Buying a house is a religion for most Chinese families, a way to build up confidence in life. In the southern county of Zhejiang, a middle-aged couple went into debt to buy a house, only to be struck by natural disasters and serious illness. The family lives in a garage, a noodle shop and a modest house.
I typed in the address where I said I lived, and the cab driver stared at the map for a long time. The system showed no roads in this neighborhood. He asked me if I didn't know. He said in surprise, "Isn't this your home, you don't know it?" I smiled, "I'm touched, just touched."
The truth is, every year for the past three years, I didn't know where my home would be.
I called my mom and her voice on the phone brooked no argument. "No, you tell him, it's this elevator block, everyone knows it! I can't find it. Call him, I'll tell him!"
The driver pulled onto the main road at the edge of the county. There was a construction site on the left, a vegetable field in the middle, and the road to the neighborhood on the right, but it hadn't been repaired yet. I hurriedly handed him my cell phone again, and following my mom's full command, he drove stiffly into the vegetable field, with a path of dirt interspersed with boulders in front of him. I vaguely heard a strange sound coming from the undercarriage of the car. In the afterglow, his face grew serious.
We finally saw the concrete floor and breathed a sigh of relief almost simultaneously when we reached home.
After getting off the bus, I carried my suitcase into the elevator, but the elevator is sometimes bad: it doesn't close at first, and then the door closes with a creak. When I got home, I heard from my mom that she had been shut down more than once. At first, she panicked and her heart rate spiked. Now she can calmly call the elevator company to open the door.
As she said this, my mom took me around the house, showing me the white-tiled floors, the carefully chosen iron vintage lamps, a glimpse of the warm brownish-red doorframes, the kitchen at sunset. The TV, marble dining table, and wooden chairs were all purchased during the renovation of the first house. They'd spent two years eating ashes in a storage unit belonging to their parents and friends. Now the new meets the old here.
Mother smiled. "Isn't it a happier life than it was then? I don't owe any money, so I own this house."
I knew my mother's contentment was genuine. This neighborhood, built next to the high-speed train, has no fences, no property, no green or recreational areas. As a relocation house, an elevator was installed thanks to the rule that "buildings of seven floors and above must have an elevator". But after all, it took her most of her life to have a place to live again.
My mom bought her first house in the county in 2007, in her 40s.
To do so, she and her father traveled to mines all over the country for more than 20 years. Both parents were born in a village 20 kilometers from the county seat. The family was so small that they left home before they were adults to make a living. There were more than 100,000 people working in the mines and shafts in our county, and relatives and friends helped each other. Later my mother also went to the mine and cooked in the mine's canteen. When my mother was 22 years old, she met my father, who was a miner in Guanzhong, and they fell in love. They got married in the late 1980s.
When they got married, they didn't get a house from their parents. They were gone for many years, and the old house was divided among the children who worked in agriculture. Later my mom would bring it up almost every New Year's Eve, "I didn't even know where to carry my duffel bag back from New Year's Eve, so I slept in my grandmother's barn at night.
All year round, my parents followed mining teams around the world, and the iron house where the miners lived in solidarity was their mobile home. I followed them into the iron house during the summer of elementary school. There was a wooden bed you could sit on, a wooden table and chairs whose paint had been removed, an electric fan and, when conditions were good, a satellite TV. During the day, my father walked into the kilometer-deep mine with dry food. At night, he returned home in the dark, picked up a bucket of water that his mother had made in advance, stood in the bath and poured it from top to bottom, with a layer of black mud at the bottom.
After a few years of hard times, they saved up some savings, and his father began contracting with others for mining work. He still went down the shafts with the workers, while his mother took care of the logistics and the miners' paychecks. It sounds lucrative, but contracting is a high investment, slow return and risky. They always make less and lose more.
Because they didn't have a house, they went to a very expensive boarding school for school and slept at an aunt's house or a teacher's house on weekends and holidays. When my parents came home for New Year, they had to bother my aunt again. They piled up boxes, bedding, and other miscellaneous items in the single room in their house to make room for a one and a half meter bed. My family of three squeezed in for the night.
Buying a house has always been a worry for my parents. around 2007, they had saved more than 400,000 yuan in savings. Unfortunately, my father put up more than 200,000 yuan to invest in a friend's mine, which he called "equity," and ultimately lost the money. With the expansion of the county's development to the south, housing prices have risen year after year, the average price of second-hand houses in the old neighborhoods of the central county has exceeded 5,000 yuan per square meter. My mom is not assured, no longer buy. I'm afraid she will never have a chance to buy a house in her life.
But my mother waited for another opportunity. The village at the southernmost tip of the county was demolished and a return-home neighborhood was built. The villagers who used to live here were able to get 2 or 3 houses and put them up for registered sale.At 450,000 square meters, the new houses were the cheapest in the county.
