When the pandemic first arrived, no one could have predicted what the disaster would mean. Now two years later, some changes are a foregone conclusion, some changes are continuing, and we are learning to live with them. The recently released movie "Embracing You Through the Cold Winter" brings everyone back to the special moment of the lockdown in Wuhan, and the trajectory of ordinary people's fates is suddenly distorted and intersected. A movie, like a mirror, allows the audience to see themselves, but also to see the fear and love of the people around them. Today is the story of the fate of five people whose fates have shifted, and it is also the story of each of you and me.
Liu Junping takeaway station manager
Return to Wuhan, which is about to be locked down
I am the eldest in the family, I have brought my younger brothers and sisters since I was a child, and I am used to worrying about it, saying that it is not the same, and the same is true at work. I started out as a rider, but then I had a strong track record, and maybe the leaders thought I had a strong aura, so I tried to manage the team.
I am now a takeaway station manager at Zhoutou Station in Hanyang, Wuhan. They all like to call me "boss", no matter what happens in life or work, they are used to letting me give advice, and sometimes even quarrel with my girlfriend, and they come to me for mediation.
At the beginning of 2020, the morning of the lockdown in Wuhan, I was actually on the highway back to my hometown in Xiaogan. Grandpa died the year before, according to the custom of the old family, the children who are floating outside must go home for the first year and give new incense to the old man. When there was still 20 kilometers to Xiaogan, the car radio began to broadcast the news that Wuhan would be locked down.
At that time, there were still more than a dozen people left in the station, the youngest of whom was only 18 years old. I originally arranged the duty list, but I was not very assured, thinking that I could not leave this group of people in Wuhan, and ran away by myself, so I immediately got off the highway and turned around to return.
I lied to my family, only to say that I got up late, encountered a lockdown, and could not get out. Family complains, such a big thing, how can you forget? They thought I was careless and didn't blame me.
As soon as I entered Wuhan, I was locked down. I rushed to the supermarket to buy 200 kilograms of rice, green vegetables, dry goods, bread, instant noodles and other daily necessities were well stocked and prepared for a long-term battle.
In fact, I have already started to prepare. After the Huanan Seafood Market closed, I went to the pharmacy to buy a lot of banlange, 84 disinfectant and disinfectant alcohol. There were so many brothers in the station that they did not dare to take it lightly. There are more things to do after the lockdown, take your temperature and wear a mask. At that time, there was no health code, and in order to reassure customers, we asked each rider to wear a safety card to deliver food - writing the rider's body temperature and the disinfection of the lunch box.
My brother has a cross-country team, he's volunteering, and he's built a group that posts missions every day. When the city was first locked down, it was not very busy, and there were few people ordering takeaways, so I volunteered with them, driving medical staff, delivering supplies, etc. I transported masks and protective clothing, drove to the high-speed service area, moved the supplies into the trunk, and transported them to the centralized distribution point. Boxes of supplies are gathered, piled up into mountains, and the staff are labeled one by one, this community, that hospital... Hopes for the whole country have come together.
These things are hidden from the family. When the child didn't wait for me to go home for the New Year, crying on the phone and saying that I was lying, I was still very sad.
Later, there were more and more takeaway orders, and I, the station manager, also became a rider and ran the list. When I first brought food to the hospital, the nurse who came to get the takeaway told me that they had been eating instant noodles for more than a week and could finally change their taste today. No matter where it is sent, others are saying, "You have to pay more attention to safety", and some people will send me masks.
Talking about this now, it seems like a very common thing, but at that time, my heart was warm. When I encounter danger, I feel that my profession is quite sacred. Two years on, I am also more convinced that the decision to return to Wuhan before the lockdown is not wrong.
Figure | Group photo while volunteering
Nurse at Aqi Top 3 Hospital
After losing his job, he returned to his old profession
When I was in college, I majored in nursing, but I loved to travel, so I took the tour guide certificate in my sophomore year, worked as a docent in the scenic spot after class, and officially became a tour guide after graduating in 2018.
