Nowadays, the proportion of netizens over the age of 50 has increased from 16.9% to 26.3%, and the Internet has further penetrated into the middle-aged and elderly groups. For many children, parents are caught up in "Internet addiction" and need to talk about it; but for the elderly, mobile phones are liberated from heavy work and housework and enter the door to a new world. When mobile phones enter the lives of the elderly, the identities of children and the elderly are reversed.
Reporter | Wu Shubin
"Oh—"
The mobile phone on the kitchen counter vibrated, the sound of cutting vegetables paused for two seconds, and suddenly there was a little silence, and there was only the grunting of the cooking pot and the babies in the living room. Soon, the clash of kitchen knives and cutting boards was heard again, drowning out other sounds.
After a while, a second vibration sounded. This time, Li Xinyi sneaked a peek from the living room, and her mother, Ren Xiujuan, put the kitchen knife on the cutting board, rubbed her hands casually on the apron, and then picked up the mobile phone. Li Xinyi could only see her mother's back, her right arm moving at small frequencies, she guessed that her mother's face must have a smile, and her fingers were writing quickly on the screen, replying to comments on the short video platform. Ten seconds later, Ren Xiujuan put down her mobile phone, glanced back, and just looked at Li Xinyi. Both mother and daughter were a little embarrassed, Li Xinyi withdrew her gaze, teased her daughter who was lying obediently in the stroller, and the sound of cutting vegetables also sounded in the kitchen again.
Just a few days ago, Li Xinyi had an "awkward and slightly serious" conversation with her mother, the main content of which was to persuade Ren Xiujuan to play less mobile phones. After some tug-of-war, the initial result reached by the two was "not affecting sleep, no more than 4 hours, not seeing netizens.". After this conversation, my mother's behavior of playing with her mobile phone seemed to have relented, but there were also times when I couldn't help it today.
Figure | Visual China
Li Xinyi is 30 years old and has just given birth. The 59-year-old Ren Xiujuan, worried that her daughter's confinement was not sitting well, and that she would not be able to take care of the child after taking maternity leave, rushed from her hometown in Anhui to Hangzhou before Li Xinyi gave birth.
When Ren Xiujuan was still in her hometown, Li Xinyi knew that her mother liked to watch short videos on her mobile phone and take pictures by herself. But during the year of living together, she discovered that her mother had become obsessed with mobile phones. Even if you do housework, such as mopping the floor, you will put your mobile phone in your pocket, as long as the news comes, immediately put the mop to the wall and take out your mobile phone to see. In the middle of our interview, Li Xinyi suddenly lowered her voice and told me, "My mother has entered the room with headphones, and it is estimated that she is going to play with her mobile phone again." ”
Li Xinyi also found that her mother would stay up late to watch videos. Li Xinyi's house is a small one-bedroom apartment, and Ren Xiujuan's guest room is separated from the living room by frosted glass.
At two o'clock in the night before the birth, Li Xinyi woke up hungry, and when she walked from the room to the living room, she found that there was still a faint light in the guest room. She knocked on the door and asked her mother "Did you sleep" and there was no response. Li Xinyi pushed open the door and saw her mother lying on her side in the bed, holding a mobile phone and headphones in her hand, watching a short video. When she found Li Xinyi coming in, she hurriedly turned off the mobile phone screen directly, pulled off the headphones, and explained with some embarrassment that she was "not too sleepy."
Li Xinyi told her mother to rest early and withdrew. But after the birth of the child, Ren Xiujuan began to squeeze out her bedtime to play with her mobile phone. Once, Li Xinyi went out for a morning, bought back a large bag of baby products, opened the door to find her mother half lying on the sofa looking at the mobile phone, the rice cooker filled with rice, but forgot to press the switch. Ren Xiujuan also loves to make short videos, to buy diapers, accompany the baby to get vaccines, and make confinement meals for her daughter, which will be filmed and transmitted to the Internet. When her granddaughter was vaccinated, she did not catch the moment of the injection, and Ren Xiujuan regretted it for a long time. Because she stayed up late, Ren Xiujuan's eye bags became heavier and heavier.
What made Li Xinyi finally decide to "talk about it" was Ren Xiujuan's tenosynovitis and spondylosis. Two months ago, Ren Xiujuan would occasionally talk about her back pain, which was her old problem, and when she was young, she worked heavily on the farm and fell ill. Li Xinyi, as usual, bought her back the usual plaster. But Ren Xiujuan cried out in pain more and more frequently, and on one occasion, the muscles under the thumb of her right hand were so sore that they could hardly bend.
In the end, the hospital's diagnosis was "tenosynovitis and spinal pain," and in addition to applying an ointment, the treatment included "reducing the time spent using the phone." Li Xinyi herself roughly estimated that her mother could hold the mobile phone for 10 hours a day, and "the mobile phone is like growing in the hand."
