Chen Qi

Only when you get older do you realize that sometimes, taking a good dump is something worth bragging about. It was the spring of 1979. Chen Qi hitched up his pants, stepped out of the public latrine in Menkuang Hutong, and contentedly made a little loop in the air with his toe. He had just had a glorious bowel movement—everything flowing smooth, leaving him thoroughly refreshed. A nineteen-year-old heart pumped blood vigorously through his veins, and his virgin member, stirred by the abdominal pressure, twitched with restless energy. What a long-lost sensation! Nine in the morning. The morning rush was over, leaving the alley remarkably quiet. This narrow hutong, barely a hundred meters long and three meters wide, lay inconspicuously tucked inside Dashilar. Thirty years ago, however, it had been a famed street of delicacies: Fushunzhai's spiced braised beef, Ruibinlou's dalian meat rolls, Kang Family's jellied tofu, alongside Niangao Qian, Baodu Feng, Baozi Yang, and more. Together with Dashilar, they had once defined the most bustling quarter of the capital. Chen Qi walked a few steps and stopped before the entrance to Courtyard No. 12. A plaque was nailed to the door: Xinhua Bookstore Dormitory. Zhang Henshui had once lived here. With seven inner courtyards front to back, it had been exceptionally spacious. The author stayed for three years, penning The Story of a Noble Family before departing for Nanjing. After passing through several hands, the compound was eventually converted into dormitories. Being a dormitory, it was naturally a mess. Dozens of households shared a single water tap. Crude coal sheds and makeshift lean-tos were thrown together everywhere, filled with the endless clatter of pots and pans and the trivial bickering of daily life. The so-called "warmth of everyday life" was merely a condescending judgment made by people with enough money to look down from above. If you were actually stuck living inside that warmth, you would never find it charming... Chen Qi could not get used to this dump. His parents were already off at work. Stepping into the house, he washed his hands and splashed his face. The mirror, stamped with an "East Is Red" design, reflected the face of a young man. His hair was not parted in the fashionable style of the day, but cut very short, bristling straight up like quills. His eyes were bright, his lips slightly thin, lending a touch of rebellion to his handsome features. He stood around 178 centimeters tall—which, for this era, was remarkably tall. Just how tall was that? Aaron Kwok was around 165, Andy Lau 169, Jacky Cheung 173, and Leon Lai at 179 was considered a true giant. If you thought the other three looked tall, it was only because their shoes were perpetually fitted with custom elevator insoles... "Chen Qi?" "Chen Qi!" A voice suddenly called from outside, and a girl came bounding in. She had ear-length short hair, an apple-cheeked face, rough skin, and a tall frame. Dressed in a worn, gray padded cotton outfit, she wore black cloth shoes with red soles—her feet had to be at least a size 41. "What are you still dragging your feet for? Come on, let's go! Time for the meeting!" "I don't wanna go." He slumped back down, wanting to lie around a bit longer. "Keep this up and I'm going to criticize you! How did you turn into such a lazy, decadent backward element the moment you returned to the city? Comrade Chen Qi, pull yourself together! Don't abandon yourself to despair just because of temporary hardship. The organization will arrange a job for us!" "Comrade Huang Zhanying, don't let our revolutionary camaraderie weigh on your conscience. Just let me sink into degeneracy..." "Save the nonsense. Move, move, move!" Huang Zhanying had a loud voice and even greater strength, hauling him up by the collar in one swift yank. Left with no choice, Chen Qi sluggishly pulled on his coat and slipped his feet into a matching pair of red-soled black cloth shoes. Mounting their heavy-duty 28-inch bicycles, they wheeled out of the hutong. Looking up, they were greeted by Dashilar, which was slowly regaining its vitality. After winding through a maze of turns, they emerged onto Zhushikou Main Street and headed east. The Beijing of 1979 slid past them like a sequence of faded old photographs. The sky was a murky gray. With so few motor vehicles, the streets appeared extraordinarily wide, and bicycles rode brazenly down the middle. Low, dilapidated buildings lined both sides, crisscrossed by a dense tangle of utility poles and wires. The crowds formed a somber sea of dull blue, gray, and army green, with only the white tunics of traffic police offering a tiny spark of brightness. Along both sides of the road, groups of people were planting trees at regular intervals. A couple of years earlier, the United Nations Environment Programme had declared Beijing a city on the edge of desertification. It was the plain truth. Spring sandstorms were brutal. Just this year, another yellow blizzard had blanketed the skies, prompting Xinhua News Agency to publish a special dispatch headlined 'Wind and Sand Bear Down on the Capital.' Coming right as the Fifth National Senior Officials Conference was underway, March 12 had been designated National Tree Planting Day. This was the very first year of the initiative, and poplars were being planted across the entire city. As a result, future springs would feature not only sandstorms, but also suffocating blizzards of poplar and willow catkins... After riding about five kilometers, they reached the east side of the Temple of Heaven, where a prominent building stood: Chongwen District Workers' Club! "So many people?" "Looks like every unemployed youth in the district showed up!" "That's 'awaiting employment'!" "Yeah, yeah, awaiting employment... Amazing how they come up with new buzzwords even in this day and age," Chen Qi muttered under his breath. A dense sea of people stretched before them, packed so tightly it seemed impossible to squeeze through. The young men and women were all youthful, but their faces looked uniformly miserable, and their clothes were plainer than plain. Every now and then, someone would crane their neck toward the doors, waiting for the club to open. Huang Zhanying was an extrovert who had no concept of social anxiety. Grabbing hold of a skinny, bespectacled young man, she asked, "Comrade, we just got here. Have you heard any news?" "Actually, I did manage to sniff out a thing or two..." The young man proved just as eager to talk. Lowering his voice, he whispered, "Word has it our batch is a pilot project. They're making an example out of us first, pushing hard to set up production and service cooperatives." "A cooperative? But that's a collective enterprise!" Huang Zhanying's eyes went wide, her already large eyeballs threatening