"Old Wang, your hairstyle today, wow, it's trendy!" Little Zhang said, glancing at Old Wang's head while coding. Old Wang, in his early thirties and a programmer, had a freshly permed curly hairstyle, looking like a sheep that had been electrocuted.
"Yeah, just got it done." Old Wang touched his hair, his tone tinged with helplessness. "Company policy, perm your hair once a year, considered an 'annual benefit' for employees."
Li Ming wakes up at seven o'clock every morning, not by the alarm clock, but by the slogan "Good morning, strivers!" broadcasted punctually over the community loudspeaker. He lives in a place called "Dual-Track Community," where everything operates on two tracks.
For instance, there are two sets of garbage sorting systems in the community. One is for "strivers," and the other is for "pausers." The strivers' bins shimmer with golden light, while the pausers' bins are dull gray. Li Ming is a striver, and he feels proud of this, though he doesn't quite understand what he's striving for.
Old Wang felt like a charlatan for the first time, even though he was just a zookeeper.
He held a plastic bottle in his hand, filled with a stinky liquid that the zoo director euphemistically called "Tiger Essence," priced at fifty yuan a bottle. Old Wang was responsible for selling it, and his sales targets were even included in his performance evaluation.
Old Wang had worked at the "Bleaching" Center for twenty years. His job was monotonous and mechanical: to thoroughly bleach various items delivered daily through complex procedures. These items varied widely, from old clothes and old furniture to broken electronics and even some "domestic waste" of unknown origin.
The Bleaching Center was located on the edge of the city, surrounded by endless white factories. Everything here was white: the walls, the floors, the work clothes, even the air was filled with a faint smell of bleach. Old Wang wore a white uniform every day, numbly operating the machines, his world gradually turning into a monotonous white.
Old Liu had worked at the zoo for thirty years, and his job was to clean the tiger enclosure. It wasn't a job that required much skill; it was just dirty and smelly. But Old Liu liked this kind of simple, direct work. Staring at the tigers all day was easier than dealing with people.
Recently, the zoo came up with an "innovation" and started selling tiger urine. They said that tourists were curious and wanted to buy it to "ward off evil." Old Liu thought it was absurd, but the director said it could generate revenue, and there was nothing shameful about it. So, in addition to cleaning the tiger enclosure, Old Liu had to collect tiger urine.
Old Wang wasn't an ordinary electrician. He was afraid of heights, afraid of sparks, afraid of electrical leaks, and even afraid of falling off utility poles—even just the thought of it. This was a well-known joke among his colleagues, who secretly called him "King Rat." But Old Wang became the most sought-after electrician in the area.
Not because he overcame his fear, but quite the opposite, because of his fear.
Old Wang stared at himself carefully in the mirror. The face in the mirror was yellow, as if it had just been pulled out of a dye vat, but not a pure yellow, rather a strange color mixed with specks of orange, like the flesh of a low-quality tangerine. He reached out and touched his cheek, feeling that his skin seemed rougher than before, with a sandy texture, like sandpaper.
Today was the third day of Old Wang's "color change."
Old Wang is back in society. No, to be precise, he's back in high school.
He used to be an excellent firefighter, rushing into burning buildings to save lives was routine for him. But after that one big fire, Old Wang’s "brain was fried," and his intellectual level regressed to childhood. After a long recovery, doctors were delighted to announce that Old Wang had recovered to the level of a high school student.
Old Wang stood in front of the company's lottery machine once again, feeling complicated. This was the third time this month, and the one hundred and twenty-seventh time he had participated in the lottery since joining the company ten years ago. Inside the machine's glass cover, colorful cards floated like a school of trapped fish, interspersed with a few glittering "grand prize cards."
"You see, isn't this height perfect?" the doctor said with a smile, pointing to the X-ray image. On the image, in the middle of my shin bone, there was a steel rod, like a scar that stretched across.
I stared at the steel rod. It wasn't perfect, it was even a bit ugly. But in the doctor's eyes, it represented the height I had dreamed of, the height accepted by society.