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Text and photos by Li He

Editor: Sydney Wang

Taking Xiaoshu into the car meant that Liuliu decided to leave Beijing completely.

Xiaoshu is a four-year-old tabby cat she picked up. Liuliu's game ID is Dashu, so she named the kitten Xiaoshu. It is inconvenient to take a cat on the train, so Liuliu spent 1,100 yuan to rent a van. So this summer, Xiaoshu was put into a light gray cat bag, blinking his eyes, not making any noise, and quietly accompanied his owner to the next city.

Liuliu’s destination is Fuxin, a resource-depleted city that ranks last in GDP in Liaoning Province.

But on social media where young people are active, Fuxin is their choice for retreat. There are many stories of people buying houses with full payment here - some people spent 28,000 yuan to buy their first house in their life, and some people sighed that they finally found a good place to lie down and live in their old age, and took pictures of the sunset in the newly renovated house, saying that they were completely healed the moment they walked in. Compared with Hegang, the "originator of low-priced houses", Fuxin has a more advantageous geographical location - it is more than 600 kilometers away from Beijing, with high-speed rail, and it takes more than two hours to get there. In terms of climate, it does not have a long and cold winter like Hegang.

Liuliu was inspired by these posts to go to Fuxin. In February this year, she spent 35,000 yuan to buy an old house of more than 50 square meters in the local area, 700 yuan per square meter. She said that this price was a bargain, but if she was luckier, she could find a house for more than 300 yuan per square meter.

I met Liuliu in Fuxin in June this year. This girl in her 20s was busy with renovations at the time. She spent half of her time telling me why she chose Fuxin, and the other half complaining about the bad things she encountered in Fuxin. After dinner that day, she took me around most of Fuxin City before I found my home, and she almost took the wrong road several times - obviously, she was not familiar enough with this city.

There are many new immigrants like Liuliu who are unfamiliar with Fuxin. They have formed WeChat groups of 500 people, chatting about everything, and occasionally organizing offline gatherings, looking for a sense of belonging in their own way. Baiwange, who has lived in Fuxin for 12 years, told me that over the years, there have been tens of thousands of new immigrants in Fuxin.

Almost everyone has a past that cannot be easily told. In Fuxin, in addition to owning a house, they also hope to start a new life. "We are not coming to Fuxin to lie down or to be in trouble. We are just living in seclusion in a new way." Baiwange wrote in his circle of friends.

A girl's life confidence

Liu Liu is obsessed with houses.

Her hometown is a small town with beautiful mountains and rivers in the central part of China. There is a custom in her hometown that if a family has both sons and daughters, the girl cannot go home during the New Year. "The elders said that if she goes home, it will affect the fortune of the men in the family." Liu Liu saw with her own eyes that her aunt was not allowed to go home during the New Year.

Liuliu is an only child, so this problem does not exist. However, she knew very early that her parents' two houses may have nothing to do with her. In some families with only daughters, if one of the parents dies, a male relative in the family must be found to pay respects to the deceased. The condition for paying respects to the deceased is often to donate the property to the deceased.

"My parents may not do this, but I want to work hard on my own and own my own house," said Liu Liu.

Low housing prices attract many people to buy houses in Fuxin

After graduating from a "211" university, she went to Guangzhou to work and lived in a dormitory provided by the company. There were several people in one room, and daily necessities were mixed together. There was no privacy at all. She moved out and found someone to share the house. The monthly rent was 1,400 yuan, and men and women lived together in a house of more than 100 square meters. When she made a phone call, she had to lower her voice. Once when she returned to the rental house, she was harassed by the man she shared the house with.

But buying a house was out of reach for her - at that time, the housing price in Guangzhou was about 20,000 yuan per square meter, and Liu Liu's monthly salary was about 4,000 yuan.

Two years later, Liuliu left Guangzhou and went to work in Beijing. The rent here is more expensive, and the price of a shared apartment has risen from the initial 1,800 yuan to 2,200 yuan. Some of the landlord's practices also made her feel uncomfortable. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she asked the landlord to join the owner group so that she could see various notifications from the community in a timely manner. The landlord refused, saying that only owners could enter.