to pop right out of their sockets. Keeping her voice down, she protested, "That won't do! Collectives pay dirt, offer terrible conditions, don't have any benefits, and everybody laughs at you!" "Hey, back at my place you were the picture of revolutionary virtue. How'd you get so pragmatic all of a sudden?" Chen Qi teased. "If it were a state-owned unit, I'd sweep latrines if they asked me to. But a collective isn't a proper unit! Don't laugh at me—you're the same. Do you think your parents could bear that kind of humiliation?" "I don't really care..." As they spoke, a stir rippled through the crowd. Waves of people began shoving forward while monitors shouted to maintain order. The club doors had finally opened. Huang Zhanying dragged him forward into the surge, charging ahead like Zhang Fei himself and refusing to fall behind. After a grueling squeeze, they made it inside. It was a cavernous hall capable of holding a thousand people, split across two tiers, with a stage at the front suitable for assemblies or film screenings. A large banner was strung across the hall: 'On-Site Briefing on Government Solutions for Youth Awaiting Employment!' The two found seats. Before long, several officials mounted the stage, and the meeting officially began. In early 1979, twenty million people across the nation were awaiting employment. Among them were over ten million sent-down youth, 2.3 million idle urban laborers, and 1.05 million college or vocational graduates and demobilized soldiers... The situation in the capital was particularly dire, with four hundred thousand youth awaiting employment—an average of one unemployed youth for every 2.7 households. That ratio was staggering! Far worse than the post-pandemic era. Many people later held a stereotyped view of this era, imagining that if you studied well and graduated from a technical school, you could easily dominate the world and be handed a guaranteed job assignment... True, jobs were assigned by the state, but only on the condition that there were enough positions to go around. The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement had begun as early as the 1950s, essentially conceived to relieve the employment pressure brought on by the first postwar baby boom. Later, as those sent-down youth flooded back to the cities, their return coincided with the second population peak, creating a massive pool of idle young labor. Full of youthful vigor and stripped of work, they loitered around the city all day, brawling and causing trouble—a volatile, destabilizing element. Thus, settling them into jobs was the state's paramount priority this year. The officials on stage droned on at length. Chen Qi listened for a while and realized it boiled down to three main points: Allowing parents to take early retirement so their children could take over their posts. Requiring various organs and enterprises to absorb a quota of unemployed youth as long-term temporary workers, promoting the idea of "two people doing the work of one, five people sharing the food of three." Developing the collective economy, expanding avenues of employment, and easing restrictions on hiring. *Children inheriting jobs, temporary gigs, slacking off on the clock, flexible employment... Ha, so this is where it all started!* *The country's service sector has practically ground to a halt, so of course there are no jobs. They have to rebuild the service industry!* *By the late nineties, when the third population peak hits, college enrollment will expand... Still, the future had it easier: livestreaming, food delivery, and ride-hailing fixed everything in one go.* Chen Qi smiled, but the thought of the future brought a sudden pang of melancholy, and he let out a faint sigh. *Sigh... that micro-drama venture really cleaned me out!* *A successful guy like me, worth tens of millions, ended up in this crummy hutong dumping chamber pots. Where am I supposed to lodge a complaint?* Indeed, he was an outsider to this era. To be perfectly honest, he hadn't wanted to come here at all. How wonderful the future had been! There was Wi-Fi, Bilibili, Douyin, food delivery, high-speed rail; you didn't even need to leave the house to hire company, just order on your phone and they'd fly in from across the country; even Xiaomi was building electric cars, with Lei Jun personally opening the car door for you... In his previous life, Chen Qi had lived into his forties. He had been a veteran netizen who traded barbs on message boards since the old BBS days. He worked corporate jobs in his youth, later struck out on his own, became a recognizable figure on Weibo, ran a short-video network with over ten million followers, invested in films and TV shows, hawked goods on livestreams, and slept with influencers and cosplayers. He wasn't the richest man around, but he lived comfortably enough—and most importantly, he didn't have to work like a beast of burden for anyone else. He had weathered his share of trials, finally scraping through the pandemic, only to find the general economy in a slump, where Jia Ling losing weight was treated as national news. He had cashed in on lowbrow content, but others were churning out even worse junk—and backed by deep-pocketed capital to boot. Big tech monopolized the market, making it harder and harder for small outfits to survive. His stock portfolio tanked, his all-in gamble on short-form streaming dramas flopped, and after drinking himself into a stupor out of sheer misery, he woke up right here. His parents in this life were ordinary workers at the Xinhua Bookstore. There had once been a younger sister, but she died in infancy. The original host had been sent down to the countryside right after middle school. Huang Zhanying had been his comrade-in-arms; her parents also worked at the Xinhua Bookstore and lived in the same courtyard, and she had a younger brother. After returning to the city, the original host had sat for numerous exams without success, proudly becoming a member of the youth awaiting employment. "Priority must be given to older individuals and those who have been awaiting employment the longest!" "Following today's meeting, neighborhood committee cadres will conduct door-to-door visits to organize production and service cooperatives, ensuring that every young person awaiting employment is placed into a productive role..." "Please place your trust in the organization, and at the same time, adjust your own thinking. Times are changing—we've even established diplomatic ties with the United States! Besides, no post is too lowly, no work is dishonorable. Wherever you are, you can make a contribution to the motherland and add your brick to the Four Modernizations!" The speaker's voice boomed from the stage, while the crowd below remained utterly bewildered. "Haah..." Chen Qi let out a long yawn.