At the end of the universe is the establishment, and at the moment when the "examination fever" continues to heat up, the confused young man stands at the fork in the road, ready to squeeze into the single-plank bridge that thousands of troops want to cross.
At the same time as the pressure of going ashore was rising, it also gave birth to hot words such as "Dachang naked speech", "taking off Kong Yiji's long shirt", "light physical work exploration", "life is the wilderness" and so on. Some young people have begun to actively or passively escape the mainstream narrative, and the "working holiday visa", which can both work and earn money and travel and vacation, has become a new way to help themselves in dealing with "involution".
In May last year, Bird, 28, quit her job in Shanghai after receiving a working holiday visa to Australia, trying to alleviate the tiredness and chaos of her career with manual work, and before that, she was a typical urban white-collar worker in a job as a content creator.
The rules of society are like a rotating drum washing machine, and most people are carried forward. It's easy to go with the flow, and once you want to jump out of the rules, you need to spend several times as much effort to fight it. At the same time, there is a high cost of trial and error.
Is a working holiday, which is known as "only one chance in life", really an effective "way to help yourself"?
Here's what she had to say.
Have you ever seen mutton that moves?
A sheep has been decapitated, entrailed, and skinned, and its muscles still twitch violently and beat disorderly. It's a scenario I've had to face every day for the past few months.
In May 2023, I joined a mutton processing factory in Australia.
On the first day of employment, the company arranges for new employees to visit the factory. Our newcomers come from Japan, Vietnam, China and Indonesia. In fact, with the exception of the white leadership, most of the plant's employees are Southeast Asian.
English is not our native language, and we have some communication barriers. Fortunately, we are all about the same age, both in our twenties and less than thirty years old, and the atmosphere was also joyful during the waiting period, learning from each other how to say "I love you", "come on", and some swearing words in each other's language......
The friendly people are all there, which makes me secretly excited and excited about the work I will face. Before coming to Australia, I had never had any experience of manual labor, and who would have thought that I would come to such a "hardcore" place as a slaughterhouse.
The factory has several departments, including the Slaughter floor, the Boning room, the Skin and the Offal.
My excitement vanished as soon as I stepped into the slaughterhouse.
Fishy smell. The warm smell of blood mixed with the strong smell of mutton hits the skin. Blood and minced flesh were scattered on the ground. Headless sheep move in an orderly manner along the suspended conveyor. Water vapor envelops the entire workshop, presenting a foggy and eerie feeling.
I caught a glimpse of someone pinching their nose with their hand.
Factory appearance
HR is a young and lovely Australian girl with a pair of standard "foreigner eyes" with blue-green pearlescent eyeshadow sparkling on her eyelids. In such a heavy environment, she was like a little sparrow in the treetops, light and flowing. Seeing everyone frowning and covering their noses, she still smiled and introduced the workflow of each workshop to us in a brisk tone.
The task of the slaughterhouse is to slaughter a live sheep and finally process it into a whole pile of lamb. The whole process is roughly divided into: electric shock, corner cutting, head cutting, anal plugging, throat jamming, peeling, foot cutting, belly cutting, internal organ cleaning, meat repair, and finally high-pressure washing.
In the face of the newcomer's visit, the workers did not look up to take a second look. Dressed in white overalls and black boots, their clothes were stained with fresh and old blood, and they held all kinds of cold cutting tools in their hands, and they all handled the mutton in front of them with expressionless faces.
The further I went, the more apprehensive I became. I was reluctant: Will I be able to adapt to this atmosphere and environment?
With a worried heart, I followed HR to continue the tour. After coming to the boning and packaging department, the environment becomes clean and bright, and there is no longer blood. The main task here is to cut the processed whole sheep into pieces, which are then vacuum-packed, labelled and boxed.
Compared to other departments, packaging seemed to be the easiest and cleanest job, and I silently prayed in my heart that I could be assigned to this position.
Uniforms
After the tour, we returned to the lounge and waited like cabbage in the market for the heads of each department to pick them out.
During this time, I went to the toilet and came back to find that the person in the packing position had been picked up. I regret it so much that I went to the toilet at this time. Eventually, Nana, another tall Chinese girl, and I were taken away by Lick, the head of the slaughterhouse.
Lick was a native, tall, unsmiling, with a rough flush on his cheeks and his eyes always wide and angry. I later learned that he was only 18 years old, but had been working in the butcher factory for four or five years.
