room couldn’t even spread a yoga mat, and it was inconvenient to kiss”. In Yanjiao, they can enjoy the quality and cheap living conditions in Hebei Province and save up their money to buy a house. In comparison, the poor commuting experience seems tolerable.

However, during weekdays, they only return here at night; on their days off, they have to run to Beijing for various parties and social engagements, and most of their lives have nothing to do with Yanjiao. Even the real estate agent’s soft copy directly describes Yanjiao’s properties as “the best city to sleep in, favored by hundreds of thousands of northerners”.

Young people looking at Beijing from Yanjiao

But in Wang Nian’s opinion, even as a “sleeping city”, Yanjiao is not up to the mark – the time cost of commuting is too high to compare with the well-known “sleeping cities” outside of Beijing’s fifth ring road, such as Huilongguan and Tiantongyuan. The cost of commuting is too high and not as good as the well-known “sleepy cities” outside Beijing’s fifth ring road, such as Huilongguan and Tiantongyuan. He had a colleague who lived in Tiantongyuan, and after he was late for work twice in a row, he was strongly encouraged to move over and share a room. It only takes 40 minutes to get from Tiantongyuan to Guangshun North Street, where the company is located, and his colleague can eat breakfast in the Qingfeng baozi store every morning and then go to work without panic.

Wang Nian was impressed. When he asked about the rent, a second bedroom cost about 1,800 yuan, while his one-bedroom apartment in Yanjiao was only 950 yuan a month. Considering his financial plan, he dismissed the idea – he had no other way to make money besides his job, and using his time for money was the only option he had to take the initiative at the moment.

When he first moved to Yanjiao, Zhou Qiang heard people say, “Yanjiao is going to be connected to the subway”. Others refuted this view, saying that Yanjiao is, after all, part of Hebei, not part of the core construction zone, and that “the subway will have to wait until the year of the monkey”. Zhou is emotionally inclined to the former view – although it is only a town in a county-level city in Hebei, its proximity to Beijing and rapid development means that many public facilities are more convenient than others.

He has often searched the Internet for “when Yanjiao will be connected to the subway” and has also mentioned this issue to local drivers several times when taking cabs. He thought that once the subway from Beijing to Yanjiao was opened, he would be able to catch up on his sleep on the road with “higher quality”, in addition to a much shorter commute time. With or without a seat, it would be much smoother to snooze all around, right? The bus has cast a shadow on his mind, and the constant bumps on the road make it difficult for him to fall into a deep sleep. Sometimes the driver braked sharply, “dreamed all the way to be shaken awake”.

4

When Wu Qihang, who has a science degree, read Stendhal’s “Red and Black” a long time ago, he found the word “provincial youth” in the book very strange and did not identify much with the psychological disparity of the main character Yu Lian. However, after working, he often joked with people about this word, saying that he went to Beijing from the small county of Wuhu, the “provincial youth” in the French novel. When he settled down in Yanjiao and moved his Beijing collective account from his school days to Hebei, this absurd feeling became even stronger. At dinner parties with his partners, he often laughs at himself, saying that he is not only a “provincial youth” from Yanjiao town, but also a “small town youth”.

As a matter of fact, Yanjiao has a lot of leisure places for “small town youths”, but many of them don’t have time to enjoy them and don’t care to enjoy them here.

Influenced by the distribution of new developments after 2000, the entire Yanjiao consumer area is concentrated in the “south”, with several large shopping centers such as Xinghe Haoyue, Tianyang Plaza, Star City, Xinlehui, Ark Shopping Plaza, Aeon, and East Trade International, covering all the young people’s rental areas. Whether it is clothing or food and beverage, the merchants stationed basically belong to the low-end brands, and the prices are relatively affordable.

When Wu Qihang first moved to Yanjiao in 2012, he was surprised that the price of kebabs here could be as low as 50 cents a skewer, “which is the price level of our hometown county. He remembers very clearly that in 2013, he and several business partners drank beer and jerked off together at the “Northeast Dumpling House” in front of his home until 3:00 at midnight, and spent a total of 238 yuan. The boss rubbed his eyes and watched the TV show on his cell phone until they left with the bill.

In those years, Wu Qihang used to treat this place as the most intimate position, but in these years, he is less and less in Yanjiao restaurant. He feels that the oil in the restaurants here is not good, the ingredients are not clean, and they are not as good as the restaurants in Beijing. When his wife doesn’t want to cook on weekends, he drives his car and takes the family to Beijing for dinner. After dinner, he can take his son to the zoo and the Science and Technology Museum, and his wife can do her hair at the China World Trade Center. The hair salon in Yanjiao is still a bit outdated, not to mention the fact that it’s ugly to cut, and it’s the most annoying thing to do when you sit down and try to get a card.

As a geek, Wang Nian is not particular about haircuts and meals, but he is seriously concerned about the medical conditions here.

