Jiang Minci is 90 years old.
More than a year ago, friends read the newspaper and learned that there was a tide of the times around him - Jiang Minci became the owner of the B station Up, and within a month of registering an account, there were more than 100,000 fans and got the medals issued by the platform.
Jiang Minci and her desk, a model of the human meridians in the corner of the desk, on which mobile phones and tablets can be seen. Photo by Jin Di
Initially as a video blogger, only Jiang Minci did not have the heart to insert willows, but the combination of "advanced age" and "Net red" punches, playing very fresh, under the stereotype that the elderly and the Internet seem to be isolated, Jiang Minci, who has a wealth of experience, quickly attracted the attention of young people, and the cumulative playback of the first video has now exceeded 5.42 million.
Since April last year, Jiang Minci has uploaded 56 videos. In the video, netizens often see Jiang Minci, whose white hair is neatly combed, telling indelible memories in a hoarse voice.
Growing up in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, escaping marriage and "truancy" to achieve his ideals, and participating in the construction of the Chengkun Railway, his past experience is like a fragment and a family treasure. Jiang Minci originally wanted to write a memoir, but claimed that she was not strong enough to achieve it, and the video gave her a more maneuverable way - narration.
In Jiang Minci's story, the elderly and the young are connected through one screen, and the network seems to break the barrier of age, but the reality is that the barrier that is broken online is still strong offline.
Own room: sewing machine, meridian model with tripod, tablet
Jiang Minci lives in her youngest son's home in Guangzhou, and she has a room of her own. Nearly 15 square meters of room is narrow, a desktop computer and photography tripod are placed next to the door, and the line of sight crosses a bed linen bunk to see an old-fashioned foot-step sewing machine.
Leaning against the sewing machine is a wooden desk, which is a "world" for her to learn - the books on it are mostly health care and dictionaries, and on the side of several health books, there is a small cluster of dried yellow jasmine, "I teach myself health knowledge, and the young people in the family do not know much more than I do." Jiang Minci raised his finger and pointed to the model of the human meridian standing in the corner of the desk.
This is indeed the impression of an "elderly room", and what causes people to question or imagine more is that there is a tablet and a tripod in the doorway on the table in the room. "Is this the digital device of the young people in your family?"
"It's my own, and I usually shoot and make videos." From April 30, 2020, in addition to regular activities such as getting up early, exercising in the morning, shopping for vegetables, and reading books, Jiang Minci has added a new pleasure to her daily life - sometimes, she spends 1 to 2 hours recording videos in the afternoon.
"I remember April 30th clearly, because it was on this day that I decided to play Station B." In Jiang Minci's eyes, this is like a symbolic day for her to express her disobedience to young people, although more often than not, she is frank about the fact that she is old.
The reason for playing Station B is not much surprising, this is just a silhouette of her own choice and her daily challenge to new things in her life. That night, the grandson doudou who was in high school held his mobile phone and brushed the B station, Jiang Minci came over, learned that the public can register their own accounts and publish a variety of video content on it, she also wanted to try to play with a smart phone in 2014, and hoped that her grandson could teach her to use it.
"You're old, young people, you're not interested in things." Beanie said. Soon, this was refuted by Jiang Minci, who asked her grandson to register an account called "Minci Immortality" for herself. "I want to tell more young people that I'm old, but my heart is still young."
At Station B, she attracted the attention of young people by telling her past experiences, and in less than 3 months, she gained 300,000 fans. Everyone is more curious about how the elderly man filmed and made his own videos. In this regard, Jiang Minci told reporters that since 1999, she has studied computer and basic editing at the university of the elderly, "However, my grandson also taught me a lot." ”
The room lights turned on, closed the pale yellow curtains, fixed the phone horizontally on the photography stand, Jiang Minci brushed her gray hair behind her ears, she adjusted her sitting posture slightly, clicked on the dot recorded in the video, "Hey hey hey! Hello everyone, I am Jiang Minci..." At the beginning of the recording, Jiang Minci told her life story, and her memory inevitably returned to the history of the last century, the memory of the times, but also related to the life course of the individual.
