"This is the real misfortune, and the habit of being desperate is worse than the desperate situation itself." The French philosopher Camus said so. In some dark and filthy corners, there are always people who live in unimaginable ways, even if it is in the bustling metropolis that countless people yearn for.
Romania is known as the "Tiger of Europe" for its high-growth GDP, and its capital, Bucharest, is the sixth largest city in the European Union. Yet it is in this "Paris of Eastern Europe" that nearly 2,000 people live like rats in the sewers of the city for a long time.
These people lie out at night and do not see the day, as if the neon of the night is their sun. Whenever the night breaks and the morning light fades, they quietly leave the ground and dwell in the foul-smelling, narrow tunnels waiting for the next night.
Why do citizens of these capitalist countries live in sewers? What are the secrets behind Bucharest's prosperity?
The survivor of prejudice
Bucharest is located on the banks of the Dengboviţa River, and its special geographical environment makes the city's climate unique – the dry temperate continental climate dominates most of Eastern Europe, while Bucharest is warm and humid all year round.
The branches of the Linden trees and cherry blossoms spread throughout the city, and the sunlight embellishes Bucharest into a beautiful garden. Many residents of Western Europe regard it as the best place to vacation in Eastern Europe, and countless tourists flock to it every year, giving it the reputation of "the Paris of Eastern Europe".
But this bustling and beautiful Paris of Eastern Europe has many secrets behind it. What one can see is the prosperity it presents to outsiders on the surface. For the locals who live here, some of the suffering and darkness belong only to them.
The developed tourism industry has only profit left in everyone's mind, and how to earn the banknotes of tourists from the developed countries of Western Europe is the first law of Bucharest. This ancient city, which used to be simple and simple, has gradually lost its original color, and the concept of capitalism has been instilled into the minds of every citizen.
Prejudice runs through every corner of Bucharest. People began to discriminate against the sick, orphans, and exclude all groups that could not bring profits. Charities such as nursing homes and orphanages no longer have stable funding in this wave, and those who are already miserable enough are once again homeless.
For a time, homeless AIDS patients, tuberculosis people, abandoned children, empty nesters living on the streets, begging for grace and luxury Western European tourists, in exchange for dignity for change and food to survive.
Decent citizens generally believe that these "parasites" are detrimental to the cityscape, especially to tourists and hinder the development of tourism, which is detrimental to Bucharest's name as a "garden city". Strong prejudice and exclusion squeeze the last bit of living space for vulnerable groups.
They are like street rats, and once they appear in the sun, they will be evicted by their former neighbors or colleagues. In the face of survival, dignity appears worthless. In order to survive, they had to avoid the sun and the crowds and head toward the dark and deep underground.
The Bucharest municipal government, which has spent a lot of money to renovate the sewer system, is well connected and has a lot of relatively dry cement floors. People who avoided scolding accidentally discovered this "paradise", they moved into the ground, and finally had a clean home.
But even so, the crusades and expulsions of other citizens have never stopped, and it seems that the existence of these vulnerable groups is a mistake. Some underground residents were so hungry that they had to go out during the day to forage for food, only to never return and never hear from them again.
Ants are still greedy, let alone living people? The fear of death has led the underground residents to compromise again. They have been following a well-established rule for decades: they must never go out of the ground until dark, and they must come back before dawn.
A layer of ground separates two very different worlds. On one side is the international city of red and bustling lights, and on the other side is the dirty, filthy, damp and dark underground kingdom. People from both worlds live completely opposite routines and lives, but they are both citizens of Bucharest.
Optimists among the underground residents had thought that they were only temporarily residing here and would soon be properly resettled and returned to the ground. Apparently, these illusionists did not see this day coming until they died.
For more than a decade, the number of inhabitants in the underground kingdom has been increasing, and some are new outsiders - the prejudice above the ground has not stopped for a moment. Some are newborns born underground, and in the eyes of these children, perhaps the world is taken for granted, and they are born to live in darkness.
As it turns out, concessions from the underground residents will not lead to a more optimistic situation for them. Driven by inertia, people's prejudices will only grow more and more. They were driven from the ground to the ground, and if they insisted on perfection, one day even this last piece of territory would be lost.
The inhabitants of the Underground Kingdom are born in the dark, die in the dark, and even settle for the darkness, and their abilities and hearts allow only to stick to the last goal— to live. Other than that, they are hard to ask for.
The order of the underground kingdom
Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, which is an immutable truth. Bucharest's underground kingdom has nearly 2,000 inhabitants, a large number of people, and there is no lack of human order here.