The biggest benefit of this tour tour is the freedom of atmosphere. Every day I meet different people, explain in different places, it will not be boring. My favorite group is to take high school graduates in the summer, similar in age, and get along like friends. When the epidemic came, the travel agency had no business, stayed at home for several months, and waited for not to resume work but to close the company.
I needed to get a new job and my first instinct was to get back to my major. At that time, nurses were in short supply, and I was fortunate to enter a public tertiary hospital and live a life of "great contrast" with before. The outpatient workload is large, going out to work at seven o'clock every morning, arriving home at eight o'clock in the evening, a stop is about ten hours, suffering from lumbar muscle strain.
Fortunately, the medical relationship in the neurology area is very good. In hospitals, there is a difference between the attending physician, the chief physician and the specialist. There is a doctor who is already at the director level, and on weekdays, patients call him "Director Yang", and he uses Sichuan dialect, "You don't call me, I am an ordinary doctor, you can call me Dr. Yang." "He was also very kind to the nurses, and sometimes received some fruit and specialties, and gave us some of them. I don't usually want it, and I run when he has to give it. He always chased after him and said, "This is called sharing." Although this kind of action is small, it is very sincere and warms people's hearts.
Sometimes when it comes to off-hours, when the doctor is still seeing the doctor, the nurse has to keep watch and lock the door. There is a teacher Zheng, more than fifty years old, who sees patients carefully and is very popular with patients. Once I was in a hurry and asked him to lock the door. The next day, he playfully said to me, "I already have your keys." "It turned out that he was afraid that I would be embarrassed, so he matched it after work, and he didn't have to wait for me later."
These doctors are like a ray of sunshine in the darkness, giving me great comfort. Influenced by them, I also wanted to upgrade my academic qualifications and pursue graduate studies in applied psychology. I plan to work as a psychology teacher in the school in the future, which can help more people, especially to make the children grow up happily.
In the past year and a half, I have not traveled again, not even Sichuan. Have I ever said that my fate has been rewritten by the pandemic? I don't think so. The Buddha had a saying, "Whoever you meet, that's the person who should be in your life." Whatever happens, that's the only thing that happens. ”
I remember Teacher Yang when they saw a doctor, and the four words they often said were "let nature take its course". People, it is because they want too much that they will be anxious. In fact, how to come is how to come, I now pay more attention to what I can do now.
Pictured| when I went to Jiuzhaigou in winter, I took a tour guide flag doll
Employee of Meng Yu Company
He pulled me out of the trough
In 2018, I took out a loan to buy a house and a car. At the end of the year, I resigned from the newspaper office and wanted to start a business.
I'm going to open a pizzeria. Before opening the store, I checked the information, studied the recipe, and went to the street to measure the flow of people. Because it was a franchise store, I also went to the headquarters in Yunnan to investigate, and tasted more than a dozen kinds of pizzas in the flagship store and branch there. I was very satisfied with the results of the survey, so I officially opened a store in Futian, Shenzhen, and part of the starting capital was deposits, and part of it was looking for bank loans.
At the beginning, the business of the store was very good, dine-in food plus takeaway, there were six or seven thousand flowing water every day. After a few months, I opened a second store nearby. The store has also reached the first position in the region on the Us group. Although it has not yet made money, the situation has opened up.
However, by the end of January 2020, no one was out, no one had ordered takeaways, and the pizzeria suddenly ran out of business. The dough, durian and other raw materials stored in the refrigerator are rotting visibly to the naked eye. The 4 clerks were all young and they quickly disappeared. Wait until the New Year, there is no clerk, the pizza can not be made, the store has no income, can only close.
The store cannot be transferred, but can only be returned to the landlord. Suddenly saddled with 800,000 debts, mortgages, car loans are out of supply. Banks started collecting debts, and every day they would send text messages and phone calls asking me when I would pay back the money.