Three photos of Jiang Minci and her classmates span three stages of her life: youth, youth and old age. Photo by Jin Di
Indelible Memories: Escape, Marriage Escape, and "Truancy"
In the community where she lives now, Jiang Minci has lived for more than 20 years, and this long-term stability is like compensation for the constant escape during the growth period.
The first eighteen years of his life, beginning in 1931 and ending in 1949, meant that Jiang Minci grew up in the context of the war. The escape began in 1938, when Guangzhou fell on October 21 of that year, after the Japanese had been bombing the city for 14 months.
Two or three months before the fall of Guangzhou, Jiang Minci and her family moved from Guangzhou back to her hometown of Jiangcun in the northern suburbs for refuge, but soon, she once again saw the Japanese planes turning round and round, wave after wave, dropping bombs from time to time, the fire on the land spreading, and her ears were filled with the sound of gunshots, cannons, and the explosion of gasoline barrels.
After the Japanese army occupied Jiangcun, Jiang Minci's mother, with her old and young, crossed the mountains and mountains to reach a military factory in Shaoguan. The military factory was simple, just a shed surrounded by bamboo mats, inhabited by refugees from all over the world, but the good times were not long, and the Japanese planes once again bombed the temporary shelter, and Jiang Minci's uncle also died in the bombing.
Jiang Minci recalled the road to escape, constantly mentioning hunger and casualties, and she felt that she was lucky enough to survive. After Shaoguan, they fled to Sichuan, Chongqing, Hong Kong and other places, in the 8-square-meter cramped house in Hong Kong, red bean-sized wood lice drilled out of the cracks in the floor at night and attacked the fleeing people, causing Jiang's brother's high fever.
Talking about her relatives who died and were separated in the flight, Jiang Minci was excited, indignant and sad, but the daguan and tenacity in her bones could not be hidden, and she lifted her weight lightly, ridiculing reporters about her growth in many places, the southern dialect and the northern tone, and the authentic Cantonese could not be spoken.
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Jiang Minci continued to flee, fleeing from forced marriage to school, and from the normal school he had to attend to the railway school, "escaping" all the way, and the life that was restricted everywhere seemed to be getting wider and wider.
In Jiang Minci's photo album, there is a copy of a black-and-white photo sent from the United States a few years ago, and in the photo stands Chinese and foreign children, who are her classmates at the church school.
In 1948, Jiang Minci's father lost her job, the family lost its financial resources, and as the eldest daughter, she needed to work outside the home. At that time, the San Francisco overseas Chinese who happened to be in the neighboring village returned to China, planning to choose an open, cultured girl to marry her son to take care of the housework, And Jiang Minci, who had studied in the church school, was "selected", except for the mother, the elders unanimously thought that this was a "good opportunity".
But Jiang Minci felt that "getting married is the most miserable" and that her biggest wish was to "go to college", so she planned to flee to Guangzhou to continue her studies, an idea supported by her mother. So Jiang Minci, holding a few yuan given by her mother and carrying a linen cloth bag containing books and old quilts, walked along the road from Jiangcun to Guangzhou. She remembered that after more than four hours of trekking, she arrived at Liuhua Bridge and ate a bowl of mung bean paste for five cents.
Fleeing to Guangzhou does not mean having books to read, and being admitted to high school does not mean having books to read. Jiang Minci had financial difficulties, so she had to go to a technical normal school with a bag of food and housing and a bursary, but her ideal career was not a teacher, but a scientist. Three years later, hengyang railway school enrolled in Guangzhou, Jiang Minci sneaked out of the normal school, registered for the exam and finally entered the railway school as desired. However, admission is not the same as having books to read, and the relationship between household registration and grain has not been handled by anyone who has become a "major problem in Jiang Minci's heart", but this problem was finally solved because it could not be solved.