He took us to Chiller (cold storage), briefly instructed an Indonesian girl to teach us, turned around and left.
The cold storage is equivalent to the transfer station of the slaughtering workshop and the deboning and packaging workshop, the last link of the slaughtering department, and the first link of the deboning and packaging workshop. After slaughtering, fresh mutton needs to be put into cold storage, let the mutton cool down, let it stand to drain acid, and ensure that the meat and fat reach a certain hardness for subsequent cutting and packaging.
At least the cold storage environment is not so bloody, I breathed a sigh of relief and officially started my career as a factory girl.
In the first days, tiredness was the most direct feeling.
The sheep are divided into 3 sizes according to weight, Light, Medium, and Heavy. The lightest is about 20 catties, the heaviest is more than 100 catties, and the heavy size sheep can account for almost 80% of the total production. On average, about 3,000 sheep are slaughtered every day and work 7.6 hours a day, which means that I sort, sort and deliver a sheep in less than 10 seconds.
Be quick with your eyes and hands. While looking up, carefully identify the sheep on the conveyor chain, whether it is L, M or H on the label, and quickly push the sheep to the corresponding specification track. Wait until the sheep on the track are almost full, and then push them into cold storage. Be forceful. With his arms outstretched, he held five or six sheep in his arms at a time, quickly and accurately, and used the slow and jamming pulley to throw the sheep into the cold storage, and then adjusted them one by one to arrange the sheep neatly.
In this process, there will be intimate "veneer communication" with the cold lamb from time to time.
The assembly line won't stop, and neither can I. Once three or four sheep have piled up on the conveyor chain, the machine failure mechanism will automatically turn on and the whole line will stop, affecting everyone's progress. The Director's angry voice came from afar: "Hurry up, don't stop." ）
Hearing this, my partner and I didn't care about sorting by weight first, regardless of thirty-seven twenty-one, first throw the piled sheep on the storage track, and then let the assembly line return to normal before the supervisor arrived.
Sheep on a conveyor chain
Cold, is another intuitive feeling. The refrigerator is constantly spitting cold air, and the temperature of the cold storage is always kept at about zero degrees. Every time the sheep comes out of the cold storage, a thick layer of frost hangs on the eyelashes.
To resist the cold, I wore several layers of clothing underneath my overalls: a thermal vest on the top, a short-sleeved sweatshirt, a long-sleeved sweatshirt, and a jacket. The lower body is autumn pants, jeans and overalls. Even the socks were worn in two pairs. The inside and the outside are three layers, and the body is warm, but the clothes are too bloated, the movement is inconvenient, and the sheep is more and more laborious when pushing.
At the end of the day, the whole body was in pain, his arms could not be lifted, his whole body seemed to be scattered, and when he returned to his residence, he had no strength to do anything else, he just wanted to lie in bed.
Faced with a corpse of mutton, Nana and I laughed at ourselves as "corpse chasers", and the cold storage was a "morgue".
Sheep in cold storage
Human adaptability cannot be underestimated.
It only took me two weeks to go from being in a hurry to being organized. My body gradually adapted to the high-intensity physical work, but every morning when I woke up, my hands were weak, my knuckles were stiff and painful, and I had to pull out the phone charger. It takes a while to get up and move around before this condition gradually eases.
To be fair, I don't hate the job. Compared with the content creation work in China, this job does not need to deal with people, nor does it have to rack its brains, as long as it uses brute force according to the rules. Mentally there is no pain at all.
What's more, the cold storage where I work is located in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a long corridor. In this space, it's just me and my partner Nana, which means we're free.
I secretly wore a small bluetooth headset under the noise-cancelling earcups provided by the factory. If I was in another department, my supervisor would check every now and then to see if the workers were wearing headphones, but in my position, I don't have to worry too much.
Every day before I go into the workshop, I download the content I want to listen to in advance, so that I can pass the time while listening to podcasts while working mechanically. There were a few times when the headphones ran out of battery or forgot to download audio, and that moment was like a second, like a nail in the air.
In the factory lounge, everyone is having breakfast
A day in the factory begins in the dark.