Stills from "All Is Well"
In fact, Ren Xiujuan's situation is not special, according to the "2020 Elderly Internet Life Report" jointly released by a mobile content platform and The Paper, last year, more than 100,000 elderly people in China were online for more than 10 hours a day. According to a report released by the China Internet Information Center, by December 2020, the proportion of netizens over the age of 50 has increased from 16.9% to 26.3%, and the Internet has further penetrated into the middle-aged and elderly groups. Like Li Xinyi, in the eyes of many children, their parents have fallen into "Internet addiction".
In fact, the emergence of mobile phones in the lives of the elderly is not long, Ren Xiujuan's first smart phone is a domestic mobile phone eliminated by her son four years ago. Before that, Ren Xiujuan never thought that she could still play with "complex smart phones".
Ren Xiujuan was born in rural Anhui And is the fourth eldest of five siblings. Parents are busy begging for a living, there is no time to take care of their children's studies, not long after graduating from primary school, Ren Xiujuan dropped out of school and helped at home. Later, when there was a boom in part-time work in the village, she and the girls from the same village went to the factory in Ningbo, Wenzhou, to make textiles and shoes, or to the toy factory and electronics factory to do assembly.
Ren Xiujuan told me that at that time, even pagers were very rare, and everyone just went to the public telephone booth every other week to call home to report that they were safe. At that time, Ningbo's department stores, restaurants, cars, bicycles, and huge buses all made Ren Xiujuan excited. Most of the time she lived a two-point life in the factory and dormitory, but during the two days of a month's vacation, she always had to go around the city to see the new things, "I don't buy clothes, I will buy some pastries", and she still remembers the first time she went to the cake shop to buy snacks.
Later, she returned to the village, married her current husband, gave birth to a son and a daughter, and never left her hometown again. Li Xinyi remembers that when she was a child, her father worked in the town's factory for many years, and her mother occasionally went, but more like a temporary worker, after all, she had to stay at home to cook, wash clothes and take care of the crops. A few years of working in the city became Ren Xiujuan's talking point.
The first mobile phone that Ren Xiujuan owned was a clamshell domestic music mobile phone, which Li Xinyi used in high school in the county. After going to college, Li Xinyi changed to a more popular Apple phone and gave the old phone to her mother, in addition to making calls, Ren Xiujuan would use it to listen to music. At that time, running housework, doing farm work, and helping her son who lived in the village with children, Ren Xiujuan had little time to open her mobile phone.
It wasn't until her grandson also went to school that she was idle and began to learn to type seriously with the smartphone that her son had eliminated. When she received a WeChat friend request from her mother, Li Xinyi thought it was fraudulent information. She called her mother to verify, and on the phone, Ren Xiujuan sounded excited and told her, "Your brother gave me a big-screen mobile phone that can write with my fingers, and I heard that there is no money to call with WeChat." ”
Li Xinyi also feels happy, in the past, she often worried that her mother would not use mobile phones to pay, did not have a health code, and fell into embarrassment outside the bus or supermarket. Therefore, seeing that her mother "took the initiative to connect with the times", Li Xinyi further taught her mother to use her mobile phone to shop, send WeChat, and watch short videos, Ren Xiujuan did not understand online payment, so she transferred some money to her mother's WeChat. Slowly, she began to receive "help slash" links from her mother, as well as dynamic videos shared in her circle of friends.
Compared with Li Xinyi's help to connect with his mother, Zhao Zhao, 30, is more worried about his father being deceived. Zhao Zhao lives in a small southern town and lives with his parents. I don't know when it started, the 61-year-old father fell in love with playing with mobile phones, and at one or two o'clock in the middle of the night, he was still sharing articles on health or international situation analysis in the circle of friends. Zhao Zhao sometimes glanced at his father's WeChat interface, the first screen was all WeChat groups, just from the name of "Bamboo Forest Yayuan Gossip", it was impossible to see what the theme of the group chat was.
The old father also loves to play the game of fighting landlords, every day he put down his rice bowl, he nestled on the living room sofa, set up reading glasses to play games, and the sound effects of games such as "can't afford" and "super double" all day long at home. Most of the housework was already undertaken by his mother, and now Zhao Zhao's father has become a hand-throwing treasurer, walking, playing cards, playing chess, almost all the activities that need to go out have been abandoned, and he concentrates on playing games at home. Once, Zhao Zhao helped his mother to put all the meals and dishes on the table, stretched his head towards the living room three times, and his father held the mobile phone, walked down with his head down and sat down, holding chopsticks in one hand and cards in the other.
"At that time, I really wanted to grab my phone and throw it on the ground." Zhao Zhao was a little resentful when he spoke, but quickly laughed again, "Probably when I was in high school, I played computer games in my room, and my father thought the same thing." ”
If you just play landlords and read WeChat articles, the problem does not seem to be big. Zhao Zhao's biggest worry is that his father, who is keen on health care, will be deceived and buy back a bunch of ineffective or even harmful "health care products".
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His father was a retired cadre, who had gone to college, and his education level was not low among his peers, but he was stubborn and had a retirement salary. Zhao Zhao listened to his mother that his father would sometimes go out in weekday afternoons to "get together with a few friends", and sometimes he came back from the party and bought back some shoes and pillows. Zhao Zhao was afraid that his father had been properly marketed on health care products, and he was even more afraid that this "gathering" would have worse consequences - he also remembered that at the beginning of this year, a serious epidemic in the northeast originated from the health center that the elderly loved to go to.