At the end of 2017, not long after he moved to Yanjiao, he had vomiting and diarrhea one night, and he dragged his tired body to the Yanjiao People’s Hospital at the door. At 11 o’clock at night, the outpatient department was sparse. Wang Nian registered and waited for half a day at the entrance of the internal medicine department, but the door of the consultation room stayed closed. Wang Nian stomach pain is unbearable, knocked on the door a few times no movement, thinking that there may be a patient in the consultation, so sit down and continue to wait. Only later could not wait any longer did he go over and knock on the door again. The door was opened only after a while, there was no patient inside, a nurse came out from inside and joked with the doctor on duty while walking.

Wang Nian walked in with a frown, the doctor wearing a mask looked like he was in his early 30s, seemed to be very unhappy with Wang Nian’s visit, simply asked him two questions, printed him a slip of paper and told him to go for a checkup, with many tests written on it.

From the time he entered the consultation room to the time he came out with the checklist, the total time was only one and a half minutes. Wang Nian covered his burning forehead with the back of his hand, feeling like he was about to lose his breath. The visit gave him a bad impression, and when he complained to his friend, he was reminded, “Don’t be too demanding, think about it, Yanjiao is just a town, their hospital is just a township health center at home. The public hospitals in Yanjiao are all contracted out, so what good can they be.” Wang Nian thought about it, and it is true. From then on, whenever he was not feeling well, he would go to the hospital in Beijing to register, even though he had to spend more time rushing and waiting in line each time.

This “dislike” and “distrust” of Yanjiao is not only reflected in daily consumption and medical care.

Compared to Beijing, Yanjiao’s educational resources are too scarce, and Wu Qihang does not want his son to lose at the starting line. The two of them have been “paving the way” for their son to study in Beijing in the future. Before the child was born, he and his wife inquired about the procedures for enrolling foreign students in Beijing.

Since 2015, they have been paying social security in Beijing’s Xicheng District, and a business partner, whose family lives in Xicheng, has promised to get them a rental certificate and other documents needed for their child’s enrollment. Wu Qihang’s intention is to rent a house near the school they attend, so that it will be easier to get to and from school. It is hard enough for them to travel between the two places, and they do not want their children to continue to suffer in the future.

Their 3-year-old son, already in a private kindergarten with high fees to read small classes. He enrolled his son in several local interest classes in Yanjiao, one of which satisfied him was a painting class – the Yanjiao campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts is near their home, and he had a young teacher from the Academy come to teach his son how to paint.

After living in Yanjiao for so many years, Wu Qihang and his wife agreed that, overall, Yanjiao is a place that lacks culture, “If you go to any of the main roads, there are places to eat everywhere, and trying to find a bookstore? Hard. There are not even any newsstands here”.

5

Once a friend sent a picture to Zhou Qiang and asked him if he “lived nearby”. On the picture were three large statues of the gods Fu, Lu, and Shou, inserted in the middle of modern streets and buildings, and at first glance, Zhou thought it was P. He asked his friend, “What is this?

He asked his friend, “What is this?” He was surprised and asked him back, “Don’t you know this building? It’s the one in Yanjiao, it’s so strange!”

Zhou Qiang checked online and found that the building named “Tianzi Hotel” was indeed in Yanjiao, with three statues of gods 41 meters high, which also entered the Guinness World Records. He greeted Luo Xinxin and came over to enjoy this magical picture. Both of them were laughing and lamenting that they knew too little about Yanjiao, although they had lived here for more than a year, the scope of their activities was only the vegetable market and supermarkets around the district.

Luo Xinxin said several times that they would “go to the botanical gardens in Yanjiao on a weekend,” but until now, the two of them did not go there, but in August last year, they took a long-distance bus trip to the “Expo Park” in Yanqing, Beijing, and came back screaming that they had been duped.

He said that his colleagues and classmates who live in Beijing don’t know much about their surroundings, and he doesn’t plan to move from Yanjiao until he saves enough money for a down payment on a house. “It’s the same everywhere you go, that’s how modern life is, and personal space is inevitably squeezed wherever you go.”

In his opinion, the work and leisure time of modern city people are mixed together like red beans and barley porridge, without clear boundaries – he does not dare to set “no disturbance” for group chat messages in the office, and on the way back by subway or at home on weekends, he will also On the other hand, he would secretly open the anime episodes in his cell phone to watch an updated episode during the company meeting. He is glad to have a “backyard” like Yanjiao around Beijing, which is part of the city’s “ecosystem”, just like the cheap hotels and restaurants around universities and the few remaining ordinary trains in the middle of the high-speed train schedule. -At least in recent years, it will provide a transitional stage for commuters like him.

In the opinion of Wu Qihang’s wife, there don’t seem to be as many hard-working young people like Wang Nian as there were in previous years. One of her cousins, born in ’96, came to join her after finishing college in her hometown of Inner Mongolia. Her cousin is working as a copywriter in a new media company in Beijing, with a monthly salary of 6,500 yuan. Wu Qihang as brother-in-law, has been prepared to help her rent a room in their own neighborhood, thinking close to, usually can have a care. But the cousin lived in his house for two days and then moved out, and went to find a shared second bedroom near the company, the monthly rent of 3,000 yuan.

Wu Qihang and his wife could not understand in any way – spending 1/2 of his salary to pay the rent, is not too “extravagant”? Cousin said, commuting to work by long-distance bus is too tired, think of all the headaches, life is only a total of how long ah, she do not save money for this crime.