She was determined to get a loan to buy a house here. For this, she and her father began a long argument. Her father's idea was more practical, the money left in the family needed to be invested in the mining project. What's the point of contracting a mine when you've taken all the money to buy a house? You want to buy a house, and you're hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. What can you repay?
Six months later, my father gave in. My mom paid for the house as she wished, but the money for the renovation is still missing. The new three-room, two-bedroom house has cement on the walls, tile on the floor, plumbing and electricity, and is empty enough for them to continue to go out and "do the work".
But soon, the new house came in handy, like a humble nest, catching the heavy fall of the mother.
In May 2008, the parents were in western Sichuan. In the earthquake, they left all their belongings behind and ran downstairs to live in a makeshift tent. After two or three days, seeing that the situation was safe, the old folks returned to the building one after another to facilitate cooking. However, a strong aftershock hit and my mom hurried downstairs in the chaos. She hit her knee on the step when she fell and suffered a comminuted patella fracture.
My mom underwent wire fixation surgery at a local hospital while my dad took care of her. After being discharged from the hospital, they decided to return to the county to recuperate.
They hid it all from me. When I came home from school in the summer, I saw a confusing picture: brightly colored tiles on the floor, exposed cement particles on all four walls, crystal lamps with tassels hanging from the living room ceiling, but simple light bulbs hanging in the bedrooms, an unfinished closet, and a few exposed wires sticking out of the walls.
I looked around in bewilderment, a dusty shell of unfulfilled dreams forming the beginnings of a home.
And my mother was half lying on the master bed.
Up, with a cast on her knee and a pair of crutches leaning on the side of the bed. Her face was pale, and she smiled at me, "It's okay, it's not serious, just get better." She raised her hand to show me the side, "Look, the bathroom and toilet are all renovated, the kitchen is also good, no problem to live."
She looked at the wall again, her face full of longing, "When it's painted, and the cabinets are painted, white, it'll look good."
After spending three or four months in bed, her mother was able to walk off the floor. For rehab, she had to go downstairs for a walk after dinner, and the neighborhood was surrounded by a construction site with sparse street trees, and she took a walk every night against the flying construction dust until she was done, "I need to walk more, or else this knee of mine is getting tighter and tighter."
The following year, after surgery to remove the wires that held her knee in place, she recuperated for a few months and recovered her mobility well. When she leaned her two legs together to compare them, the muscles in her left calf had atrophied considerably and were noticeably thinner.
It looked as if her mother's body was fully recovered. Her father's contracting work was not going well, and she did not follow her to the mines again, resting at home to recuperate. After two more years of smooth sailing, the concrete walls of our home were painted a clean white, and our lives seemed to be about to take on a new look.
In 2012, I started attending a boarding middle school. During the holidays, they told me on the phone that they were working in the mine and I was living at home alone. One afternoon, there was a knock on the door at home. They came back, and my mother was assisted upstairs by a neighbor. While the southern summer heat had not yet faded, she wore a woolen cap, revealing a short section of dark brown hair underneath. As far as I can remember, she has always had long hair and tried to curl it. I blurted out, "Mom, why did you cut your hair short, it looks pretty good."
The neighbor outside the door laughed, and my mother bent over with a smile, "It looks good, I just cut it!" The neighbor left, she took off her hat, also took off the "short hair", the scalp of the newborn hair like a baby short thin and soft. She told me she had cervical cancer and had finished chemotherapy.
I had seen a lab report on their bedside table that said fibroids, benign. I just gently folded it back, and the information I looked up said it was not a dangerous condition. I didn't realize that the condition would later take a sharp turn for the worse and would rip our family's life into an even bigger chasm.
I also learned later that relatives had been worried about people and money, said to my father, or do not treat, is my father firmly support the treatment, and in the hospital with the bed for 2, 3 months. Chemotherapy is quite effective, but the family therefore borrowed more than 100,000 debts, they had to mortgage the house to the bank, rely on the money to cope. For an extra income, they rent out the second bedroom closest to the door to middle-school students who walk around the neighborhood.
New illnesses and old ones have weakened my mother's health.
In 2013, when she was returning to her hometown, she fell on a mountain road and was taken to the hospital after re-fracturing her knee. I accompanied her to the hospital as she waited for the operation. During the three-hour wait, she lay flat on her back on a medical trolley, turning her head to face the wall, her face red, her tone of voice impatient and aggravated.
Fourteen years later, it happened again. She went to visit her family, walked up the last flight of stairs, and somehow her legs gave out and she went straight down to her knees for another surgery. This time, doctors removed a piece of her iliac bone to fill in the over-worn patella.