After a while, the landlord told Liuliu that his son was getting married and he might sell the house at any time. After that, the landlord would notify her again every once in a while. Liuliu lived in fear every day, and until she moved out, the house was not sold.

The idea of ​​"becoming an owner, not a tenant" grew stronger and stronger in Liuliu's mind, but not only were the housing prices in Guangzhou and Beijing out of her reach, even in the county where she lived, the housing prices had risen to 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per square meter, and she had no ability to buy one.

What's more, Liuliu was determined not to go back to her hometown. Usually, her parents would ask her when she would get married after just a few words on the phone. Her father even said that they could get married after knowing each other for a month. A few years ago, Liuliu had a long-distance relationship and had been single since the breakup. She found all kinds of excuses to avoid the topic, but her parents, who were unwilling to give up, kept introducing blind dates to her through relatives and friends.

In order not to offend her parents, Liu Liu would usually add the other party on WeChat. After chatting a few times, there would be no further contact.

The men's goal was direct and clear: to get married and have children. As for the spiritual life that Liu Liu cared about, they didn't understand, nor did they intend to understand. The parents' cognition was similar to those of the men. They repeatedly told Liu Liu that she had to have a child with whomever she was with, and it was better to have one earlier than later. Moreover, as long as both parties had a child, they could compromise on issues related to their relationship and spiritual life. The older elders even taught Liu Liu to try to "find a man on the same street, who knows her well and is convenient for her to get along with."

Whenever the topic of marriage and childbearing came up, both sides would end up unhappy. Liu Liu still remembers a conversation with his father.

"I asked my dad what to do if my husband cheated on me in the future. He said I just had to change."

"What about prostitution?"

"I won't go to prostitutes after I get married."

"What if he commits domestic violence?"

"Your mother and I have been fighting and quarreling all our lives."

"If these serious problems arise, can I get a divorce?"

"no!"

This conversation made Liuliu feel uneasy about blind dates and marriage. She knew very well that one day she might have to marry a man she met through a blind date. So the only way out for her was to buy an apartment.

"For me, a house means freedom to a certain extent. At least it does not restrict you. For example, before you get married, you are not restricted by your parents. After you get married, you are not restricted by your husband. You always have a way out. I have seen a saying before that there is no fixed destiny for women in this world. She first works as a guest at her parents' house for a while, then stays at her husband's house for a while, flies to her children's house when she is old, and finally finds a place to rest in peace." Liu Liu told me confidently that if she owned a house and encountered divorce, she would not have to go to her parents' house in dejection and listen to their nagging about remarriage; nor would she have to exhaust her energy fighting with a man for the property. Instead, she could leave freely and live her own life.

Low-priced housing information on the street

She considered Hegang, but was scared by the long winter there. When searching for cheap houses online, Liuliu noticed Fuxin. Many people there are doing self-media, and they say it is a place "worth lying down."

Before arriving in Fuxin, Liuliu had no idea about the city. She even had no idea about the entire Liaoning Province. The only things she knew about were Tieling, Zhao Benshan, and Errenzhuan. On a weekend in October 2023, she bought a high-speed rail ticket from Beijing to Fuxin.

She didn't have high expectations for Fuxin, but after an inspection, she found that it was completely beyond her imagination. "The scale, infrastructure, and prosperity are all good. There is a high-speed rail station, a tertiary hospital, and a university, which is enough for living." After that, she came several more times and made up her mind to buy a house.

After comparing several houses recommended by the agent, she chose a family compound where many retired cadres lived. In her opinion, this at least means that the residents are of good quality. The community is separated from Fuxin South Station by a wall. The houses are more than 20 years old. There is a morning market nearby, which can be reached in two or three minutes on foot. There is also a police station not far away, which makes Liuliu feel safe.

The house Liuliu was interested in was on the second floor, with two bedrooms and one living room, 50 square meters, and the overall asking price was 35,000 yuan. The owners were a retired cadre couple, very easy to talk to, and the two sides decided to make a deal without much negotiation. The agent told Liuliu that the price of the second floor was rare in the second-hand housing market in Fuxin, and it was considered a bargain. Liuliu quickly transferred the house payment.

