When he received the order to deliver to Zhang Aihua, the delivery man Chen Hang was particularly cautious.
It was the spring when the epidemic was at its peak, a deserted neighborhood where no one wanted to live unless they were unwell and self-quarantined.
Through the open space infested with wild dogs and cats, climbing up the rusted and broken staircase banister, he came to the door of the old house on the fifth floor and knocked on the old wooden door that shook off the dust at the first touch.
After knocking for a while, there was a sound inside, but after waiting for more than 10 minutes, no one opened the door.
Chen Hang felt angry because during the epidemic, not many people were willing to come out to deliver, and he had a huge number of take-out orders on hand and couldn’t spend too much time on this one, otherwise he would receive a series of complaints.
He takeaway placed at the door, clicked the order has been completed, and was about to turn to go when an old lady’s complaint came from the door, “are hungry for a week, came without the key, deliberately torture me ah?”
With the sound of talking a little louder, Chen Hang looked back, the old lady had unlocked the door, and then immediately turned around, dragging her body back.
This time, he saw that it was a crippled old man, leaning on a plastic stool to help support her walk.
The old man thought he was the youngest son, and when Chen Hang took the take-out into the house, while splitting his head and screaming, he grabbed to open the take-out box. It wasn’t until he looked up that he realized it was just a delivery man.
That was Zhang Aihua’s first takeaway.
01
Eating take-out and waiting to die
Zhang Aihua told Chen Hang that her youngest son originally came twice a week to give her a bath and prepare two days’ worth of meals, and put the uneaten ones in the refrigerator and heat them up in the microwave when she wanted to eat them.
But those days, her son did not come over.
Originally, her youngest son called her and told her that they couldn’t go out because of the new pneumonia everywhere, so she should save some money and share the food in the fridge for a few more days. But she was so old and deaf that she knew how to answer the phone, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying.
After she ran out of food, she couldn’t go downstairs by herself, holding a plastic stool, and she knew she would fall half to her death. When she was really hungry, she took the old tea leaves from the cupboard, steeped them in water and then chewed them by the handful.
After she ate several meals of tea leaves, eaten to the point of vomiting, Chen Hang delivered takeout, this takeout, so fragrant that she herself did not believe that her son had ordered it.
“It must be the meal you ordered for me in order to help me.”
After a few weeks, however, she was finally convinced that it was her sons who had ordered it. The takeaways, which soon became as revolting to her as those tea leaves. At first, she ate with exceptional satisfaction because she was hungry for days, but after nearly a year of such take-out, she was on the verge of a breakdown.
The take-out was ordered and divided between her two sons, one of whom was responsible for a week. Originally, the take-out man delivered two deliveries to her each day; after two months, the take-out man delivered potentially three or four days’ worth. Her son found that this saved on delivery fees.
The number of takeaways grew, but her refrigerator broke down and lost its cooling function. On the days when the temperature picked up, the frozen ice from the quick-freeze layer dissolved and a strip of brown water ran out on the floor. The take-out began to stink and rot inside.
The system of the takeaway platform, the second time the order to Zhang Aihua was assigned to Chen Hang, he did not hesitate to take it. For this reason he did not take too many other orders, and when he arrived at the door, he found that she had stopped locking the door.
He knew that his line of work was a daily race against time, efficient and ruthless, but when he encountered such an old person, he always thought he could help her. However, the hygiene in the house was so bad that he put off the idea of helping to clean it up.
This time it has been half a year since the last time, there is movement outside the door, Zhang Aihua knew it was the delivery guy came. Many times, the delivery man has become a sounding board between her and her son.
She asked her youngest son to come over when she had a fever, and he used the delivery to buy her a box of ibuprofen and cefradine capsules; when the refrigerator broke down, her youngest son came to look at it and said there was nothing to fix to give her a replacement, but there was no follow-up; once a month, her youngest son would come over and give her a bath and throw away the lunch boxes together, even if it was sanitary.
Recently, she developed bed sores and said she wanted to go to the hospital. She knew that many elderly people with bed sores could easily die. But as usual, her youngest son bought an anti-inflammatory ointment with a takeaway delivery.
“They just want me to die, die early, this house demolition they will be able to get the money.”
Did not stay long, Chen Hang felt there to become a large accusation scene, rushed to leave. Before leaving, Zhang Aihua asked him to help call his youngest son, “Tell him that tomorrow he will sign the demolition documents, see if he comes over.” Chen Hang felt that this was a lie and only dialed the phone to let her speak for herself.