From skipping marriage to truancy, she kept moving closer to her inner desire, and netizens praised her courage and strong sense of autonomy. After graduation, Jiang Minci entered the Nanchang Railway Engineering Corporation and participated in the construction of many railways in the southwest region, including the Chengdu-Kunming Railway through the "open-air geological museum".
Online and offline: Has the Internet Broken the Age Barrier?
After becoming a video blogger, Jiang Minci felt that her circle of friends had become larger - in addition to old friends who often met offline, there were netizens who had hardly met online.
Offline friends are acquaintances with the elderly group of similar ages for many years, some elderly people will brush vibrato, but also use mobile phones to read the news, but when together, they are more inclined to morning exercise, grocery shopping, face-to-face conversation.
Online netizens hid behind a string of bullets, transformed into comments, "Grandma is good", "Wish Grandma good health", "I hope Grandma tells more stories of the past", Jiang Minci realized that at the end of the screen, there are mostly "children" who are about the same size as Doudou.
Through Jiang Minci's B station video, young netizens became curious about the life and experience of this old man who was more than a year apart from his age.
Young people go from watching to familiarizing, to trying to find empathy from Jiang Minci's older generation's life experience, perhaps because of the development of network technology, or because Jiang Minci dares to express himself... In short, more and more young netizens are posting bullet screens or messages in her videos.
Jiang Minci likes to watch the bullet screens and comments in her videos, and she feels that this wait-and-see is also a kind of communication, and sometimes tries to reply to the comments below. However, there are also doubtful voices on the Internet that have thrown over, "I am so old, I still shoot videos, is it that my family wants to make money from you?" ","The video quality is getting worse and worse"...
For these comments, Jiang Minci did not accept them all or ignore them, "Questioning is common, I am pursuing my own happiness, the video quality is not good, but I also have listened to what everyone likes to see what I say." ”
Online netizens also have times when they "run to the spot". Jiang Minci was invited to participate in the special project of "Summer of the Eaves" of Station B, and talked with a young video blogger, in which the two generations discussed each other's views on marriage and love, happy past and regrets.
The web seems to break down barriers of age, connecting the elderly with the young, but the reality is often not as perfect as imagined.
Some netizens believe that Jiang Minci's popularity is not accidental, she has a wealth of life experience, tenacious character, living in a first-tier city such as Guangzhou, received a better education in the era of high illiteracy rate, studied in the university of the elderly after retirement, and studied video editing very early. In the countryside, many elderly people do not know even the words, naturally can not use smart phones, society should take them into account.
According to the seventh census data released by the Bureau of Statistics, as of November 1, 2020, China's elderly population aged 60 and above reached 264 million, accounting for 18.7%. However, according to the 47th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in February this year, as of December 2020, the internet penetration rate of the elderly aged 60 and over was only 38.6%. In other words, china's more than 160 million elderly people will not use smart phones.
Jiang Minci's first few videos were filmed with the help of Doudou. Now Doudou is in his third year of high school, about to usher in a big exam in his life, busy with studying, Jiang Minci will go through the production process of the whole video by herself, she will put her mobile phone on a tripod, and tell her past to the screen. She would write down the manuscript because she was "afraid of forgetting the next sentence after speaking the previous sentence" and felt that the framework of the manuscript limited her thinking. After recording the video and uploading it to her tablet, she then makes a simple clip.
Doudou and grandma lived door to door, but Jiang Minci often did not see him, and often relied on mobile phones to contact at home, she smiled and said: "He is in the house, he can't shout." ”
Jiang Minci feels that compared with when she was a child, the relationship between the elderly and the young has changed. In the past, young people needed to learn from the elderly, but now it is different.
[Trainee reporter] Zhang Jin Yang Qiong
【Photography】 Jin Di
【Author】 Zhang Jin; Jin Di; Yang Qiong
Southern Probe
Source: South+ - Create more value