At 6 o'clock in the morning, before dawn, the commuter bus picked up people on time. Upon arrival at the factory, the workers lined up to receive their uniforms, and after eating their own breakfast, they began to change their clothes. Enter the workshop at 7 o'clock, have two 30-minute lunch and rest periods in the middle, and finish work at 15:30 without working overtime.
At that time, I had a fixed overtime of 40 minutes to 1 hour per day. Australia's wage system is clear, and working hours can be accurate to the minute. My salary is 31 Australian dollars (about 150 yuan) per hour, and overtime is calculated at 1.5 times, and more than two hours are calculated as 2 times. Almost all migrant workers who come to Australia are eager to work overtime, but not everyone has the opportunity to work overtime.
In winter, it gets dark early. When I got home from work, it was already dark. During the week, I rarely see the sun.
The factory is located in a remote town in southern Australia, where there is no metro, taxis or buses. The only public transport is a van, and reservations must be made in advance by calling if you need one. Even this only van only runs until 2 p.m. on Saturdays. On Sunday, operations ceased completely.
It is conceivable that in a small town of this size, if you don't have a car, it is a problem to travel, let alone any entertainment projects. The accommodation arranged by the company is about a dozen kilometers from the center of the town. Every Friday after work, I take the company's commuter bus to the supermarket in the center of town to do some shopping, which is one of the few leisure activities.
The only public transport in town
In such a closed environment. Many workers fell in love. Maybe it's because people need to rely on each other to find a little solace in a foreign country, or they are trying to add some fun to their boring lives. In an environment like a butcher's factory, whenever I see a couple in love, a song by Zhang Huimei "Bloody Love Story" always comes to mind.
Some couples come from different countries, and if one of them doesn't speak English very well, there may seem to be some barriers to communication. At first, I wondered, how can we fall in love if we don't understand the language, but then I realized that human interaction can be very simple, maybe we are used to thinking about things too complicated. With the help of translation software, body language, and the tacit understanding formed by getting along for a long time, there will always be a way.
Everything can be kept simple. The days in the factory are like being in a vacuum world.
There are also a few moments of excitement in small-town life.
Every Saturday morning at 8 a.m., a local team of volunteers organizes a run. After hearing the news, I started to join them and run 5km a week. Running adds a lot of fun to my monotonous life and becomes one of the things I look forward to the most every week.
Workers often have parties every once in a while, and I always bring drinks and food to appointments with gusto. Interestingly, Mitsuliang's "Fairy Tale" and Wilber Pan's "Have to Love" were popular in several Asian countries and also became a fixture at parties. There was a long-haired rock 'n' roll youth who played the guitar well. We all love a rock band called "Red Hot Chili Peppers". When he played, everyone stood around him and sang in a circle.
After spending some time together, I found that Indonesians are always full of energy, energetic, love to sing and party, are also very active on social platforms, and their English is generally good. There are even a few factory friends who are bloggers on IG and YouTube (overseas social media) and have gained a lot of fans.
I learned from my conversations with them that in Jakarta, the most developed city in Indonesia, people have a monthly income of only about 2,000 yuan, but the prices and expenses in Indonesia are not low. In contrast, two days of work in Australia are equivalent to one month's wages in their home country. It's no wonder that they are always enthusiastic, love to joke, and are full of hope for life.
Therefore, when looking for a job, they have a clearer goal and are willing to choose to go to a factory in a small town rather than a big city such as Sydney. Because Australia's legal minimum wage is uniform, it is the same no matter where you work. Although there is relatively little entertainment life in the town, the consumption level is low, the working hours are stable, and it is easier to save money.
An Indonesian worker soaked rice in instant noodles after being too lazy to cook
Iron factory, flowing backpacker. Some people arrive, some people leave.
A farewell party is an indispensable ritual. I remember the first time I went to the farewell party, I had just arrived at the factory, and most of the people didn't know each other, and an Indonesian girl warmly invited me to go to the party after work on Friday. That night, I was surprised to find that almost the entire factory was gone one after another, batch after batch, everyone was drinking, tasting exotic food, taking pictures together, and music filled the whole room.
At 9 a.m. on Saturday, as is customary, everyone gathered at the bus terminal to bid farewell to their departing partners and say their final goodbyes. It wasn't until the bus departed that we waved and watched the people in the bus drift away.
The feelings of the Chinese have always been restrained, and they do not like to leave with great momentum. At the time, I thought that when I left here, I would not have a party or need to be sent to the station.
