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Lying in the hot streets of summer, rummaging through neon-lit bins for food, sick and unable to go to the hospital without identity documents. Wanderers roam every corner of Shanghai, wandering through the cracks of this thriving city.
Outside a neighborhood near the north square of the Shanghai Railway Station, a 50-year-old uncle is curled up and sleeping on a cushion. In the summer heat, he wears a duck-tongue hat, a jacket, and a pair of pink lady flip-flops on his feet. A dirty blue trolley box stood next to the fence of the neighborhood, and several water glasses were placed on the stone steps of the fence.
This is a "street friend", which is what most people call a tramp. He fell asleep peacefully, his clenched right hand resting on the chin of his chin as if in a self-defensive motion. Traffic runs through the wide road, not far away is the bustling and imposing railway station, and the sharp knives on the fence of the community show strict access control. His living space was compressed on the side of this road.
Picture | Old Zheng lying asleep on the side of the road
As a member of the Shanghai "New Life for the Wanderers" non-profit organization, I have seen too many similar scenes. Instinct drove me to stop and crouch down to wake him up softly. He was not in big trouble, but he was still hungry, and there was a bun shop next to him, so I got up and went to buy him a few buns.
While waiting, a middle-aged man next to me asked, "Are you going to buy a bun for the person who is sleeping?" I replied yes. The middle-aged man was a little emotional: "Don't buy it for him, why don't you go to work if you have hands and feet?" Being a security guard can also support himself, don't you encourage him to get something for nothing? ”
I didn't want to talk to him more, and I was afraid that the wanderers would hear him, so I gave him a thumbs up and said, "You're right." Maybe he didn't expect me to answer like this, and the iron fist hit the cotton. He muttered in his mouth, this is a caretaker, and turned to leave. The wanderer took my bun and soy milk and saw that I was really helping him before letting down his guard. We chatted.
His surname is Zheng, 52 years old, his hometown is in the countryside of Xinyang County, Henan, and he has been wandering in Shanghai for many years. When he was young, he did not save any money from part-time work, and he had committed crimes and been dealt with. Now he has varicose veins in one leg, not to mention work, walking hurts. A few years ago, Old Zheng went back to his hometown once, his parents have died, Old Zheng is bare, and no relatives are willing to take care of him. Village cadres once said that they could build him a house and apply for a minimum guarantee.
I asked him, "That's fine, why don't you stay in the village?" Old Zheng glanced at me obliquely: "What is the use of building a house?" How can I live alone? His minimum guarantee is more than 300 a month, not enough to eat, and the nursing home can only enter at the age of 60. He plans to go back at the age of 60.
Picture | Old Zheng sitting on the side of the road preparing to eat
Unlike beggars in the city, homeless people are often accustomed to sitting on the side of the road, and most do not actively disturb pedestrians. But in the eyes of many people, these wanderers are lazy if they don't work. This is not the case. In the seven years since I joined the Shanghai "Homeless New Life" public welfare organization, there may be homeless people who do not work purely because of laziness, but I rarely encounter, most of the homeless people choose to wander, and they have their own unavoidable grievances.
Old Zheng tried to find a job, but even as a security guard, the threshold was not low for him. Security recruitment requirements are generally 18-45 years old, height of 1.70 meters or more, junior high school education or above, good facial features, no criminal record. Work content: According to the relevant requirements, the vehicles entering the service enterprise and the visiting personnel and visitors are inspected, registered and guided, and the posts are erected, patrolled, treated with civility and courtesy, and saluted the vehicles entering and leaving.
This is a common security job advertisement on the Internet, and the conditions are already very relaxed. But lao Zheng hardly matched, he was 52 years old, 167cm tall, had not attended junior high school, and had a criminal record. And those positions with low requirements in the community and parking lot will first solve the needs of the local unemployed. Lao Zheng, a wanderer with no technology and only physical strength, most of them cannot do long-term work, can only do daily work, and often encounter unscrupulous intermediaries to deduct wages.
So their normal routine is to wander the streets, living a starved life, rummaging through neon-lit garbage cans, sheltering on the street, under the overpass, KFC stores, and 24-hour self-service banks. Like a leaf drifting in the wind, it is scattered through the crevices of this bustling metropolis.
