After Spring Festival in 2003, Shengjun went to work for the company in Qingdao as a porter. The basic wage was 1,500 yuan a month, but he wouldn't be paid until the fourth month, as the first three months' wages were a deposit. After working there for four months, Shengjun sensed that the company was going downhill, as more and more workers were leaving. Furthermore, he didn't get paid as promised. Shengjun went to the labor relations department to ask for his salary, but the head of the department told him that due to slack market demand, the company was having a difficult time getting capital returns, and that it was no use coming to him. Furious, Shengjun borrowed some money for his fare and went home.
At home, Shengjun reflected on the past few years, and the more he mulled it over the worse he felt.
In August, he went back to Beijing.
An old woman from the residential area where Shengjun had worked as a security guard told him that her son was the director of a logistics company, and that she could try and get him a job there if he wanted. Shengjun accepted. The company had more than a dozen lorries, and its major business was to transport books, furniture and household appliances.
To start with, Shengjun's job was simply to load and unload the lorries. After three months, the director acknowledged his hard work and obvious intelligence by sending him to a branch office to shadow the manager there. In six months' time, Shengjun mastered the prices of his own line as well as the out-of-town lines and was eventually promoted to branch business manager. His main responsibility was to negotiate with clients.
In the spring of 2005, a new office was being built in Tianjin, and the director sent Shengjun there to oversee proceedings. Shengjun worked long hours to talk with people in the industrial park and equipment manufacturing companies, and established many business connections. Although he was busy every day, Shengjun was happy because he was also learning more, and the director was very satisfied with his progress.
After six months in Tianjin, Shenjun had carved out a new path for the company.
In October, the Chaoyang district office was established and Shengjun was appointed to the position of branch manager, with five people working under him.
At that time Shengjun already had a girlfriend, who had been his classmate at school and was now working as a waitress at a restaurant in Shijiazhuang. Not long after becoming manager, Shengjun asked his girlfriend to come to Beijing and work as a bookbinder in a friend's printing company.
I asked him, "Why at this particular point did you invite your girlfriend to come to Beijing?"
Shengjun said, "Well, after five or six years in the city, I already had the feeling that I would never go back to the countryside."
"Could you really be so sure?"
"Yes, I could. Several years ago when I went back, I could stay at home for a fortnight, but now I find it hard to stay there for more than a few days. My hometown is at least twenty to thirty years behind Beijing, if not fifty. Why should I stay at home in the coun-tryside, if it means I can only enjoy the same life city people do in twenty years time, when I am nearly sixty?"
"Where do you think the main differences lie?"
"In the country the traffic is bad; and although we have telephones, there's no internet access. As for a 'cultural life' so to speak, there's nothing except TV. People are still so old-fashioned and conservative; they lack any innovative spirit. The quality of schooling is another problem. The education provided by my hometown cannot compare to what's on offer in the cities. It has been many years since anyone from my village has gone to university. I was married in 2008 and had a daughter a year later. I sent her to be looked after by my parents because both my wife and I are at the beginning of our careers. But we plan to bring her back after two or three years so that she can be schooled in Beijing. I want her to receive the same education as other children do here. I must stay for my daughter's sake, if not for my own. We've already suffered a great deal from receiving a poor education and we want to protect our children from the same fate…"
In October 2009, Shengjun left the logistics company because he came into conflict with the director.
He stayed at home doing nothing for a month, thinking about what his next step should be. He wanted to start a logistics company of his own, but no matter how small he started, he would still need at least a few trucks, several rooms and 30 to 50 thousand yuan of liquid assets. All these were beyond his reach.
But he couldn't afford to do nothing. At the end of the year, Shengjun saw that there was a vacancy for a deliveryman in a courier company and hurriedly applied.
He told me that the operating style of a logistics company was very different to that of a courier company. In a logistics company, anything a customer wants to be delivered has to be sent to the company first, but a courier company carries out a door-to-door service.
Shengjun works for the ZJS Express Company, which is divided into stations, post-offices, divisions and departments. Every day at eight o'clock in the morning the deliverymen assemble at their station, then they go to the post-office together and receive packages from the manager. At noon, they go back to the post-office to pick up more packages before going out again at half past one to deliver them. Usually he would collect and deliver twenty packages a day, which would bring in 2,000 yuan a month. During busy periods he could earn as much as 3,000.
Now, the couple has a combined monthly income of 4,000 yuan. After expenses—which include their 400 yuan monthly rent in Daxing, the 300 yuan that they send to their parents to look after their daughter, and the 1,000 yuan they themselves spend on food and general necessities, they manage to save around 2,000 yuan a month.