Standing on the podium, sitting across from the South Koreans, sometimes one, sometimes several. Xu Hong spoke Korean and tried her best to talk to them, during which a few familiar Chinese pronunciations popped up from time to time. Offstage, the crappy Chinese collided with it.
This is a Chinese as a foreign language class taught by Xu Hong. The classes are set in a foreign company in Guangzhou, and the students who come to the class are all foreign employees here, and Xu Hong is responsible for teaching them Chinese. Twice a day, one hour at a time. In order to prepare for a lesson, it is usually necessary to prepare 2 hours or more in advance.
She doesn't want the course to be too serious and boring, so she always racks her brains to design mini-games, tests, situational dialogues and other interactions. Before I arrived at the class point, I couldn't wait to wait in the classroom to see the students walk into the classroom one by one.
In the classroom, most students are reserved and quiet. A student in his 40s is the most active, always riveting a happy energy, full of curiosity and fun in even the simplest games. Outside of class, some students go out of their way to the park to chat with the elderly, or go to the supermarket to talk to the staff.
For Guangzhou, they are equally curious. On days when they don't have to go to work, some people go to the local teahouse and have a few dim sums. More often than not, of course, they miss the food of their own country, but these can be easily satisfied.
This experience was the first time Xu Hong taught foreigners face-to-face after graduation. She was pleasantly surprised by the strange experience. More importantly, she found what she wanted here.
Xu Hong came to Guangzhou in August last year, and for the city, it is one of the new populations.
Statistics show that at the end of 2023, Guangzhou will have a permanent population of 18.827 million, achieving restorative growth in the post-epidemic era, an increase of 92,900 over the previous year, a year-on-year increase of 0.50%, and a growth rate of 0.91 percentage points over the previous year, with the highest increment and growth rate in the past three years, and the total population accounting for 14.82% of the province, continuing to rank firmly in the position of the largest city in the province in terms of population. Against the backdrop of a negative population growth of 2.08 million in the country, Guangzhou, as a first-tier city, still has a large number of people continuing to flow in.
What attracts young people like Xu Hong?
The days are rushing
Xu Hong is not an adventurous person. After graduating from her undergraduate degree in 2021, she returned to her hometown and longed to serve an iron rice bowl and stabilize herself. A year after "working behind closed doors", the raging waves slapped her on the beach.
Struggling to get up and into the job market. Graduated from a major in Chinese as a foreign language, she wants to do a professional counterpart job and teach Chinese to foreigners. But in this small city where she has lived for more than 20 years, she has a hard place. The resume she submitted was at the bottom, and she didn't get an interview.
The dream can only be put on hold for the time being. Xu Hong entered a private junior high school as a Chinese teacher and class teacher. Locally, the job pays well. But instead, there is day and night preparation for lessons, and all kinds of trivial tasks interspersed between teaching and lesson preparation.
Guangzhou, taken by Xu Hong/Source: Xu Hong
After working for a year, his weight dropped by nearly 10 pounds. He is 170 cm tall, but he weighs no more than 100. She has always been healthy, but she has also begun to be riddled with various diseases.
The work she didn't like drained her energy. She wanted to talk to someone, but she gave up after filtering through the names. My former classmates were scattered all over the world, and there were few people who could make an appointment to talk. If you want to go out for a walk, there are those streets and alleys back and forth, which is a bit greasy.
"Even if you make money and get paid, you don't know where to spend it. The emptiness slowly gnawed at her body until it was completely hollowed out. Such a day seems to be just a simple life, boring. She looked for another outlet.
In August 2023, Xu Hong's resume was echoed. She made up her mind to leave her hometown to "drift wide". It didn't take long for me to touch the career of my dreams.
In the city, she saw people with different colors of skin on the same street. A series of novel experiences fascinated her. In a trance, she spied into the interior of the city, full of ideals.
Xu Hong chose to come to Guangzhou/Source: Xu Hong
Guangzhou is very "crowded". As a popular city in the country, during the peak commuting period, people are close to each other. According to official authoritative data, as of December 31, 2023, Guangzhou has a permanent population of 18.827 million, with a total actual population of 22.9818 million. Among them, 12,188,600 registered floating population, accounting for 53.03%.