My parents knew I was in debt after receiving a letter from a lawyer. They were civil servants in small cities, and the moment they received the bank letter, they felt like the sky was falling, and kept calling me, "What the hell are you doing in Shenzhen?" ”
At the hardest time, I thought about self-sufficiency. My dad was originally a very tall and cold person, during that time I didn't know why, walking the dog, eating bowls of ravioli, seeing cats, dogs and dogs on the road, he would take pictures and send them to me, and would report to me about his work and life. These contents looked inexplicable, but at that time, they became the support for me to live well.
My idea is very simple, first stay up, stay up one day to count the day, always have to pay off the debt, can not cause trouble to the parents.
Later, I had to sell the house, because there was no money to repay the car loan and the mortgage, there were overdue records, and the house could only go to the auction, which lowered the price a lot. He sold the car again, borrowed a sum of money from his parents, and then worked for a while before slowly paying off the debt. There is no savings on my body.
Even a small thing happened in that period of time, it would greatly touch me. One night I went to the supermarket to buy discounted food, and on the way back, the backpack strap suddenly broke, and the contents spilled on the ground, and I squatted on the ground and couldn't stand up for half a day.
It's hard to find a job, but I'm lucky enough to find a small company for corporate promotion. I rented a room downstairs from my old home, and after graduating for many years, I started renting a house and squeezing the subway again.
In the past two years, the ups and downs, the whole person's mental state is not as positive as before, and the age is more than 30, which is completely unsuitable for love. Instead, I met Mr. Right.
He was a good fit with me. I love Friends, he's the one who can memorize the lines. He never preached or asked me to make money or have children, but just told me, "Don't worry about anything, leave it to me." I was short-tempered and grumpy, and he was very tolerant of me, "You can do whatever you want, I want you to be happy." "He didn't mind my past at all, or that my debts hadn't been paid off, and I was still paying off my debts every month."
The hope of life is slowly unfolding again. Commute to work, cook and eat, and keep a few more cats. Sometimes I think that if I want to exchange what I have lost for the current person, it is also worth it.
Two days ago, I sent my dad a picture of hanging out with him. My dad said he hadn't seen you smile in over a year.
The picture | circle of friends sent when opening a pizzeria
Liu Yan real estate cost accounting
Waiting for an opportunity in the dormant
I am 37 years old, a cost accountant in the real estate industry, and after the 35-year-old professional watershed, I am greeted by unemployment.
Before the epidemic came, my housing enterprise was about to collapse, coupled with the intermittent suspension of work in the past two years, the house could not be sold, and now it has completely closed down. Sooner or later, the real estate bubble will burst, but these two years have arrived in advance.
I voluntarily left in April this year. At that time, considering that the number of employees in the real estate industry was particularly large, one more cost engineer's certificate, not to mention the charcoal in the snow, at least it was the icing on the cake, and I wanted to spend time reading books to prepare for the exam. Who knew that because of the prevention and control requirements, a few days before the exam, the cost engineer exam in guizhou Province was cancelled. Many of my former colleagues and I left the exam to prepare for the exam, which was a huge blow.
We are older, and many companies simply do not recruit. I kept submitting resumes and spent thousands of dollars to ask headhunters to beautify their resumes. Interviewed several times, no following.
Real estate companies are more willing to recruit college students who have graduated from prestigious universities, even if they just went to do nothing. We have more than ten years of work experience, one is a high price, a few thousand dollars a month is definitely not dry; the other is a skilled hand, know many industry insiders, not good to fool.
The real estate industry cost accounting is divided into several kinds, like our installation professional, before looking for a job is not worried at all, do not work happily, you can go at any time, you can immediately find a good condition to open the next home. Nowadays, even if you are a very good technician, it is not easy to find a home.
Now, I help my friends do cost accounting on the construction site, which is a transition. It's nice to have a job in the current economic environment. I have old people, young people, and mortgages to pay off, and at least one job to cover these expenses.
It is not very realistic to change careers again, that is, I want to work hard to keep the job in hand, sink my heart to get the certificate in hand, and then find a training class to improve my skills and competitiveness, I believe that even if I am older, even if it is late, I will eventually have the day to stay up.