The house bought by Liuliu

To apply for a house certificate, you need a household registration book. Liu Liu didn't want to let her parents know, so she took her ID card and re-applied for a house certificate in her hometown, claiming that her household registration book was lost. Then she took the re-issued household registration book to Fuxin to go through the formalities and transfer the ownership. She got the house certificate in about 10 days.

The big red notebook is her confidence and a guarantee for an uncertain future.

Glory and decline

As for Fuxin, I initially thought it would be deserted, with the remnants of the decline and distress of the old industrial base in Northeast China. Public information online shows that Fuxin is located in the transition zone between the Inner Mongolia Plateau and the Liaohe Plain in the south of Northeast China and the northwest of Liaoning, with a combined urban and rural population of less than 2 million. As a media person, my memory of Fuxin is often associated with "mine disasters" and "gas explosions" - for example, on February 14, 2005, a particularly serious gas explosion occurred in the Haizhou Mine of Sunjiawan Coal Mine of Liaoning Fuxin Mining (Group) Co., Ltd., killing 214 people.

After I actually walked into the city, I found that it broke some of my stereotypes. There was no gray sky, and no dilapidated factories in the city. At dawn, old people with carts and baskets occupied the morning market to buy food. At night, after young people got off work, several famous night markets were crowded with people, just like the food streets in other Internet-famous cities.

The most representative landmark of Fuxin is the Haizhou Open-pit Mine National Mine Park. This was the famous Haizhou open-pit coal mine before. After it was closed in 2005, it was listed as one of the first national mine parks. It is about 2 kilometers long from north to south and nearly 4 kilometers from east to west. The mine pit, which is about 350 meters deep, is full of the glory of Fuxin in the past.

Fuxin Haizhou open-pit coal mine has become the memory of a generation

On July 1, 1953, this coal mine, the largest in Asia, the second largest in the world, and the first mechanized, electrified, and modernized in my country, was officially put into production. The commemorative stamps issued by China Post in 1954 and the reverse side of the third set of RMB five-yuan notes in 1960 both featured scenes of coal mining operations with electric picks at the Haizhou open-pit mine.

An old miner told me, "Fuxin was like a big factory at that time. In addition to the Haizhou Mine, there were several other mines. The number of people working in the coal industry, including their families, was about 350,000, accounting for half of Fuxin's population at the time." According to official information from the Fuxin Communist Youth League, Fuxin produced more than 700 million tons of raw coal for the country during those years. If this amount of coal was loaded into train cars, it could circle the earth 3.5 times along the equator.

But the mines will eventually run out. In the memory of old miners, the glory of Fuxin coal mines suddenly dimmed around the 1990s. As coal resources gradually dried up and mining costs rose, the single industry dominated by coal began to decline, and Fuxin fell into the dilemma of "mine exhaustion and city decline". Dongliang Mine, Ping'an Mine, Xinqiu Open-pit Coal Mine, and Haizhou Open-pit Mine were closed one after another. In 2001, Fuxin was officially recognized by the State Council as the first resource-exhausted city in the country.

Fuxin, a city that prospered and fell because of coal

During the coal mining period, miners lived in earth and stone houses, brick and wood houses from the early days of the People's Republic of China, and even labor houses and simple houses from the Japanese puppet period. At that time, Fuxin once presented a magical landscape of "hundreds of miles of mines and hundreds of miles of shanties".

Since 2005, Fuxin has made shantytown reconstruction a "number one livelihood project". After the shantytown reconstruction, many families can be allocated several resettlement houses. Local residents said that the resettlement houses are generally not large, about 50 to 60 square meters each.

Most of the low-priced houses in Fuxin today are resettlement houses and old houses built in the past.

As a native of Fuxin, Xiao Wu, who was born in 1995, has three resettlement houses, each of which is more than 60 square meters. His parents worked in the mines, and the whole family lived in a shanty town. In Xiao Wu's limited childhood memories, around 1996, many mines began to close, his parents were laid off, and life was once difficult. The Xinhua Daily Telegraph reported that "by 2000, 129,000 coal workers in Fuxin were laid off, and 198,000 urban residents were below the minimum living standard, accounting for a quarter of the city's total population."