Five knee surgeries and one cancer chemotherapy treatment in seven years have made her optimistic mother sensitive and depressed. Once upon a time, the corners of her mouth were always up, "You have to smile more, the corners of your mouth down will have bad luck." Now, lying in her hospital bed, she looks chagrined, saying that the fortune-teller had told her long ago not to go out to visit the patient or to go out to drink the wedding wine, "Why didn't I listen?"
She began to wonder again if there was something wrong with the house that had brought her so much misfortune. One day, out of the blue, she asked me, "Would it be okay to sell the house?" Rarely, she shed tears in front of me.
Mother went to a fortune-teller again to have her fortune told. The fortune-teller was iron-clad, "You only need to move three more times, and you'll surely usher in wealth." She smiled respectfully and pulled a roll of large red bills from her purse and handed it over. The fortune teller pulled open a drawer and stuffed it in, the table was crowded and the large denomination bills were already fluffed up in a thick layer.
"What the Buddha said must be accurate." She says she's not thinking about selling the house for a while, yet she reads about it all the time.
She began to suffer from severe insomnia, often staying awake all night, complaining to me about how she couldn't sleep and refusing to go to the hospital. Father went back and forth between the provinces, there is always no satisfactory opportunity, was cheated by the partners to more than 50,000 yuan, the police in a different place after the case was filed is also nowhere to be found.
Despite the fact that I have asked many times, how much debt does the family have? They always keep their mouths shut to me and say that children don't need to know so much. A few years later I learned that there is no income during that time, they will be the house mortgage, to friends and relatives to borrow money to pay off the loan, the next year again mortgage, ID cards also took to the loan, so down, they pay the bank every month interest to five or six thousand.
They guarded that house for two years of monthly deficits.
In the summer of 2016, I went home and my mother once again gave me an unfamiliar address. I realized that they had sold the house after all. After the money from the sale of the house was liquidated, more than 300,000 yuan was left, and she briefly breathed a sigh of relief, saying that in the first few years she couldn't breathe, couldn't stand up straight, and lived in a house that felt like it was already someone else's.
The new home is housed in the cheapest garage you can find in the county, tucked away in a construction site. The concrete floor in front of the door is connected to a large area of barren grass, and the roll-up front door walks in with a stove set up on one side and a table and chairs on the other. Further inside, the left side is a narrow bathroom, the right side of the creaking wooden stairs leading to the second floor bedroom, wall stickers convex bubble, rolled edge, the room is extremely low, the window in the leg position, narrow side, looking out is the opposite side of the brown painted facade and street trees.
The old house was a high-priced luxury appliance, which was temporarily placed in a friend's warehouse by his parents. The refrigerator had been knocked too hard during the move and was scrapped not long afterward. They went to great lengths to transport back the old refrigerator that the friend didn't want, but when they opened the door, it was thick with dirty frost, and my mother blinked her back trying to clean it.
She was so excited that she pulled me in and said that the current place is only temporary. She was able to buy a very low-priced "tender house" from an acquaintance, and it will be ready in two years' time. Next year, she is going to change another place to rent, so that she has moved three times, there will be a time to make a fortune.
The next year, we did move out of the garage. Coming home from school, I remained at the new address to a two-story storefront on the county street. They resold the house they had on hand again and bought it in a little better location - a new subdivision about a kilometer away - and living in the new house turned into an even longer wait.
On the first floor, my mother opened a noodle shop, and on the second floor, we lived in a small attic. I went upstairs, and on the wooden platform extending from the attic was an old 200 yuan mahjong machine, surrounded by a few customers.
Mother's careful budgeting, mahjong for the dealer, will be counted as "a round", can draw 10 yuan fee, daily income is not certain, sometimes a single night she can receive sixty to one hundred dollars ranging. When a guest comes to the first floor, she goes downstairs to wash her hands, quickly makes a bowl of noodles, and then returns to the attic.
It was 1:00 a.m. that morning when my mother shut down the first floor of the store and we cleaned up, and the mahjong players were in full swing. The mahjong table was just a sliding door away from the bed, and we lay down to the deafening sound of the table being shuffled. I froze for a moment, not realizing that we were going to sleep to such sounds.
She said, "Just bear with it, or you can put your headphones on." I lay on the bed with my back to her and couldn't help but start to whimper in the choking smell of smoke. She was afraid that people outside would hear me and half sat up fuming, "What are you crying for?"
I just thought it was hard for her. I tried to calm myself and attempted to speak, but she turned away and lay down, leaving me with a backdrop of rejection.
The fog of cigarettes burrowed in from under the wooden door, a thud was the muffled sound of a card being slammed on the table, a few brief conversations or complaints, and then the machine rumbled in its belly and spat out a whole new deck of codes, and week after week people wiled away the long night until dawn. At dawn she rose and opened the door of the store to begin a new day of labor.
