Without spoiling as much as possible, let’s tell the story of two of my roommates.
Roommate Z, from a rural village in a poor mountainous area in the middle. Both his parents worked part-time jobs in big cities. How poor was their family and their place before? He said that the elementary school student he studied eats at school every day. Eat is boiled cabbage radish potatoes. Did I say you don't put soy sauce? He said there is no soy sauce. The junior high school cafeteria ate buns stuffed with fennel, and there were even worms in the dishes. We chatted, and I talked about the first time our family bought a car when we were in elementary school. Then he was surprised to say that your family had a car at that time! I said it was all in 2010, and our county was stuck in traffic.
Although Z and his family are working part-time to earn some money, they have bought a house and have savings. Their monthly living expenses are more than 1,000 yuan, and his sister is also working. But he still does some things that we think are disrespectful. Last year, he proposed to have dinner together in the dormitory. Because we had evening classes, we discussed going after class. Everyone would have some dinner first, and then just eat a little for the dinner. Before we left, he asked if we had dinner. We say eat. He said proudly that I didn't eat, and then laughed twice. During dinner he announced to us that he didn't eat, so he wanted to eat more.
We had BBQ and ordered a casserole. Another roommate wants to serve him a bowl of porridge. He pushed it away in a hurry, saying that he didn't drink porridge, he wanted to eat more meat. This is the background.
I grew up in a small county-level city on the 6th tier in the north, and the economy is relatively good in our province. High school to the provincial capital to read. Most of my classmates from childhood to adulthood are dual-earner families or small and middle-class families within the system. Most of the students in rural areas also have relatively well-off families. I never had contact with classmates from poor areas before I went to college, so I didn't feel that way.
Our dormitory occasionally jokes about marriage and love. Z said that he must find an indigenous girl from a first-tier city to marry. He said that in junior high school he "understood that it is impossible to escape the class by relying on himself" and that only marriage can change his destiny.
Another roommate, Q, is from a suburb of Beijing. His family is an immigrant from a neighboring province to Beijing. Both parents work within the system and have houses and cars.
From the first day Q freshman moved in. He kept talking about how uneven development was between different districts in Beijing. Especially the economic gap between the north and south cities and the education gap between east and west cities. He has repeatedly emphasized that the economy in his district is backward and there are no good schools. Then expect the Beijing municipal government to change its policy or move to Xicheng or Haidian District on their own.
But the rest of us are from small county towns. The family's income and real estate are actually much less than Q's family. And we all came from the college entrance examination province. Every time we hear Q complaining too much about how unfair Beijing High School is, we have nothing to say. We cannot feel any sympathy at all for his complaints.
By the third year, we are all faced with the choice of postgraduate entrance examination and postgraduate research work. Q especially hates a boy Y in their class. He felt that the classmate was not that great and didn't put much effort into it, but Y got a very high gpa, was in charge of the student organization, and had a beautiful and excellent girlfriend. It just so happens that Y comes from a populous province in the central part of the country, and the family is still a registered poor household.
Q often tells us sarcastic things about Y, but he thinks it is unfair that he has a scholarship, a postgraduate study, and a good girlfriend.
For professional reasons, both Y and Q have to go to Beijing for an internship. In order to relieve the burden of students going to Beijing for internships, the college has to issue rental subsidies. Q told us that he plans to live at home and secretly save the rental subsidy to buy things. At the college meeting, the teacher announced that students who live in Beijing will not receive rental subsidies because they can go home. This time Y laughed at Q for a long time. Then Q broke out again in the dormitory group and spoke badly about Y to us. He said that Y wanted to work in Beijing in the future, and now he is always worried about buying a house. He has expressed to him many times that no matter what he does, as long as he makes money, he is king. He said that this is the evil logic of capitalists, and that Y would kill and rob for money.
We can't take it anymore. Start to ask Q, if Y goes to work in Beijing. How much does he spend on rent each month. If he still works in this industry, his income will be a problem even for his basic life. He also faces his girlfriend's future marriage requirements, future children's schooling, and parents' medical care. And all of this is something Q, a Beijinger with a household registration and a house, doesn't have to think about it at all. What qualifications does he have to satirize other people wanting to make money?
Q began to become hysterical, and the conversation turned to us, sarcasm that we didn't even have the qualifications to sympathize with Y, and that I didn't even have a roof for 1,000 yuan a year to shelter from the rain in the future (can't go to graduate school). So far in the discussion, we have not spoken.
In fact, we are not only speaking for Y, but more like speaking for ourselves. When we enter the society soon, the pressure of house, hukou and marriage will come. People like Q, who are also Chinese, don't have to think about many issues.
Having experienced Q, I found that the self-knowledge between people is not absolute, but relative. He lives in the suburbs of Beijing and only feels the disparity within Beijing. But his position has actually far surpassed those of us working-class living in small counties and even poor mountainous areas. But he still asks us to sympathize with him. He even felt that a person like Y was not worthy of sympathy. Even though Y was born in a poor household, he already belongs to a small number of people in absolute poverty in this country.
There is no sympathy among the weak. I'm thankful that I grew up in a working-class family where my family allowed me to maintain basic dignity and grace without being incapable of empathy for the pain at the bottom. But I didn't expect that there are still people like Z. They don't think our family's life is ordinary. Even Z often expresses jealousy towards me so much that he needs to prove himself through some consumption.
I didn't even expect a person like Q to exist. The envy of the higher class and the contempt for the lower class were completely integrated into him. He can dream of living in some privileged neighborhood in the imperial capital while occupying the moral high ground to criticize poor classmates like Y.
I found that the university was full of people like me who held "civilization" like the protagonist and thought they could change all this through persuasion and education. What's interesting is that while I was watching this video, the background sound was that the teacher in the online class was talking about seeing democracy, relationships and ritual prosperity through this epidemic. Teachers who hold right-wing views are expressing that some problems can be avoided through some system design...
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