When he grew up, Xiao Wu learned that his parents had bought out nearly 20 years of seniority, and were compensated with a few hundred yuan a year, with the couple paying more than 10,000 yuan in total. In order to find another way out, they opened a small restaurant in Fuxin. After graduating from junior high school and moving around for a few years, Xiao Wu returned to Fuxin, helped out in his family's restaurant, and learned cooking from his father.

When he moved into the resettlement house, Xiao Wu was 22 years old. Soon, he got married and had children, and his life was monotonous and boring. With the decline of the old industrial base in Northeast China, young people in this city are trying their best to get out. The capable ones go to Shenyang and Harbin; the more capable ones flow into the interior and go to Beijing and Shanghai.

Xiao Wu has fewer and fewer friends in Fuxin. "The city is small, life is monotonous, and the income is low. Who would want to stay here?"

Many low-priced houses have been unoccupied for a long time.

During the holidays, childhood friends would come back for a few days. They were obviously doing well, some were in finance, some were involved in investment. Xiao Wu said that every time his friends came back, they were wearing gold and silver, wearing mink, driving all kinds of luxury cars, and giving out Zhonghua cigarettes when they met. That glamorous world that only existed in high-sounding talk had nothing to do with Xiao Wu, he knew that he had long since fallen behind his friends.

But because his mother was in poor health and he was the only son, Xiao Wu couldn't go out even if he didn't want to. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant was closed, and after the pandemic, he turned to running a night market.

The night markets in Fuxin are always bustling. As soon as it gets dark, dozens of night markets such as Dongfeng Road, Hongmana, and Youai Bridge Night Market become busy, and the sound of QR codes being received is constant. The owner of a real mutton kebab restaurant directly puts out the slogan, "I will die if it is not pure mutton." The two words "I will die" are in the largest font size, vigorous and powerful, full of confidence. For a whole night, Xiao Wu was enthusiastically soliciting customers, "Brother, what do you want to eat?" "Beauty, do you want to order something?" Some people were attracted by his enthusiasm, and more people walked away without even looking up. In this way, Xiao Wu can earn several thousand yuan every month. In this city, it is enough for him to live.

Last year, he sold a resettlement house for 110,000 yuan. The buyer was a single girl from Fujian in her 30s who wanted to live in Fuxin. "I don't know what's good about Fuxin. But it's OK. There are more young people here." Xiao Wu is very clear that Fuxin can no longer retain local young people. Many of the young faces on the street are new immigrants.

New immigrants squeezed into low-priced housing

During my interview in Fuxin, I spent most of my time walking and fishing with the new immigrants, and strolling to the area near Fuxin South Station to eat a 13-yuan buffet. Fuxin is not expensive, and there are seven or eight low-priced buffet restaurants near the South Station alone, with more than 40 dishes including meat and vegetables.

The boss said that relying on these dishes alone would definitely make a loss, and the main source of profit is from the drinks and beverages that can be ordered separately. Many local men drank bottle after bottle of beer and shouted loudly, "Gaha! What are you doing? What are you doing?"

New immigrants seldom order drinks. They tend to just eat and leave.

Many new immigrants from Fuxin live in this community.

Baiwange is a senior immigrant. This 40-year-old from Jinzhou came to Fuxin in 2012 and gave himself the online name "Baiwanzhishichengfuxin".

Before coming to Fuxin, Baiwange lived a wandering life - he moved around in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities, worked in securities companies, futures companies and even worked as a sub-landlord, but he never made a name for himself or earned a lot of money. He felt that his most glorious moment was when he was an extra in Beijing, and he showed me his photos. At that time, he was still thin and strong, with a straight nose, and wore the uniform of a foreign special police.

The lowest point was in Shenyang. He had little money, so he had to use his bicycle to carry his luggage to rent a house near Bawangsi in Dadong District, Shenyang, for 100 yuan a month. There was no heating, and the brick bed was very small, so he had to sleep sideways. During the first Spring Festival in Shenyang, the house was too cold, so Baiwan bought two bags of dumplings and left them at home, which froze. In the end, the two bags of dumplings were eaten by mice and himself.