Farewell to departing factory friends at the station
The speed of the assembly line is getting faster day by day.
My partner Nana and I are like two donkeys pulling a mill, in order to eat the carrot in front of us that can never be reached, in the low temperature of zero degrees, we are often sweating profusely. After another "fierce battle", my hair was completely soaked with sweat. At lunchtime, a co-worker saw that my hair was wet and asked me if I had gone to take a shower. (There is a shower room in the changing room)
Before Nana and I joined the factory, we were also held by two female students. But during that time, factory production was low, with an average of more than a thousand to two thousand sheep slaughtered per day. After we joined, the production gradually increased to more than 3,000 heads, but only the two of us girls were still doing the work.
During this time, Nana and I waited every day for someone to be transferred to our position, and even asked for a supervisor. Unexpectedly, there were waves of new employees, but the supervisor had no intention of adding more manpower to us.
As I mentioned earlier, supervisors usually don't come to us because of the remote location of the work. Maybe it's because he can't directly observe the intensity of our work, and there have never been major problems in the part we are responsible for. Or maybe it's because once the workers have acquired certain rights, they tend to automatically divide themselves into the bourgeois camp and begin to squeeze the surplus value of other ordinary workers as much as possible.
Under such circumstances, I exerted the consciousness of the proletariat and decided to resign.
At this time, I have been working in this factory for four months, and I have met the conditions for renewing my second visa. The Australian working holiday visa is valid for one year, and if you have worked in remote areas and some designated industries for 3 months and 6 months, you can combine the second and third visas to stay for the second and third years. That's one of the reasons why I chose to work in this remote town in the first place.
View of the town
The increase in workload and visa conditions were not the only reasons why I wanted to leave my job. The more important reason is that I perceive that the work environment is changing me little by little.
Although everyone has different careers and life experiences before coming to Australia to work. Among my co-workers are fresh graduates from major universities, psychologists, tour guides, lawyers, bank tellers, and so on.
I have to admit that doing repetitive work on the assembly line for a long time will make people more and more numb. Coupled with the isolation of the town, it is difficult to get in touch with new things. As a result, complaining about the tiredness of work and the new romance in the gossip factory gradually became our only topic of conversation. I lost all interest in partying.
It is a process of boiling a frog in warm water. Such days can be endured, can be improvised, there are no special worries, no real distress, and there is no despair, even the physical pain can be used to.
Tired and sleepy, my body was like an old dog that was pretending to sleep.
In the last two weeks of the factory, time flies.
When my co-worker knew I didn't want to party, she threw a party for me with her roommates. The Chinese friends made a lot of my favorite food to satisfy my Chinese stomach. Amir drove me for a long time to see the sunset on the edge of the town and every landmark, taking lots of photos for me.
There was a new girl in the factory, petite and with sparkling eyes. We met at a party hosted by Japanese girls, and we got along very well, and we agreed to go to each other's countries in the future. It's a pity that we've only known each other for a week, and I'm leaving. To my surprise, she cried sadly when she learned the news.
In an adult society, it is rare to meet such simple and lovely friends. Especially when you're about to reach the 30-year-old threshold.
Shi Tiesheng said that you can't be too stingy in a happy day. Before leaving, I prepared a gift for each of my acquaintances, including a handwritten postcard, to thank each of my friends, say goodbye, and say goodbye.
I chose to leave on a weekday Monday to avoid a farewell scenario. Before I set off, a friend with a car suddenly appeared and drove me to the bus stop. Another friend didn't go to work and waited for me at the station, bringing coffee and breakfast.
Sitting on the bus, I finished reading the messages and letters from my friends, turned my head to look out the window, and the scenery on both sides of the highway flew by, the wilderness, the forest, the wooden houses, the cattle and sheep walking together, and the flocks of hula and lala.
Life may be about finding meaning in repetition. Constant encounters, and non-stop goodbyes.
Scenery along the road
Later, Nana told me that the people who took over my position changed and eventually transferred two male workers to partner with her.
It can be seen that in my career as a factory girl, I used to be a serious and hard-working screw. During this period, my hands have touched more than 200,000 sheep, but I have not eaten a single bite of mutton.
After leaving the butcher's factory, I moved to different cities and towns, working part-time while vacationing. I worked as a clerk in a coffee shop, and also as a tally clerk and cashier in a supermarket.