“No time to come over, tomorrow Tanabata Festival, is the most crowded time. You help me ask how much the demolition back, if not at a loss, let her sign it herself.” The youngest son suddenly thought of something and said with slight excitement, you tell my mother, I found a good quality second-hand refrigerator, I’ll send it over in a few days when I have time.
But this time, Zhang Aihua listened carefully, directly cursed, “second-hand refrigerator, how much to buy a new one? You want my fridge to break down in a few days again?”
Soon, the youngest son hung up the phone.
More than a thousand kilometers away, in an old home on Jianji Road in Guangzhou’s Haizhu District, another old man like Zhang Aihua, who was far from his children, came to the end of his life.
Delivery rider Ma Yusong found the place according to the ordering address, but no one answered the door no matter how he tapped.
The takeaway was ordered by the homeowner’s children. They couldn’t reach the old man by phone and lived too far away, so they wanted to see if the old man was okay at home through the delivery boy.
Ma Yusong contact locksmiths
Through the crack of the security window, Ma Yusong vaguely saw someone fall in the bathroom, an ominous feeling instantly rose up.
He borrowed a wrench and an axe from his neighbors and tried to smash the door or burglar window, but failed to do so.
After calling the police, firefighters soon arrived, and by the time paramedics arrived, the old man had sadly passed away.
Ma Yusong cried on the spot, for this unknown old man, but also for his own distant parents.
Delivery is a daily struggle against time.
He has received bad reviews, deducted money, and been reprimanded by customers because of overtime. But there has never been a time when it was as hard as it is now.
He couldn’t help but assume, “If I had come one step earlier, wouldn’t everything have been different?”
Many people advised Ma Yusong not to blame himself, as what he had done was far beyond his job. The children, who should have been most responsible for the elderly, were absent from the scene in countless similar stories.
Most of their absence is due to one reason or another.
Zhang Aihua’s youngest son works at a gym in Kunming, and his job is to distribute flyers and solicit customers to open cards. As the performance and customer conversion effect is linked, the average monthly salary up to about 2400. The daughter-in-law, on the other hand, works as a cleaner in a school, 1700 a month.
“I have to rent 1200 a month, my daughter’s kindergarten school has to 1000, dinner expenses 1200 bar, the rest of the cell phone bills, buy a dress to buy a quilt, basically every month to count. How much money do I have left? This used refrigerator, I still save a few months to squeeze out.” From the youngest son’s point of view, he really had no choice. Bringing his mother to live with him would require him to rent a three-bedroom apartment, directly increasing his rent expenses by 500. Such additional expenses would make his life unsustainable.
Plus WeChat’s Chen Hang asked him rhetorically, saying you extra time to do more work, send down takeout can be subsidized back to the 500.
“The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the public. To and from work, lunch and shopping peak, have to wind up all the time, and Internet promotions to grab customers, where I have time to run takeout?” In fact, he couldn’t switch to take-out to make more money because he had hepatitis.
Zhang Aihua’s eldest son, because of the failure of borrowing online loans to do business, with his wife and daughter went to Shenzhen to open up online cars.
Internet loans he borrowed 120,000, five-year period, together with more than 200,000 have to pay back, more than 5,000 per month. At the same time, he needs to support the family, to create a better environment for the two children, so he needs a job with an income of more than 10,000. He couldn’t find such an income job in Kunming, so he had to choose to go to economically developed areas.
But the cost, he also can not take his mother. Renting a room in Shenzhen, an extra room is more than 1000, but also have to arrange a manpower dedicated to wait for food and living. And, running online taxi, to earn enough 10,000, he has to run more than 20 orders a day. Not even a breath of air, let alone to deal with the elderly living problems.
According to the economic cost of layers of screening down, takeout becomes a remote support of the second choice.
As a form of elderly care that has emerged in recent years, it is limited in what it can do except act as a sounding board to confirm that the elderly are alive.
This is by no means a predicament for individual families.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China ranks first in the world in terms of the growth rate of population aging. As of the end of 2019, the domestic population of people over 60 years old has exceeded 250 million, accounting for 18.1% of the total population. Among them, more than 40 million elderly people are disabled and mentally handicapped, showing accelerated growth compared to previous years.
Under the national condition of “getting old before getting rich”, young people are dragged into the high-efficiency and high-paced socialized production machine, and they are getting more and more “rolled up” and unable to do anything else. The dilemma.
The “elderly takeaway” is just the most extreme side of this dilemma.
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