Behind the congestion, there is a huge opportunity. Among the floating population in Guangzhou, young people aged 18-39 are the absolute main force, accounting for nearly sixty percent (58.69%). According to the survey, "work and employment" is the most important reason for the migration of people in Guangzhou, accounting for 64.5%, especially among the floating population aged 15-64, accounting for 73.2%.
Like most people, Qu Pengfei, a native of Hengyang, Hunan, also came for a "job".
Qu Pengfei entered the society after graduating from junior high school and worked as an auto repairer in Hengyang. In 2015, he came to Guangzhou, worked as a backroom chef in a restaurant, and was later introduced to the hairdressing industry.
Qu Pengfei is doing hairstyles for guests/Source: Qu Pengfei
"There are more opportunities in Guangzhou. In Qu Pengfei's view, as long as you are willing to work hard, there will be hope. Missing the opportunity to change his fate by studying, now, he wants to change his fate by his career.
The job starts as an apprentice. The daily work is very simple, which is to sweep the floor and wash the hair of the guests, from morning to night. Later, he had the opportunity to pick up scissors and give people a haircut. Hair cutting skills have improved little by little, and I have been in this industry for eight years.
Today, Qu Pengfei has been promoted to the level of "technical supervision director" in the industry. He said that he can quickly determine what kind of hairstyle is suitable for a customer based on their face shape and shape. As a result, he has also accumulated a lot of customers.
At the end of the day, there are usually more than a dozen customers who come to Qu Pengfei to get his hair trimmed. When you get busy, it's normal to get off work at one or two o'clock in the morning. Although it was hard work, sweat had already washed away the initial confusion. With a craft, he found his place in the city.
survival
Teaching Koreans was the first opportunity Xu Hong encountered when she came to Guangzhou. Later, for a better opportunity, she jumped to another company, mainly teaching online classes to Southeast Asians working in Hong Kong, and also had to go to work every day to do other jobs.
And just like that, she began her half-hour one-way commute. On her first commute to work, following the flow of people into the subway car, she felt that everything was very fresh, and couldn't help but send a message to her friends, "You know, that feeling of squeezing the subway to work with everyone in a big city."
Now, the novelty has calmed down, but she's still enjoying it. Xu Hong is obsessed with the "breaking" energy given by this big city, and in addition to breaking through, he can also find a lot of breathing space here.
In recent years, talk shows have become popular. After watching a few episodes of the show after dinner, the joke that pierced the nerve became an outlet in her depressed life at that time. After coming to Guangzhou, she went to the local performance site to see several theatrical performances, and the emotional resonance fascinated her.
Xu Hong went to see a talk show/Source: Xu Hong
It turns out that hard work and slowing down can exist at the same time, and the threshold is not high. Guangzhou has a large number of high-end residential areas and expensive goods, but it is not only high prices.
In the vicinity of the company, two meat and one vegetable in exchange for 14 yuan can fill the stomach. Downstairs in her residence, inexpensive foods such as rice rolls, claypot rice, and pork offal soup rice are waiting for her. Here, it seems, there is always a way to survive.
Xu Hong lives in an urban village in the old city, and although it is a single room, the interior is not unobstructed. The room was well lit. For two or three hours a day, sunlight pours into the house through the windows, and the room is still bright when there is no sun.
The downstairs is full of shops. Many local ladies and gentlemen live here, and there are also outsiders from all over the country, and Cantonese and different accents communicate in the streets and alleys. When you go out and go home, you can feel the life of a foreign land.
Xu Hong's claypot rice set in Guangzhou cost a total of 16 yuan / Source: Xu Hong
Wu Qi likes this kind of life. After 10 o'clock in the evening, the vendors pushing small carts near the neighborhood where she rented began to move.
The carts converge in the open space under the viaduct and are lined up in two columns. The orange flame scorched the black iron pot, the oil splashed in the pot, the iron spoon flipped over, and in a short time, a fried beef river was packed.