Located on the northern outskirts of Bucharest, The Garadet Railway Station has a hidden entrance to the Station Square, the most formal gate of the Underground Kingdom. Push open this door and a new world will be revealed.
Walk along the passage that connects the sewers, where rooms large and small are cluttered. Residents made simple partitions out of broken bricks and planks to maintain what little privacy remained in their homes.
In the narrow rooms, there are all kinds of dilapidated small furniture, most of which are waste collected from the garbage dump, and some of which are homemade by residents with carpenter skills. Slightly wealthier people also have battery-style radios, electric fans and other small appliances.
The humid and dreary environment makes it easy for wood to rot here, so residents generally do not have wooden beds, and hammocks made of sacks and ropes are popular. The inferior ropes break after a while, and the residents are too lazy to repair them, sleeping directly on the cold ground with sacks.
The influx of more than 2,000 residents overwhelmed the entire sewer, and people had to use their hands to expand it as much as possible. After more than ten years of excavation, it seems to have lost its original appearance of the sewer, more like a miniature small town, and only the pipes that emit a stink all the time prove the fact that this is a sewer.
In addition to the stench of the sewers themselves, residents' household garbage, excrement and even corpses have taken the air pollution here to the extreme. The foul-smelling environment makes ordinary people unable to open their eyes at all, and only these people who want to survive can stick to it and get used to it.
The most vivid manifestation of the order of the underground kingdom is the emergence of leaders. The leader here is named Bruce Lee , the English name of the Chinese martial arts superstar Bruce Lee. Bruce's idol is Bruce Lee, whose name was chosen from street gang fights.
The rapidly developing economy brought Bucharest a developed material culture, but also brought about fierce class contradictions. Football culture is well developed here, rivalries between fans of rival teams are fierce, and street gangsters are extremely popular.
Bruce grew up in this rugged environment, he never went to school, and all his time was spent practicing Chinese martial arts. As an adult, he started as a gangster and knocked down one opponent after another with his fists until he became the leader of a gang.
As the saying goes, there is a way to steal, and Bruce is a rather chivalrous gangster boss. The inhabitants of the Underground Kingdom are old and weak women and children, so they are often harassed by some gangsters and hooligans. Bruce was not accustomed to this bullying practice, and led his younger brother to intervene repeatedly.
After coming and going, Bruce found that this method was not a cure for the symptoms, so he simply moved into the underground kingdom and became a full-fledged bodyguard here. The underground residents whom he sheltered worshipped him and revered him as a leader, and each family regularly paid him a certain amount of protection fees.
The money Bruce did not use to squander, he used a large part of it to improve relations with other gangs, so as to fundamentally eliminate their intrusion into the underground kingdom. If there are still gangs that have committed treachery, Bruce will lead the residents to fight back.
Bruce, with his arms prickly and fleshy, is a murderous mafia who seems to have nothing to do with justice, but the series of measures he implemented after he entered the underground kingdom have earned him a wide reputation.
The underground kingdom is a mix of fish and dragons, full of people of all kinds, and cases of sexual abuse of minors often occur here, which are divorced from the rule of law. Bruce cracks down this, and when a similar situation arises, he will personally lead his little brother to hunt down the prisoners.
Those who commit sexual assault will face a series of cruel punishments on the underworld, of which physical castration is the most common and convenient means. Bruce was not at all soft on them, and the steel knife he carried with him was so sharp that anyone with evil intentions was terrified.
In addition, Bruce did everything he could to recruit underground residents into his gang work. Despite all the dirty work, the meager income can always bring some hope to their poor life.
Bruce has put the underground kingdom in good order, and the people have regained the feeling of life on the ground, which seems to be not a sewer, but their real home. The inhabitants rely on each other like family, and the dark world blooms with a long-lost human brilliance.
The only difference is that the clock is reversed for 12 hours as the sun sets and the sunrises breathe. Night means safety at this time, and day is synonymous with danger. The dim lights of the underground and the dazzling neon of the city are their only light.
The chaos of capitalist society
Bruce is a hero in the underground kingdom, but undoubtedly a sinner for the rule of law. He held people's lives in his hands, took drugs and trafficked drugs, and brought great harm to society. He brings not only a sense of security to the underground kingdom, but also a variety of potent drugs.
Drugs have numbed the nerves of the underground residents, making them feel as if they are outside the mud. Bruce prides himself on being a kind of help, but drugs are ultimately forbidden products that destroy the human body and mind, and the underground kingdom full of drugs is not absolutely pure and good.