That year, her father went on to work in the mines, and she took care of the store on her own, never resting unless she had to go out. She proudly told me that she earned more than 5,000 yuan a month, which was enough to cover her family's expenses, my college tuition, and even her father's monthly salary.
A year later, my mother, who has always been strong, found herself working less and less hard. Her heart rate was fast and slow, and when she walked a little bit, she couldn't breathe, and her body was slick with cold sweat.
Every three months, I am anxious to grab a specialist's number for a hospital in Shanghai from the online platform, and arrange for a train ticket and accommodation. She leaves from home, I leave from school, and we meet on the same train.
Three hundred dollars for the registration fee and only three minutes of meeting with the doctor. The doctor diagnosed arrhythmia and frequent premature beats, but her condition is not yet serious enough to warrant surgery, so she's going to use medication first to see what works, and if it gets worse, she'll need eighteen thousand dollars for surgery plus hospitalization. Then, we took a big bag of medication at the hospital, enough for three months.
After dinner, my mother wanted to go for a walk in the neighborhood, and as we walked through the park, she staggered, "To leave such a large park in such a lot." Nearby homes are 120,000 per square foot, and it is not an exaggeration to say that there is an inch of land under our feet. Tall balsam fir laying down shadows, people walking and talking peacefully, not far away is a wide road, the end of the front is the light of the complex mall, this park is an island of luxury green, we happened to pass by another life.
Not much farther, mother's breathing is unsteady, to sit down to rest. The plaza was divided into two sides of elderly people dancing, and playful children ran past us. "If I lived in this neighborhood and was in better health, I'd come dancing every day too." She stood up to join the dancing seniors, not shy or timid, her movements a little awkward. After dancing for a few minutes and then folding back to rest, I reached out to help her, holding the cold sweat on one palm of her hand in the heat, like a serpent's letter cutting through me, a figment of her illness and pain.
After this return to her hometown, she closed the store and retired the house. The new house was repossessed and she and her father began to renovate the new house. To save money, they lived in a house bought by her cousin's family, in the same neighborhood as ours. We were on the seventh floor and her family was on the third floor.
Only, the cousin's home is also a rough house, in addition to concrete walls and water and electricity, nothing, they moved into the necessary cooker and bed, because it is difficult to withstand the summer heat, called me to help online shopping an air conditioning fan. The first time I saw this, I was in the middle of a "half-finished" house like this one.
Decorating was done, and after some time, my mother moved into the new house as she wished. She looked much better. She bragged about her luck in buying a house on the seventh floor, and even the rooftop area on the top floor was ours. She raised money to build a loft, following the style of other neighbors, and built a new roof and walls on the rooftop, which drew the attention of the URA, whose staff inspected the district several times before delineating the scope of what could be built.
She talks about the progress of the eighth floor with a smile on her face, and when it is completed it can be rented out, another income. However, coincidentally, the wall position than the delineation of the range beyond one meter, along with the top was forced to demolish, this time the loss of 30,000, the fortune teller said that the fortune did not come. The construction of the top floor fell silent, she put a passion into the affairs of vegetable planting downstairs for the time being.
After dinner, I accompanied her for a walk in the open space downstairs, where residents planted vegetables that flourished in the open parking lot, not far from the high-speed rail line, and the train rumbled as it passed. One by one, my mother greeted the oncoming neighbors, and her laughter was still loud and clear.
Later I asked her, "Didn't the fortune teller say you could get rich if you changed three places? If you didn't get rich, did he have to pay you back?"
She laughed, "Now is not quite good, buy this suite, even if I got rich."
- END -
Writing | Yu Chuan
Related Q&A: Related Q&A: Nanning man caught in the set of loans, backed by a huge debt of 3.5 million, more than 7 million of the villa is also lost, how do you think?First of all, the most important thing is to call the police, the police, the police, the important thing to say three times. Loan has in fact constituted a criminal offense, they expect to cheat the borrower by signing a contract with the borrower (the victim) to go running water to form the surface of the legitimate borrowing facts of the way to cheat the borrower's money, their behavior has constituted fraud, and some of the gangs are also delusional through the lawsuit to achieve the possession of the victim's property purpose. Therefore, the set of loans is a crime, encountered to timely report. Second, timely online voice to find the same cheated, since it is a gang, it is likely that other people will also encounter this situation, this time to form a group, and then go to the police, because in some cases the police may think that there is not enough evidence will not be admitted, and the more victims admitted the greater the likelihood. The more victims there are, the more likely they are to be accepted. At the same time, the Internet may also attract the attention of netizens and ultimately allow the police to intervene in the investigation.
The above is my answer to this question, I hope to help you, thank you