Life in big cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane is closer to home. You can walk, watch movies, visit art exhibitions, go to markets and see shows. In my free time, I like to spend time on beaches large and small, or lie on the lawn of the park to read and bask in the sun.
Life here is slow-paced, there are few people in a hurry on the streets, and everyone seems to be patient. No matter how long the line is, everyone will wait slowly and never complain when they are in line. You can hear countless words of "I'm sorry", "thank you", and "I wish you a good day" throughout the day. Vehicles rarely overspeed, make sharp turns, and yield to pedestrians even when they are still far away.
When I take the subway or bus in China, I always stop at the door one stop in advance and wait to get off, worrying that the door will close too quickly or delay other people's trips. In Australia, the interaction between drivers and passengers is much more relaxed. When you get on the bus with a large bag of luggage, the driver will wait until you are fully seated before setting off slowly, and you don't have to wait at the door early when you get off the bus.
Australians sunbathing on the beach
Behind this mentality, it is inseparable from Australia's perfect welfare system and treatment guarantee.
Street dwellings are a "feature" of Australian cities. Some of them are neatly dressed and read on the street as if no one is around, and even have a dog by their side, which is quite romantic, while others are in ragged clothes, usually with alcohol, drug addiction or illness.
I once was passing by Martin Place in Sydney when I saw a long line. I was wondering why these people were queuing up when a middle-aged homeless man asked me if I was hungry and told me that there would be free food to be distributed soon. After a while, a cart full of supplies appeared, and it turned out that the charity would come every day to provide relief meals to the homeless.
I decided to join the queue as well, and while waiting, I was worried that I didn't look like a homeless person and might not be offered food.
As I turned out later, my worries were unfounded. The staff warmly asked me what flavor of pizza I wanted, without any unusual looks, at least on the surface. That day I received an apple, two different flavors of bread, a whole pizza, and a bottle of mineral water, enough for two meals.
When the middle-aged homeless man saw that I had received food, he took the initiative to talk to me again. When he learned that I was about to leave the city and go to work in a supermarket in a remote town, he actually paid me $10, thinking that my life was too hard.
I declined his kindness and admired his self-consistent mentality.
Free relief meals
Leisure and patience belong to Australians, even the homeless. Most of the time I carry the nervousness of an outsider.
In order to facilitate movement, life is compressed to the extreme, and all clothes and daily necessities are packed into one or two suitcases. Be ready to move to different cities and towns at any time. I endure the fragmentation of relationships brought about by frequent movements, constantly moving and changing jobs, and living a "suspended life".
Many working holiday bloggers like to share beautiful slices of life online, creating a beautiful scene of "life is wilderness". The leisurely cleaning work on the island, the joy of picking fruit on the farm, the high-paying payroll, and the pride of getting permanent residency in Australia. But there is no mention of the undercurrents, thorns, and beasts of prey in the wilderness.
In fact, even working on a beautiful island requires flushing toilets, and when picking blueberries on a farm, you have to bask in the hot sun for six or seven hours, and stop working on rainy days, and you don't make enough money to pay rent. There are also many working holidaymakers who are depressed, save up for injuries, and can't find a job to pay for themselves.
A homeless man with a dog
Backpackers often ask each other the question: what to do after a working holiday? Some plan for the future in detail, but most remain confused and anxious.
In the face of career gaps, 30-year-old workplace discrimination, home purchases, family purchases, age anxiety and other issues, the unresolved problems still linger.
I gradually discovered that the city is a factory, some people are factory managers, some people are managers, and most people are workers on the assembly line. An ordinary person's day has long been written. There isn't much difference between physical and mental work, and there's not much difference between factories and factories, although each place has its own culture and landmarks.
For me, coming to Australia for a working holiday is more like a mobile life experiment.
Being an experiential, or having a sense of stability, I understand that one cannot be and have both at the same time. Today, I understand the "wilderness" as it is to maintain tenacious vitality within one's own capabilities.
I like a quote from the writer Hesse:
"I know I have hundreds of pieces in my pocket for the game of life, and I'm thrilled to understand what this game means. I am willing to start this game again, to experience its pain again, to tremble again at its absurdity, and to walk through my inner hell again and often. ”
Note: Image courtesy of the author. Some of the names in this article have been changed for privacy reasons.