Ironically, even though Bruce was a drug-trafficking mafia criminal, he did what he was supposed to do by the Romanian government. Instead of harshly accusing him of selling drugs while doing good, ask where the credibility of the Romanian government is.
Romania's GDP is growing rapidly, the highest among all EU countries. In 2019, it was included in the Ranks of High-Income Economies by the World Bank, with an annual GDP per capita of up to 11,000 euros. Such a prosperous economy cannot accommodate those vulnerable people who need help.
The social security system is so backward that Romania also strongly encourages its citizens to have children, and parents who cannot afford to raise children have to abandon their children on the streets. For a time, the abandonment of babies became a common social phenomenon in Romania, and people almost tacitly acquiesced to this extremely immoral behavior.
These helpless children have nowhere to go, either freeze to death and starve to death in the streets, or leave the ground and join the underground kingdom. They have no hukou, no jobs, and the next generation they reproduce will continue this miserable life, living in the dark sewers for generations.
Half heaven, half hell, this is a common phenomenon in capitalist society. On Wall Street in New York, where the United States is most proud, upstairs are capitalists manipulating global finance discussing the stock market, and downstairs are homeless people begging for bread.
The situation is even worse in India's metropolitan Mumbai, where a rising financial tower is lined with low slums. The two buildings are separated by only one wall, but there is an income gap thousands of times. Ordinary Indians in the slums earn only two coins a day, and they cannot even guarantee basic hygiene in their daily lives.
In capitalist society, the weak will hardly ever turn around. The capitalists manipulate the vast majority of the means of production and social wealth, and they do not give the bottom masses the opportunity to rise. As for those high-sounding charities, very few have really been implemented.
The inhabitants of bucharest's underground kingdom have no future in sight, just as all vulnerable groups in capitalist society do not see it. They indulge in alcohol and drugs, seek spiritual solace in a short period of anesthesia, and their already overwhelmed lives are hit hard.
The underground kingdom is full of life, and people suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis know that their lives are not long off, and their sighs are mixed with the sound of water flowing in the sewers, like a purgatory. People don't live to live, they just wait to die.
A reporter once came to Bucharest to visit the underground kingdom, and everything in front of him made his scalp tingle. The imaginary underground residents should be some vicious-looking, morbid monsters, but through the photos, it is not difficult to find that the people here are no different from normal people.
They were also alive, dressed in colorful clothes, with all sorts of hairstyles, and some young and beautiful girls. Once he remembered that they were suffering from various diseases and were going to die of illness in the near future, the reporter's heart was like a knife.
In the face of the reporter's interview, the underground residents invariably refused, as if they were defending their last dignity, they did not want outsiders to see their downfalls. They had lost all their dignity when they lived in the sewers, and their stubbornness as human beings prompted them not to crush them.
The pungent smell and oppressive environment forced reporters to leave early, leaving only fragmentary photographs. Without these vivid records, we would never have imagined that there was such a group of people behind the bustling metropolis of Bucharest.
Teenagers make up a significant portion of the underground population, which means that if the Romanian government does not take proper measures to resettle them, a large number of underground residents will continue to exist in the coming decades, and the underground kingdom seems to never die.
The people's struggle has forced the capitalist government to gradually implement a series of policies to protect people's livelihood and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, and Romania has adjusted the social security system and personal income tax for several consecutive years, but there is still a big gap from the expectations of the Romanian people at the bottom.
In recent years, the impact of the epidemic has made Romania's devastated society worse, and mass demonstrations have emerged one after another. In fact, it is not only a small Romania, but how good can the United States, the number one capitalist power, be?
A country's system is good or bad, and history does not lie. In the face of irresistible natural disasters, the capitalist countries are frequently chaotic and dangerous, and the pavilions born in the financial bubble will eventually become illusory mirages.
The world is experiencing major changes unprecedented in a century, and this drastic change has made the people of all countries in the world deeply aware of the superiority of the socialist system. What system to adopt and what road to take is a fundamental issue related to the future and destiny of the nation. The Chinese nation has flourished for more than 5,000 years and will certainly advance on the road of socialism.
As the lights come on and the neon rises, the inhabitants of the underground kingdom step out of the sewers and onto the glorious streets of Bucharest.
"Sir, can you leave me your remaining cigarette butts?"
The graceful and luxurious citizen looked at the unkempt compatriot in front of him with a look of disgust, and he handed the cigarette in his hand, wondering in his heart: "What is wrong with this society?" ”