84 posts tagged with "Society"

Lao Zhang, Zhang Fushun, a man nearing fifty, had recently been feeling like there was a wall in front of him. Not made of brick, nor of cement, but rather as if condensed from the suffocating summer heat of a late evening – transparent, yet tangibly obstructing him, impossible to push through or circumvent.

Back in the day, Lao Zhang was a well-regarded figure in the hutong. Not because of any high office or vast wealth, but for his steadfastness. He'd worked diligently at the non-staple food store for the better part of his life, saving up 400,000 yuan. This 400,000 was the foundation for the latter half of his life, the capital his wife kept mentioning for a bigger refrigerator, for a washing machine with a dryer function, and his own dream of carrying a birdcage, drinking tea, and listening to opera after retirement. The Beijing sun, in his eyes, had once been warm and golden.

Doctor Liu felt a bit wronged, like he’d swallowed a cold, hard bun that lodged in his chest, neither going down nor coming up.

K was awakened by an absolute silence. Not the tranquility proper to the deep night, which contains subtle signs of life, but a complete stillness, a dead quiet as if the universe itself had stopped breathing. He fumbled for the switch by his bed; his finger pressed down, only to be met with a hollow, unresponsive "click." The light didn't turn on. Outside the window, the city, where neon and streetlights once flowed eternally, was now submerged in an unfathomable darkness. Only a few distant stars looked down coldly upon this suddenly silenced land.

Old Wang reckoned this was the most reliable thing he’d done in his entire life. That bit of pension money he'd saved for nearly half his life – he hadn't listened to his wife's nagging about buying some darned "wealth management product," nor had he followed the young folks next door dabbling in some "Eye-Pee-Oh." No, he, Old Wang, had exchanged it for golden nuggets! Real, solid, gleaming yellow nuggets. Heavy in his hand when he clutched them, and tucked under his pillow, they made him sleep more soundly than ever.

In that dusty small town, names, like dust, were easily forgotten. Lin Xiaoqing's name, however, was once the brightest star in town. Her home was a mud-brick house that seemed to tremble with every gust of wind. Her parents were farmers who toiled from dawn till dusk, their sweat watering the barren land and nourishing her seemingly unattainable dream of university. That year, the acceptance letter arrived like a golden dove, flapping its wings as it flew into their humble home. The red seal, the white paper, carried the entirety of a young girl's imagination about the future – sunlit classrooms, vast seas of books, and the hope of escaping this land.

That piece of news, like a stone dropped into the still lake of time, sent ripples spreading rapidly, eventually reaching the forgotten department where Archivist K worked. The President, during an impromptu remark, had expressed a desire for the miraculous—he wanted to meet the ghost allegedly 300 years old and still on the Social Security system's list. The order descended through layers of bureaucracy, finally becoming a memo with blurred ink placed on K's dust-covered desk. Task: Verify and locate Elias Greene, male, allegedly born 172X, currently still a social security beneficiary.

Beiping's dust, come Saturday, seemed to carry a hint of rest too, lazily tumbling under the sun. But the earth in Old Wang Tou's heart felt like it had been hardened by last night's wind, compacted, unable to breathe.

He huddled in his palm-sized little room in the South City. Old newspapers were pasted onto the window paper, printed with long-outdated foreign company ads, the words almost faded away. Inside, there was a whiff of stale cooking smoke, mixed with a faint scent of mildew. He just sat like that, facing the creaking wooden door, his gaze blank.

K, or let's call him Old Wang for now – names, after all, had long been worn down to vague designations in this endless hustle – rode his creaking electric scooter, navigating the maze-like veins of the city. Today, the system had assigned him a special order, marked "Urgent" and "Medicine." The remarks section pleaded, "Life-saving medicine, please be quick, only an old person at home." The address pointed to an old residential complex on the city's edge, a place like a forgotten fold hidden beneath the glossy surface of the metropolis.

K, weary of the office air thick with a mixture of dust and despair, decided to climb a mountain during the holiday. He'd heard of one on the outskirts of the city, not high, but with views said to cleanse the soul. He needed cleansing, desperately. The city felt like a vast, sticky web, and he sensed he was being slowly digested. The mountain, perhaps, was a pocket of reality outside the web.

The air in the town was stagnant, as always. The dusty afternoon sun cast a dull glow on the sooty windowpanes of Wang Afu's house. Inside, the air was even heavier. Wang Afu's long sighs and his wife Li Xiujuan's silent resistance stood between them like an invisible wall.