Social Class The Survival Stress and Status Quo of 3 Groups

Social Class

Careful budgeting in the market
At 4am in the market, dim yellow lights swayed in the mist, barely illuminating the stalls. Chen Xiulan squatted in front of a pile of wilting cabbage and negotiated with the vendor. Her rough fingers repeatedly rubbed the plastic bag, and there were still stains from yesterday’s waste collection in the nail crevices. She has been grinding here for a long time in order to save that fifty cents.

Chen Xiulan is 65 years old this year and used to be a female worker in a textile factory. Twenty years ago, she also woke up before dawn and rushed to the factory to work. At that time, although the salary was not high, the family was squeezed into a tube shaped building, living a simple but stable life. Nowadays, her husband is bedridden with illness all year round, and her son and daughter-in-law are working in other places. She not only has to take care of the sick, but also raise her young grandson, and the burden of life is all on her thin shoulders.
Last month, my spouse’s serious illness depleted the family’s savings. Now, she even has to take her antihypertensive medication in half. In order to subsidize her household expenses, she picks up waste in the community every day. When her neighbors catch her, she can only awkwardly smile and say, ‘Even idle is idle.’. Once, when her grandson curiously asked her why she was picking up these things, she touched her child’s head and gently said, “This is grandma’s little secret. You’ll find out when you grow up.” In fact, she knew in her heart that she was racing against time and wanted to use the money earned from these waste products to buy more Chinese medicine for her spouse and more antihypertensive pills for herself.
The glamour and pressure in office buildings Social Class
In sharp contrast to Chen Xiulan, Lin Yue is busy in a high-end office building. She was wearing a limited edition suit and high heels, confidently shuttling through the office area. As the director of a well-known Internet company, she seems to have unlimited success. However, the pressure behind it is always present.

On Lin Yue’s desk, there is a photo of her daughter, and the child in the photo is smiling innocently. But every time she worked late at night, watching the numbers jumping on the computer screen and listening to the whistling wind outside, her heart was filled with guilt. She missed too many moments of her daughter’s growth for this job. Last month, my daughter cried on the phone and asked when she could attend the parent teacher conference. She could only hold back her tears and say, ‘I’ll be busy for a while,’ but she didn’t know how long this’ period ‘would last.
In daily life, Lin Yue faces enormous economic pressure. Social Class The monthly mortgage of 35000 yuan, the high tuition fees for the bilingual kindergarten for her child, and the debt owed by her husband’s failed entrepreneurship are like three mountains, weighing down her breath. When passing by the discount area in the mall, she would involuntarily stop and watch as the tag price dropped from three digits to two digits, calculating in her heart how much money she could save to enroll her child in some extracurricular classes. Despite being a mid-level member of the new middle class, her life is far from as carefree as it appears on the surface.Social Class
A confused young man renting a house Social Class
Twenty three year old Zhou Yang is standing at a crossroads in life, filled with confusion. His rental house is located deep in the urban village, small and damp, with walls covered in moss. Every morning, he has to cross the noisy streets and squeeze onto the crowded subway to go for an interview. Watching the hurried crowd in the subway, he was both envious and confused. He envied those who were dressed in formal attire and looked successful in their careers, wondering when he could find a stable job.

During graduation season, Zhou Yang submitted over a hundred resumes, but only received a few interview notifications. After finally entering a startup company, I was informed of a “job adjustment” on the last day of my probation period. At night, Social Class he sat alone in the rental room, staring at the message from his parents on his phone that “everything is fine at home, don’t worry”, tears streaming down his cheap pillow. He dare not tell his parents that he has been living on instant noodles for three consecutive months, and he cannot imagine how he will take on the responsibility of raising children and caring for the elderly in the future.
Perseverance under heavy pressure Social Class