Kapok shop owner
Navigating a whole new industry
I love to travel and after graduating from college, I decided to make my own homestay.
My home is on the outskirts of Dalian, there is a 600 square meters of two-story yard, just suitable, I began to decorate the design. In terms of internal decoration, to create a net red style, set up some hands-on experience projects, residents can try cake baking, floral art, etc.; external transformation, added an orchard and vegetable field, so that guests can experience the fun of picking vegetables and fruits, close to nature.
My homestay has been in operation since 2012 and can accommodate up to 40 people. At that time, the domestic well-done homestays were concentrated in Dali and Lijiang, the industry threshold was low, and they applied for a business license, and they could start operating if they had a house or capital. In recent years, peers have competed to create an Internet celebrity style, and a price war has been fought, and people have constantly poured in to get a piece of the pie. The homestay industry has been in a period of rapid growth until the epidemic comes.
In the past two years, I have repeatedly tossed and turned between opening and closing stores, and the longest time, it was closed for two months. Compared to before, the revenue has decreased by 80%, and the customer has lost a lot. I couldn't do it anymore and had to make another living, so in March this year I came to Beijing and opened a flower shop in Chaoyang District. When I was doing a homestay before, it would involve flower bed sets, and I had learned some floral knowledge, but I didn't expect it to come in handy at this time.
Florist is a completely unfamiliar industry, looking for customers, talking about cooperation, expanding channels, all need to explore from scratch. Store costs and material costs are in front of us, the storage cycle of flowers is only 3-4 days, and the cost of some imported flowers is very high, if you can't sell them, the pressure is very high.
Our customer unit price is basically more than 200 yuan, or quite high. People are in a state of being a little afraid to spend money now. I want to continue to enrich the variety of flowers, customers will like. In the beginning stage, knowing that you have lost money, you must also grit your teeth and invest in it.
In the past two years, many things are difficult to estimate, and it is difficult to say how many goods are prepared in normal times and how many goods are prepared for festivals. This year's Valentine's Day and other festivals, the business is good, there is no leftovers, so tanabata, I prepared 70,000 yuan of goods. As a result, there were few orders, most of which were not sold, and could only be thrown away or given away.
This reminds me that I will have to be doubly careful in the future. Every day when I get the flower materials, I will slowly sort out, beat the leaves and prick, repair the bad petals, maintain the external structure, clean the containers, disinfect, control the indoor temperature... Busy and busy, but there is some comfort in the heart.
The flower shop sounds wonderful, and I hope that life in the future can also be very beautiful. It's like handing over a beautiful bouquet of flowers to a client, and I bless them from the bottom of my heart.
Pictured | a snap of a colleague preparing for a floral class
Every ordinary person who experiences difficulties, persevering, is his own hero.
The plot of "Embracing You Through Winter" can find character archetypes in real life. In the hardest winter in Wuhan two years ago, their fate was rewritten. Jia Ling plays a takeaway rider in Wuhan, who is locked down, riding a battery car through the deserted streets, delivering medicine to the piano teacher (Zhu Yilong) trapped at home, and also delivering food to medical staff. The role she plays is similar to liu junping, the takeaway station manager in the previous article.
Whether in the movie or in life, there are ordinary people like you and me. He may be the piano teacher in urgent need of medicine in the film, or the owner of a travel agency with difficulty in cash flow, or he may be a shopkeeper who is in debt in reality, a nurse who is busy in a new working environment...
Warmth always comes in the next moment. The piano teacher meets the delivery rider who delivers the medicine, the travel agency owner gets emergency funds, the in-debt shopkeeper meets the lover who pulls her out of the mud, and the nurse meets the well-meaning doctor. Just like the movie conveys, in the midst of change, people are watching out for each other, looking for new breakthroughs, and constantly discovering new hopes and beauty around the corner.
On December 31, the film was officially released, and I hope that every moviegoer can receive comfort in these ordinary heart-warming stories. Say goodbye to the two years that have been suspended, and in the new year, gain new strength and hope.
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Written by | Zhou Rongwang
Edit | Zhang Xinming