A Migrant Labourer's Shanghai Dr

I received a phone call about two hours ago. It was Hawk Zhang calling. He said he was laid off as of end of June as the financial advisor company refused to convert his approbation contract into a formal one.

He has been scouting for a job ever since, but to no avail. He said he was going to an interview tomorrow.  

"The idea of sighing up to be a delivery person has often come up to me," he said.

"Really? I heard the other day from a taxi driver that if not minding the early hours and late hours, he may earn as much as RMB 20,000 a month, like getting out at eight in the morning and returning ..." I actually concurred with him, believing now that physicial labour nowadays generates much better pay than those who work with mental powers, feeling that this must be a way out for him.

"No way! He was boasting!" he said. "It was just a casual idea to me." He added like giving an oath: "I still want to work in the offices."

He said he understood why his four-year-relationship with a young woman, who was a salesperson in a real estate company in Shanghai for the first three years and then moved northward to Taicang of Jiangsu Province, where many German companies were converging, had come to an abrupt end, because since mid-2018, he has not been able to hang on to one job for more than half a year at one go. He explained as if in a confession.

"My unstable career has dashed her confidence in me, and she was scared off of a tumultous life ahead with me," he said. Just at the start of the traditional New Year, the girl, coming from a small city in Anhui Province, suddenly told him she had decided to part ways with him, telling him that she would be married in about two weeks.

The news came like a thunderbolt to him. He was beside himself hearing of this, begging and promising to no avail. And then he started having sleepless nights. "I was glued to the screen (of the mobile phone) until 4 am every day and then slept off until 9 am when I woke up again, to busy about a day's job hunting," he said.

I was alarmed of this late going to bed and warned him that he was not being responsible with himself, as failing to fall into sleep at a much earlier time like 10 pm or 11 pm might jepodize his health. Without health, all else is nothing, I stressed.

He said he understood all that but that he simply could not control himself.

The girl's parents developed a disdain of him as early as 2019, when they refused to meet his parents, who had travelled some 2000 kilometers from a village of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province to Shanghai to meet with what they thought would be their future-daughter-in-law's parents. What an embarassment that was, to him and to his parents!

Zhang has three WeChat accounts. One seems to be strictly for work purposes, but those two others, then, must be for personal life. I don't know why someone can be hectic enough to manage three WeChat accounts. I've known people who have two WeChat accounts, but never three. One of the WeChat accounts actually had, not has, his girlfriend and him together in a blurry cover picture. I recalled that she looked rather plain in appearance. A mutual friend of ours, having met her, said the girl was sullen and tended to raise hell over the slightest trifle.

A few weeks ago, Zhange called me, earnestly seeking out a listening ear. He said: "Now I just want to get married immediately, at whatever cost." I told him that was not a healthy and rational notion to have on his mind. "Marriage is something you cannot plan ahead, but so much of a luck," I said.

"I know, I know," he said, but his eagerness to get married was just that much and strong as to be unshakeable.

I later forwarded him a WeChat group for singles. He immediately replied, seeing that the group was named "Single People of Overseas returnees": “That group was simply not my dish to think of.”

He usually talks like he knows a lot of people and knows some big shots, confidently, eloquently but it was without prejudice to say that, a bit hastily, but deep down he feels keenly of his inferiority: he doesn't know much English and has never studied abroad! 

Once he was hired by a foreign financial advisory. After signing up with the HR department and having met the General Manager, he was left alone with other colleagues, but they all looked reserved, reticent and grim, speaking barely beyond what was necessary, and if they ever spoke, they spoke a mixture of Chinese and English! Leaving the office for lunch he debated within himself, and decided that that company, with its name including "fir" in it, was not a company he was supposed to fit in, so he never returned to the office. That was his shortest tenure of a job!

He was born in 1985 but I remember that when I first met him he said he was born in 1992, and I and some other people he was meeting with did not have a slight doubt of his telling the truth. Being sallow, haggard and bony, though a trifle anxious on the face, he might indeed be that young. I actually joked with others in his face that being so young in a highly specialised profession as an financial advisor, he had a bounty future on the horizon for himself. 

Perhaps that was exactly what he had wished for, hoping that he was not old enough to realize his Shanghai dream.

He called me actually asking me to register him in my own company as a staff so that he was eligible to continue to pay for his social insurance. He said it was Shanghai's policy that one must have a certain number of months of paying for his social insurance without a single month's default before being allowed to buy an apartment.

Buying an apartment was a must for him, he said, "how can I marry without having an apartment?" 

"Ah, I admire you so much, that you are married and own an apartment in Shanghai."

Within the Inner Ring Road, new apartments sell for RMB 400,000 per square meter at the Bund, and nearly RMB 70,000 per square meter for an old apartment. That was the kind of price of apartments in Shanghai.

But what did he earn when he was working? Rarely surpassing RMB 10,000 a month. The most recent job afforded him RMB 12,000 pre-tax, and he got about RMB 9,000 net in his pocket. Because he was the highest paid employee, the employer installed a big computer screen with the video camera on at his back, he sitting at the extreme end of the office, to ensure he was working all the time.

How often he had grunted at the sight of the big screen, on which the entire office and all the staff were, with him certainly looming the largest and shown in the tiniest detail!

- Written in Hohhot, on the evening of 4 August 2021

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