Because of his wife’s cousin’s case, Wu Qihang also noticed that the number of college graduates who came to Yanjiao to rent a room in the past two years was indeed much less, and now when he walks around the district, he sees mostly middle-aged faces like his, and many old people speaking various dialects – they come here to help their children take care of their children, and at night they dance happily in the district, play chess and play musical instruments in the pavilion, just like a local.

6

Zhou Qiang has also heard that there is a town of Huaqiao next to Shanghai, which belongs to Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. It is a town that has grown up on the back of Shanghai, with a resident population of more than 250,000, most of whom are “drifters” like them. Some people initially lived there temporarily, then bought a house and settled down, and even changed jobs to Huaqiao.

Zhou Qiang sometimes can not help but worry, like they are squeezed into the car every day to Beijing days can last how many years? In the future, when they are older and their health is poor, they will have to travel around like this, wearing the stars and the moon?

The father-in-law and mother-in-law repeatedly proposed that Zhou and his wife buy a house in Yanjiao, saying that they would sell an unused house in their home to support them. Zhou Qiang also paid attention to the real estate transactions in Yanjiao, every time he took a car back to Yanjiao, when he arrived at the “Hebei border”, the first thing he saw was the sales department of Xingda Plaza, large and small, and some agents with a wilder path, advertising “live in Hebei, enjoy the Tianjin college entrance examination policy”. Seems to have blown in advance “Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration” of the east wind.

Zhou Qiang inquired about the “I love my home” in front of the community, the current price has dropped a bit, about 20,000 per square meter. Luo Xinxin is teaching in Tongzhou and has a Beijing account, so there is no doubt that her children will study in Beijing in the future, and if they buy a house in Yanjiao, their plan to “take over Beijing” will be a compromise.

However, Zhou Qiang’s father had some doubts about his son buying a house in Yanjiao. He came to Beijing to help his company purchase equipment, and came to Yanjiao to see his son and daughter-in-law, and left from Haidian District in Beijing after dinner at 7:00 pm. After he met up with Zhou Qiang at the bus station, he looked up and down the stores on both sides of the road and joked with his son, “It’s much brighter than our little eight-line town. I brought your grandmother from the countryside to the city back then, and you’ve started to take the old road of ‘encircling the city from the countryside’ again.”

Which of the young people who first came to Yanjiao didn’t think this way when they went to Beijing to start a family there?

Last fall, Wang Nian once went to a cafe in Yanjiao to work overtime in order to complete a bid for a project book. After working for 2 hours, two female customers came in and sat down to chat. The cafe is very quiet, the two women’s chatter all floated over to Wang Nian’s ears. From the conversation, we can hear that one is a film actress and the other is a producer.

The actress, with obvious agitation, spilled her grievances to the producer: “I don’t know what happened in the past two years, I can’t always get good scenes …… when I first started, Zhang Jiayi and Zuo Xiaoqing played my parents, you say, this is not a bad starting point, right?”

The producer tsked and sighed and said, “Then your early resources have been very good.” Then he helped the actress analyze the recent situation.

Wang Nian had never been exposed to this industry, so he couldn’t help but perk up his ears and listen. He learned from the conversation that the actress had bought a house in Yanjiao at a young age by taking on plays. But she was obviously not satisfied with her current situation, saying emphatically several times, “I am from Hebei myself, and Beijing is so close to my home. When I was in school, I thought that I would have no problem settling in Beijing in the future. But look at it now, my house is still in Hebei, and I can’t get out of our province even though I’ve been fighting for it. I’m too much of a failure!”

Wang Nian slowly raised his head, sneaking a glance at the childish actress from the side. He couldn’t tell why, but at that moment he had an emotional resonance with the actress. Before that, he didn’t have much feeling about living in Yanjiao, Hebei, but the actress’ words brought him back to the time when he had just graduated from college and chose a city for employment: Zhengzhou, the capital city of his hometown, had great development potential in the past few years, but he finally chose Beijing.

How attractive was the capital to him that he was willing to eat breakfast on the subway every morning and waste most of his life on the road? He knew that even if he did save enough money for a down payment on a house in Beijing one day, life would not be easy. When he was in Yanjiao, he always felt that “this is just a transitional stage” and that many things can be settled, and he didn’t like it here, nor did he have any deep feelings for it.

In order to save money, Wang Nian would take a long-distance bus at night from Beijing to Yanjiao. The highway connecting Beijing and Yanjiao is a silent darkness, with exhausted passengers driving on it and no one talking, and no lights flashing on either side of the road. Wang Nian vividly remembers that when he was a child, he would play outdoors with his buddies until darkness fell, and a huge wave of fear would rise up in his heart, and at that time, all he wanted to do was hurry back home, as if that was the safest place in the world.

Now, whether it was Yanjiao, or Beijing, or even his parents’ “hometown”, he could no longer find that comforting feeling. The bus was like a horse that had been running for three days and nights, rushing forward with its eyes closed. He felt that he had become one with the bus, shuttling in the silent darkness, no specific shape, just speed, speed.