I was born in 1978, I started a small company in Shanghai, I have a wife and children, and my life is still quite passable. In 2014, I joined the "Homeless New Life" non-profit organization, and in my spare time, I began to contact the homeless, and worked with team members to give them food, send clothes, and provide some assistance.
The reason why many homeless people choose to live in a metropolis like Shanghai is on the one hand because the quality of people in first-tier cities is high, and they are not likely to hurt them, and well-meaning people will buy them food. On the other hand, the standard of living here is relatively high, there is a wealth of food in the garbage can, and even money, clothes and shoes can be picked up. Obviously they live better here than in smaller cities, but as members of the city, they are clearly the lowest group of people.
Almost all metropolises have two sides, A and B, on the one hand, representing the highest point of urban civilization, and on the other hand, the wound hidden under urban civilization. Las Vegas, the largest city in the U.S. state of Nevada, is beneath the extravagant and spectacular casino, 500 miles of underground tunnels and crowded with all sorts of homeless people. This is the paradox of modern urban civilization.
There is a more important reason why vagrants cannot find work, and there is no ID card. As a result, they are turned a blind eye on the road, becoming an invisible, transparent person, and equally invisible in the household register.
Zhang Zhiwang, a deaf wanderer, was about 53 years old and wandered to Shanghai in 2000. He was born deaf and mute, could speak simple sign language, and could write a few words. He lives by picking up bottles and collecting cardboard boxes, and everyone laughs when he sees him, and the street friends like him. He had dagger and snake tattoos on his arms, and had something like psoriasis on his legs, which were very hard piece by piece, and his legs were a little lame when walking.
Pictured| Zhang Zhiwang
On this day, he tried to ask us for help, but he had not learned formal sign language, only simple comparison, more complicated, sign language volunteers also have to guess with a mask, can understand 50%. We took him to the emergency room of a hospital to register, and when the nurse asked him if he wanted an ID, he shook his head and said no. Because he has not had an ID card since he was a child, he does not know where his home is.
Finally he lay down at the front desk of the hospital and wrote his name crookedly. This is the only proof that distinguishes him from a tree, a brick, and a street lamp in the city.
Fortunately, the hospital was accommodating, and the volunteer took him to do several examinations in the dermatology department of the hospital, spending hundreds of dollars. Soon the skin of his calves was visibly better, and when he saw us, he would bend down and roll up his trouser legs to show us, smiling and giving a thumbs up.
There are five wanderers like Zhang Zhiwang, a deaf man, and we know of them. In the cognition of many people, people should have a household registration and an identity card. In fact, according to the results of the sixth national census in 2010, there are about 13 million people without household registration. 10 years later, the seventh census of the country's total population of 1.41 billion, if calculated according to the previous 1% ratio, conservative estimates are about 10 million unregistered people, including various reasons for the unregistered, uninformed homeless people.
Picture | left one nameless, left two Hao Zhenhua, left three Zhang Zhiwang
There are many reasons for not having an ID card. The wanderer Wu Zhenggui was brought up by his adoptive father and adoptive mother from childhood, because when he was young, he wanted to move out of the hukou and fall into the same school, but he did not succeed and could not move back, so he became a black household.
He tried to go to the police station to obtain a replacement identity card, and the materials that the police station needed him to provide were the household registration book, the driver's license of the motor vehicle, the passport and other valid identity documents issued by the public security organs. But he couldn't come up with anything.
After the death of his adoptive father and adoptive mother, Wu Zhenggui, who was about twenty years old, left his hometown and wandered around. In the nearly 40 years of displacement, he was deported to the shelter twice, and countless times interrogated by the police, and no identity information was found. Unable to take a car, unable to stay in a hotel, without a bank card or any documents, he became an invisible person in the city of modern society who is blocked out by existing regulations.
Now he is a devout Christian, and he also does some volunteer work, and well-wishers provide him with a temporary place to live. Life is not as messy as before, but the only thing he can't forget is the hukou issue. The police checked him many times, and every time he left disappointedly, his mouth chanting: "Eh, how is it so strange?" ”
Sometimes he repeated the phrase all the way, and the questioning was swept away by the traffic on the road.