The last stop before Fuxin was Siping. He opened a small hotel there, got a girlfriend, and eventually broke up. Brother Baiwan didn't want to say a word about the breakup, "She is from Jilin, and in the end, I couldn't even hear or mention the word Jilin." In short, he had to leave Siping - that was his sad place.

He first wanted to be as far away as possible. So he considered a small border town in Guangxi, but later he heard that there were frequent wars in neighboring Myanmar and shells could easily fall into Chinese territory, so he gave up. Later he learned from social media that the housing prices in Fuxin were also low and not far from his hometown of Jinzhou. So he finally returned to the Northeast and bought a house of more than 50 square meters at a price of 1,000 yuan per square meter.

"The cheap ones are all on the top floor. The starting price for houses below the third floor is about 100,000 yuan." The agent Xiao Wang told me that although some second-hand houses in Fuxin are cheap, houses that cost a few hundred yuan per square meter are not mainstream, and houses that cost around 2,000 yuan are normal. In the low-priced housing circle in Fuxin, single mother Xiao Wang is very famous. She is from Inner Mongolia. She was in a bad state for a while and just wanted to find a city life with less pressure. In the end, she chose Fuxin. After changing two low-priced second-hand houses, Xiao Wang took out a loan to buy a brand new commercial house. At the same time, she became an agent on the short video platform, specializing in selling low-priced houses.

"The low-priced houses in Fuxin are basically resettlement houses." Another agent explained that some houses are even sold at a loss after accounting for the cost of renovation, but the owners still have to sell them, after all, there is no point in keeping them. "There was a southerner who bought 9 houses in Fuxin at one time in 2023 and brought in a team to do game leveling. In the end, the business failed and he had to sell the houses."

After changing two low-priced second-hand houses, Xiao Wang bought a brand new commercial house.

In the first few years after arriving in Fuxin, Baiwan went back to Jinzhou every Spring Festival. After his parents passed away one after another, the family no longer existed.

The sense of belonging that Fuxin gave him gradually replaced that of Jinzhou. In early 2019, Baiwan Ge suddenly found that more and more outsiders moved to Fuxin, and some even moved from Hegang. Because Baiwan Ge came early, he naturally assumed the role of "predecessor". He created a group for new immigrants and was also pulled into many groups, gradually becoming a bond between them.

Most new immigrants are reluctant to tell stories of the past. In their view, coming to Fuxin means becoming a new person, so why bother talking about the past? A girl born after 1995 refused my interview and said that she originally wanted to find a place where she would not be disturbed. "Except for my cat, I don't even trust my family, let alone the media."

Baiwange told me that among the new immigrants, there are more girls than boys, more people who buy houses than rent them, and more people who are not married and have no children than those who want to get married and have children; almost everyone has a pet, mostly cats. Baiwange has established a small circle of people who do not marry and have no children in Fuxin. "Although we are a small group, we have put aside the love and hatred in the world, and we have no worries at all. What we have is the love for life."

He admired a girl named Li Xingxing. She usually does self-media. In December last year, she donated all the 8,800 yuan she earned from self-media to a welfare home in Fuxin. She usually eats instant noodles. To express his respect, Baiwan Ge wrote in his circle of friends, "Learn from Li Xingxing, who immigrated from Yanjiao to Fuxin, abandon vulgar tastes, and achieve boundless love.

There was another girl who had mental problems. She wanted to go to Fuxin to buy a house and start a new life. But she underestimated the housing prices here. When she found out that the only 7,000 yuan in her credit card was not enough to buy a house, she was shocked and went to a mental hospital.

"I had this (mental) illness before, but I failed to buy it and then got stimulated and had a relapse." Brother Baiwan sighed.

Brother Baiwan's life in Fuxin is busy but dull - in addition to selling things on second-hand platforms, he also helps manage 30 rental houses, earning about 5,000 yuan a month. Of the 1,000 yuan fixed expenses, 200 yuan is spent on gas, and the rest is used for food and drink.