Social Class Consume healthy agricultural products regularly

Zhou Yang finally found a job in a small company, with a salary barely enough to make ends meet. But he dare not slack off, dare not get sick, dare not take leave, because every absence may mean losing this hard won job. He saw his colleagues around him, some working overtime desperately for promotion, some scrimping and frugal to save money, all struggling to move forward under the heavy pressure of life. There is a colleague in the company who is a few years older than him. In order to repay his mortgage and car loan, he works at the company during the day and delivers takeout at night. He is exhausted but dare not stop

Lin Yue’s child has reached the age of elementary school, and the issue of school district housing has become a huge stone in her heart. In order to send their child to a good school, she and her husband had to bear heavy loans again. Late at night, she stood alone on the balcony, gazing at the lights of the city, her heart filled with helplessness and exhaustion. She remembered when she was a child, studying in a rural school. Although the conditions were difficult, there was not so much anxiety and pressure. Now, for the sake of their child’s education, she and her husband have almost emptied all their savings and are burdened with decades of debt.

Social Class
Chen Xiulan’s spouse’s condition is gradually stabilizing, but medical expenses are still a bottomless pit. She still goes to the market early every day, searching for the cheapest ingredients and carefully searching for recyclable waste in the community. Once, in order to enroll her grandson in a public elementary school, she went to the school gate at 3am and stood in the cold wind for several hours, only to be told that the quota was full. She walked home dejectedly, tears streaming down her face, feeling that she couldn’t even do such a small thing well.
The hope of life

Social Class
Despite the hardships of life, they never gave up. Zhou Yang is working hard to learn and taking on more tasks proactively, hoping to have the opportunity for promotion. Although he became anemic due to overwork during the process, he immediately returned to the company after receiving intravenous therapy in the hospital because he knew that only by working hard could he change his life

。

When faced with a layoff crisis in the company, Lin Yue worked hard to balance family and work, actively improved her business skills, and strived to retain her position. She uses her spare time to learn new knowledge and skills. Although she hides in the bathroom and cries when she hears discussions from colleagues behind her back, she still hasn’t given up and strives to find a balance between family and career.
Chen Xiulan still takes good care of her husband and grandson, guarding this home in her own way. She started learning some simple handmade crafts, transforming the picked up waste into small objects, and occasionally selling them for some money to subsidize the household. She also organized a mutual aid group with other elderly people in the community, helping each other and sharing their life experiences and happiness with each other.Social Class
Three people of different ages and social classes are struggling fiercely in the torrent of life. Their stories are a microcosm of the lives of countless ordinary people. However, behind them lies a broader and more severe portrayal of social reality. According to relevant data, the wealth gap in China has become increasingly prominent in terms of wealth distribution. The minority group at the top of society holds an astonishing proportion of social wealth, while the majority of the population at the bottom holds a very limited share of wealth. In the field of private wealth, only 0.33% of the population holds as much as 67.4% of private wealth. In sharp contrast, 92.77% of the vast population holds only 7% of private wealth, which intuitively shows a serious imbalance in wealth distribution. ​
This imbalance is vividly reflected in the daily lives of ordinary people. When elderly people like Chen Xiulan, who are from the lower class, repeatedly deal with vendors in the market in order to save a few cents, even reducing the use of basic medicines, on the other side of the city, luxury hotels are hosting a series of extravagant consumption feasts. The price of a table of food may be the living expenses of Chen Xiulan’s family for several months.

When we buy Kanto yaku at a convenience store, someone is calculating the price difference between the surgery fee and the antihypertensive medication; When we placed an order for “Anti aging facial mask” in the live broadcast room, someone was calculating the early education fee and the bed fee of the nursing home for the grandchildren; While we were scrolling through ‘Lying Flat Literature’, someone was putting candy wrappers into the photo album, as if it were some kind of hidden legacy.Social Class
The predicament of these three generations is like being squeezed into the same conveyor belt: young people are crushed by the gears of ‘potential’, middle-aged people are twisted by the screws of ‘pillars’, and elderly people are wrapped in rust by the packaging paper of’ respecting the elderly ‘. At the end of the conveyor belt, no one pressed the pause buttonSocial Class