The weather is cold, the number of nine cold days, the year is coming, you are in a foreign country as a stranger, are you okay?
Do you remember when you were 18 years old, when you stepped out of the house, carrying an oversized camouflage bag, carrying a red and white donkey brand woven bag, carrying a big red bucket, majestic, and angrily squeezing onto the green-skinned train heading north to Guangzhou. While eating the instant noodles with ham sausages in luxury, he silently swore that the laborers must mix with people and come back like dogs. Then at the train station in a foreign country, he watched the traffic coming and going.
Luckily, after countless blank eyes, reprimands, and even cheating money, you finally entered the hardware factory, leather shoe factory, toy factory... Since then, he has become a member of the human flesh machine.
Bad luck, after buying two steamed buns for the last dollar, I could only sleep under the roadside, flower beds, and overpass piers near Liuhua Road where I could sleep... Then wait for the day when the joint defense team will invite you to the shelter because you don't have a temporary residence permit.
Whether it's good luck or bad luck. It won't be long before you discover how ridiculous your spirit and longing and vows are at the moment of your departure; you've already discovered that the bucket of ham sausage noodles you ate on the green-skinned train was something you would hardly enjoy any longer in the short term. So you put down your ideals and even dignity, and endured the rant and insults of the indigenous supervisor, the manager, the woman who is said to be the lady of the boss, on the factory assembly line, in the private shop, in the huge urban village, in everything that could be earned, and finally got a few bills that you think are a lot after a month or a few months.
In this way, you start the cycle, still carrying a plastic bucket woven bag, of course, may add a hot fast, from this factory to that factory, from this urban village to that urban village, occasionally in the interlude of cheating on the fellow and being deceived by the fellow.
Maybe in the middle of the night, no one is on the street, yelling "We are all trying to live" in your metallic voice, and then going back to the rental house or factory dormitory, secretly crying, because I miss home, thinking about the home that I can't go back to because I can't afford a ticket. Bullshit gets ahead, bullshit returns home, shit glue leather screws. After crying, I found a torn sock that I had changed half a month ago to dry my tears, covered my head and waited for tomorrow's dawn to start another day of robot life.
After three years, five years, ten years or more, you have become an official like a squad leader, a line leader, and a group leader, and you can finally return to your hometown with your head held high, and say in front of the village chief, you want to make money from me, a word!
Perhaps, you will become one of the three great gods.
Perhaps, you disappeared and no one ever saw you again.
One day, when you finally buy a house and settle in another country, you will sigh that people are strangers in other places, or you have taken other places as your hometown.
The year is approaching, are you from other places okay?