Zhao Zhao persuaded his father more than once to play less mobile phones and go out more, but his father only needed one sentence to make him dumb, "Don't you always play mobile phones when you come home from work?" In the eyes of children, parents put a lot of time into mobile phones, which is "Internet addiction" and an urgent problem to be solved, and this tension is a superfluous worry in the eyes of parents.
Ren Xiujuan also couldn't understand why her daughter cared so much about playing with her mobile phone. She told me that she was willing to sit down with Li Xinyi and talk about the three chapters of the mobile phone, not that she felt that it was wrong to play with the mobile phone, but did not want to cause trouble for her daughter because of her body, "The child lives very hard in the big city, and it is too much trouble to take me to the doctor." ”
Ren Xiujuan is a lively person. She was almost sixty years old, and last year during the Spring Festival, she went to town to burn her long hair into small wavy rolls and dye them reddish-brown. She loves to watch short videos, there is no complicated operation, a finger swiped upwards, it is a new video. Talking about the impressionable videos she had watched recently, Ren Xiujuan was very excited, and shared with me several "very fun" content that she saw, such as "a bridge in the sky, shaking, people hanging on the rope to walk over" in Chongqing, or how she just learned how to use the method of heating milk to restore the cracked plate to its original state.
Li Xinyi did not pay attention to her mother's account, and only when Ren Xiujuan forwarded it to the circle of friends, she would click in to see. The videos Ren Xiujuan shared were varied, all roughly done, and the number of likes and comments was not much, but this did not affect her enthusiasm. When she lived in the village, Ren Xiujuan posted mostly about life in the village — square dances in the village, newly built public toilets, rice in the fields. One of the most liked ones is the scene where a centenarian in the village entertains the villagers at a banquet when he is doing his birthday. At the bottom of the video, most of them are short comments such as "really lively" and "I want to eat", with a series of roses and thumb expressions.
After coming to Hangzhou, the videos she posted looked a bit cluttered, with no special themes, sometimes vegetable shelves in supermarkets, sometimes teams for nucleic acid testing, sometimes cars waiting to pick up children in front of school at school in the afternoon, and someone in the comments would ask her, "What is this doing?" Ren Xiujuan replied one by one.
Ren Xiujuan told me that most of the people who commented were old sisters from the same village, some of whom were still in the village, and some of whom were scattered in various cities to bring children to their children. Their cultural level is not high, they are not used to typing, and the most common way to communicate is to send WeChat voice and comment on each other under short videos. I asked her, why did she shoot a video of grocery shopping in the supermarket? Ren Xiujuan said, "In the countryside, vegetables are sold on the ground, and many people have never seen such a neat one and feel fresh." ”
These repetitive, simple and boring videos that seem to young people are very different from the previous rural life, opening the door to a new world for Ren Xiujuan, making this peasant woman who has lived in the countryside for many years feel novel and excited, and filling in a lot of blank time in the city.
"Old Age Hangzhou Drift" really broke the familiar life trajectory of Ren Xiujuan. In the village, she was busy tending the loofah shed in front of her house, feeding a few hens, going to the town with her husband to catch a market, or visiting her son's house. There was really no place to go, so I sat down at the door of the ancestral hall, and soon there would be women I knew who would gather to chat. On the short video platform, she can often brush up on the videos of the same villagers, which is another talking point when visiting the door.
A year after coming to Hangzhou, she is still "out of place" with this big city. Every day cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, a lot of free time, Ren Xiujuan tried to sit in the small garden in the past community, where there are many elderly people playing chess and chatting, but her Mandarin with a strong hometown accent, can not understand some of the elderly Hangzhou dialect, communication is difficult, and "pension and children go to school, I don't have to talk."
She also followed her daughter and son-in-law to the West Lake and Leifeng Pagoda once or twice, "crowded, hot weather, to go a long way." Even the three square dance teams in the park near the community have uniform costumes, and Ren Xiujuan wears her own clothes and is embarrassed to dance behind. She told me that when the child was older and could attend the care class, she would "go back to the village and live a comfortable life."
Every time a short video receives likes, comments, or fans, it is ren Xiujuan's most excited time. Unless it is holding her granddaughter, she will pull out her hand to reply at the first time. It seems that the short videos and interactions on the social platform have made this "Hang drift" peasant woman gain rare recognition and praise in big cities.
Li Xinyi interjected at the side, reminding her mother, "I didn't say that I wouldn't let you play with your mobile phone, but you can't just play with your mobile phone every day." Ren Xiujuan withdrew from our conversation and argued with her daughter, some angry, but also a little aggrieved, "Can't you play with your mobile phone after every day?" I'm old and can't go out and play like a young person, so what can I do? ”
(In the text, Ren Xiujuan, Li Xinyi, and Zhao Zhao are pseudonyms.) ）