Some time ago, because a relative passed away, Baiwan went back to Jinzhou and met some of his childhood friends. His hometown became increasingly unfamiliar to him, "There are few elderly people I know, and the children have all grown up."

On the way back to Fuxin, he realized that he could not leave Fuxin for the rest of his life.

The bad side

Liuliu was not as determined as Baiwange. She once doubted whether she should stay in Fuxin. On the day she met me, she had not even made up her mind. Liuliu said that as soon as she got the house deed, the problem came - the old house she bought had a very simple decoration before. For example, the toilet was exposed outside, and there was no door or wall to cover it. Everything had to be renovated.

Liu Liu found a designer on a social platform and told him her ideas. Liu Liu had many ideas for her home. She wanted her home to be smart, so she asked the designer to leave space for smart switches and smart home appliances. She also left enough space for a small tree and designed a bay window.

With the design drawings, Liu Liu found a decorator in Fuxin and paid half of the down payment.

According to the contract, the entire construction period was 33 days, which means it was completed by May 20th, but the work was not completed until June 20th. The reason given by the decorator was that his costs could not cover the total cost. The implication was that he was losing money. But Liuliu believed that before signing the contract, the decorator should have predicted the cost, otherwise he should not sign it. The two sides argued for a long time without any result.

Liuliu thought the decorator was suspected of fraud and called the police. The last time she called the police was because she was sexually harassed at work. The police came and said it was not a fraud, but just a dispute, and urged the decorator to finish the work quickly. Liuliu eventually learned that the renovation money had actually been misappropriated.

Decoration became Liuliu's first lesson in Fuxin. In addition, she discovered the not-so-good side of the city. "I often encountered men urinating in public on the main road; when I ate in a restaurant, the dishes were not fresh, and I would be scolded by the merchants when I complained; some vendors sold things at a fraction of the weight and refused to admit it; many roads were bumpy and in disrepair for many years, and I fell because of them; there were always people driving four-wheeled old man's electric cars on the road..."

However, Liuliu likes Fuxin as a whole and is very positive about her future life. Liuliu used to work in self-media, and she still wants to do some online work in Fuxin in the future, and she is targeting the health track for the elderly. But not everyone has made a good plan, such as Dabao who moved to Fuxin a year ago. He didn't know what to do in this city, and wandered around the streets for a year.

Most of the low-priced houses in Fuxin are resettlement houses or old houses.

Dabao is in his 40s, a native Beijinger who speaks authentic Beijing dialect, but he does not feel any sense of superiority. "I was born in the suburbs of Beijing, a rural person, separated from Hebei by a river. I can't afford a house in Beijing. I want to buy a car, but I haven't been able to get a license plate since 2012." He was originally a third-party dispatched employee of a government unit in Beijing, with a monthly salary of only a few thousand yuan, and a commute time of about three hours from home to the unit. Unable to afford a house, Dabao lived in a yard with his parents. He had a girlfriend in Beijing, but later broke up because the woman's family was demolished.

In this way, Dabao slowly became a "Beijing loser".

He had wanted to escape from Beijing for a long time. As soon as the epidemic control ended, he went straight to Fuxin to look at houses. His first impression of this city was that it was small. "I can ride a tram to where I want to go in a short time. It's not like Beijing, where it takes at least half a day to do anything." Later, he spent more than 40,000 yuan to buy an old house of 70 square meters. The total price of this house cannot even buy one square meter in Beijing. Dabao is very happy. He finally has his own house in his 40s.

"Everyone knows about the Beijing exam, but no one wants to leave. I am the one who escapes from the siege." After more than a year of living on his savings, Dabao finally found an agency and became an apprentice. Although there is no salary for the time being, at least he can look forward to graduating soon.

Job opportunities in Fuxin are indeed limited. In Baiwange's observation, many new immigrants are digital nomads who can make money with an Internet cable. There are also vendors selling pot cakes, socks and fish. Some have found jobs as supermarket cashiers or Internet cafe network administrators in the local area, earning 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month, which is already good. "If you are willing to work hard, you can support yourself by doing day labor, but young people nowadays can't bear that hardship." He noticed that some people invest in stocks, funds, etc. "They want to lie down, but after lying down for a long time, they feel that they need to make more money."

