On the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, loading dock worker Chen Baoguo received two hundred yuan, his final pay packet. He had just 267.5 yuan in his pocket, and the old injury in his back throbbed dully in the cold.
He told his daughter, “I’m working overtime this year. Triple pay.” The moment the lie left his lips, the New Year became a hurdle he had to clear alone.
From the icy stench of the frozen-goods market before dawn to the warmth he couldn’t even mooch outside the mall; from the scrutinizing eyes on his posture at the library to the carefully faked firecracker sounds over the phone. He turned sweat into crumpled cash and silently bore the contemptuous looks, using the working-class smell clinging to him to fight back against the cold beneath the city’s festive bustle.
This is not a story of an underdog’s rise. It is a story about staying alive, and how that comes down to every last coin, every pang of pain, every bite of a hard bun dipped in cold meat juices.
Meat-Juice Buns: seventy-two hours in the life of an ordinary person, getting through each day around the New Year.
I am in this situation. When I was in elementary school, I followed my father who worked at a construction site for a while. I slept on the construction site at night in the summer, with damp quilts and mosquitoes. I don't know how my father and I survived. Looking at Lao Chen, I kind of remembered my own father...
The writing is very realistic, good work!!!
Very realistic, like being there