The booth next door was even bigger. The half-human-tall charcoal grill sits on the floor, and the fat meat skewers are bubbling with oil and sprinkled with secret seasonings. Further on, oysters, offal, lemon tea...... Cheap big bowls, also "really fragrant".
Standing at the intersection several times waiting for the traffic light, Wu Qi was so lured by the smell that he stopped. There were a few low wooden tables at the kebab stall, and she had eaten skewers a few times while sitting on a red plastic stool. Some of the diners at the next table are carrying briefcases, while others are stepping on slippers and facing the sky, all of them tacitly taking a sip of beer and a bite of meat.
Sometimes, she just packs a 10-yuan fried beef river home, which is enough to satisfy her hunger for a night.
It's not just about survival
Wu Qi is a native of Macau. In 2017, she went to Guangzhou to study at university. She recalls that when she first arrived in the city, her Macau status brought many inconveniences and troubles.
At that time, it was not as convenient to take high-speed trains and trains as it is now. After purchasing tickets online, she could not directly swipe her ID card to enter the gate like mainland residents. If you want to get on the bus, you have to go to the site to pick up a paper ticket.
Getting tickets is the most headache for her. Because she used the Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macao Residents (referred to as the "Home Return Permit") to purchase the ticket, she could not collect the ticket at the self-service ticket vending machine, and she had to queue up with the ticket buyer at the manual window.
The trouble is that because I can't predict the flow of people that day, I always hang my heart and go out an hour or two early. Sometimes I went out in a hurry, there were not many people in line, and after taking the ticket, I stayed at the station for an hour.
Later, she found out that she was able to pick up her tickets at the self-service ticket machine. Later, the railway no longer issued paper tickets, and they all "swiped the card to enter the gate". It's just a matter of luck to get through the gates. She said that at that time, the ticket gates in different stations were different, some could smoothly swipe the card, and some could not. Occasionally, she would be "stuck" in the machine and would have to go to the manual channel.
Now the ticket gates at the high-speed rail station have been upgraded, speeding up the efficiency of entering the station/Source: Guangzhou Daily data map
"At that time, the turnstile next to the manual passage was deliberately lined up when entering the station, which was stuck to facilitate the change of lanes, but I had to queue up again. Later, in order to save trouble, I went directly to the manual. She also often encounters entering the station from the self-service gate of the Guangzhou high-speed rail station, going north, and when she arrives in another city, she has to take an artificial passage to exit the station.
Now, the ticket gates have been upgraded to add the recognition function of passports and home return permits, and she no longer goes to the manual channel to queue up by default, but is the same as mainland residents. Similar changes, seeping into more details of life, are also spreading to more cities.
Staying in a foreign land, Wu Qi no longer felt out of place. What Guangzhou brought to her was not the feeling of "drifting". Hong Kong native Lin Yan has similar feelings.
Last year, after graduating from graduate school, Lin Yin decided to stay in Guangzhou for employment. In her spare time, she likes to go to the riverside ribbon park. The green belt that stretches along the riverbank is dotted with small tents, and people sit on the spread out picnic mats to chat and laugh. The breeze blows, ripples ripple along the river, and the occasional young man plays the guitar and sings her favorite Cantonese songs.
One night, Lin Yin heard someone singing Eason Chan's song / Source: Lin Yin
The familiar melody and language evoke a sense of intimacy in my heart. In her opinion, Guangzhou has a "Cantonese" flavor. Even though the cities they lived in were different, they were all similar, "the feeling of being in the same circle".
Here, she felt a different kind of calm life. People don't just live to survive. When you are tired from work, you can slow down, think about nothing, and enjoy the beauty of the moment.
"You get the feeling that a lot of people here are enjoying life, everybody. Lin Yin said.
(Except for Qu Pengfei in the article, the rest of the characters are pseudonyms)
Author | Wei Xindu
Editor-in-Chief on Duty | Zhao Jinghan
Edit | Zhang Lai
Typography | Fifi