Those who left and those who stayed

"You have the capital to lie down, but poor people are not suitable for it." Also constrained by the difficulty in finding a job, "Yi Tiao Yu", a new immigrant, left Fuxin in March this year.

Yi Yi Yu was born in 1995 and is from Tianjin. His purpose of going to Fuxin was very clear - to heal his wounds.

Yizhiyu was diagnosed with depression when he was in high school. After barely finishing college, he went to Shenzhen to work as a programmer. The tense workplace environment aggravated his depression - he could never fall asleep, whether it was day or night; he sometimes had auditory hallucinations when walking on the road; he took an increased dose of the antidepressant drug sertraline, but it still didn't work.

He called a friend, and the other party just said, "Brother, think positively, come out for a drink." But he couldn't think positively, and alcohol had no effect. He was like a fish that knew it was sick, like a dying fish. He tried to call the psychological crisis counseling hotline, but the line was always busy.

He decided to leave Shenzhen. In March 2022, Yi Yi Yu spent 50,000 yuan to buy a 50-square-meter house in Fuxin, and spent more than 30,000 yuan on decoration. In the year since he moved to Fuxin, he changed his mobile phone number and registered a new WeChat account, which only his parents knew. His daily life is very fixed. He gets up at 6 o'clock in the morning to run for an hour. During the day, he reads books, watches dramas, and writes novels at home. When he is bored, he goes shopping and fishing. At 6 o'clock in the evening, he rides a bike around Fuxin City for two hours.

He had no social life in this city and just wanted to be alone.

Healthy work and rest and regular life did work, Yi Yi Yu felt that he was in better shape. But a new anxiety came again - he needed to work. "I don't have much money, I can't just live off my savings." Yi Yi Yu studied computer science, and in Fuxin, he couldn't find any other suitable job except network management. He didn't want to work as a delivery man or an intermediary.

During that time, he took his resume to several small local companies for interviews. One day, he suddenly realized that if he wanted to work, why did he have to go to school in Fuxin? After hesitating for a while, Yi Yi Yu rented out his house in Fuxin and returned to Shenzhen to continue his life as a programmer in an Internet company. He didn't know how long he could hold on. "If the depression gets worse again, the worst that can happen is that I can go back to Fuxin and lie down."

Houses costing several hundred yuan per square meter

Liuliu has no plans to leave Fuxin for the time being. After the renovation incident, her life is back on track.

She terminated the previous contract and found a new decorator, who was originally scheduled to finish the work in mid-August. But after more than 20 days, the other party had not started laying tiles. When she asked again, he said that he had taken on other people's work at the same time and went to work for them first. Liuliu asked three or four more companies and finally decided on a new tile craftsman.

In addition to the small tree, Liuliu also picked up a stuffed animal in the rental house. It had no name, so she called it "Wei". When she first picked it up, Wei was sick, so Liuliu bought a nebulizer and shaved its hair. She planned to find a good family to give it away after Wei recovered.

During the Dragon Boat Festival, Liu Liu went back to her hometown. Her parents were still urging her to get married. She stayed for a few days and then returned to Beijing to pack up and move to Fuxin. Compared with a marriage with no end in sight and an uncertain future, the bad things she encountered in Fuxin were nothing. For her, the house was still her confidence. She designed a 5-square-meter studio for herself and planned to find some online work to do.

She has not told her parents about buying a house. Her parents even thought she was still working in Beijing. "Let's talk about it later. I haven't figured out how to start the conversation yet." Liu Liu said that she told her two best friends about it. One of them is single and the other is newly married. The single girl lives in a rental house, while the married one moved into the house bought by her husband. In their opinion, Liu Liu's decision to buy a house in Fuxin was a wise one - she did what she wanted to do and lived for herself.

"You are different now than when you were in Beijing. You smile more often." A close friend said on WeChat.

"Really?" Liu Liu asked back, followed by a long string of "ha".

Operation/ Li Xinran Proofreading/ Li Baofang Art Design/ Uncle Mary

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