Strictly speaking, wanderers are not beggars, and some wanderers have no obvious features, mixed in the crowd, neatly dressed, and difficult to identify. This is their deliberate "invisibility", disguised as decency to avoid attention. Like a drop of water dissolved in a river, a trace of wind wrapped in a gust of wind. Drowning yourself in the constant flow of people seems to be able to enjoy the same dignity as they do.
And once they have a disability, they have to desperately make a living by dramatic begging.
The blind Fang Chengtao is active in the subway station all year round, sitting quietly on the edge of the passage, holding a red and white blind cane in his arms, and there are empty bowls on the ground, sometimes noodle buckets that have been eaten, and sometimes plastic lunch boxes that have been eaten. Next to it was a large bag of luggage in woven bags, as well as wooden sticks to pick up the luggage, and next to the luggage was a piece of cardboard that read, "I can't see with my eyes."
He wore a hat and kept his head down, and on the hat was someone who drew a pair of beautiful blue eyes with a colored pen, as if he was looking ahead. When people come to the subway station and passengers throw a coin into the bowl, Fang Chengtao will look up and say" Thank you! ”。
Picture | the blind Man Fang Chengtao
Fang Chengtao, 58 years old, from his hometown of Bengbu, Anhui Province, did small business in Shanghai in his early years. One day while walking on the road, he was hit by a factory car and was rescued and killed. Unexpectedly, half a year after he was discharged from the hospital, he suddenly lost sight in his eyes. After unsuccessfully seeking compensation from the factory, he has been on the road to petitioning, and in order to maintain the cost of petitioning, he has become a wandering professional beggar.
Over the years, he could not see the development and change of the city, but could only feel the rushing footsteps in the subway, the sound of the wind, the sound of the subway entering and leaving the station, as if it had never changed. In the morning and evening rush hours, when countless footsteps came to him like a thousand horses galloping, he often felt that many eyes were focused on him.
The trepidation lasted only a few seconds, and his survival instinct made him calm about everything around him. I thought, maybe no one was watching him.
The aid station is a shelter for the homeless in the city, but generally only temporary assistance can be provided, such as no money to buy a ticket home, you can stay at the aid station for one or two nights, and the aid station helps to buy tickets. In more complicated cases, they need to think about it. In addition, many homeless people are reluctant to enter the aid station because they have to hand in their mobile phones and all their belongings, are not allowed to smoke and drink, and cannot leave the room. In contrast, they prefer to live a free and wandering life.
For many homeless people, the most critical question is where to go when they are old and infirm. An Weidong is one of them.
Anweidong is a wanderer I have known for seven years. He had been wandering around the train station, picking up bottles and cartons during the day to sell money, and sleeping under the overpass at night. Wei Dong grew a white beard, a big belly, and a missing index finger in his left hand, and sat on the matza in the shade to sleep.
Pictured| An Weidong and Zhang Zhiwang
Once I asked him, "Wei Dong, how old are you?" He held out his right hand with his index finger and compared it to an eight: "Eighty more." But his body was very tough, not at all like eighty-plus. Based on his attribution and experience, we speculate that he was born in 1947 and is 75 years old this year.
Wei Dong is a kind, honest, and kind person, and he feels that he is in good health and does not want to be trapped in the rescue station. We hope to help him and solve the problem of pension placement. But he said: "Without your help, you will die on the street when you are old, wait for 120 to pull away." Like other elderly wanderers. His identity information could not be found, we had taken him to the police station to check, but found nothing.
After a long seven years together, we pieced together the life of An Weidong.
An Weidong's hometown of Bengbu, Anhui, when he was a child, his father remarried after his mother's death, living with his half-siblings, often not enough to go to the vegetable market to pick up vegetable leaves and cinders. During the Cultural Revolution, he was a radical who claimed to have been to Beijing and was received by Chairman Mao. After the End of the Cultural Revolution, he spent 10 years in prison at Baihu Farm in Anhui Province, after which his father and stepmother died. He went to the countryside of Hebei and planted fruit trees for decades.
Later, he returned to his hometown in Anhui, but no one wanted to see him, so he ran to Shanghai to wander. Many things are because of the age, Wei Dong's memory has been blurred. He has never married, cannot prove his identity, and has no hope of returning home to retire. If you want to help him restore his household registration, he will have to look for clues from nearly 40 years ago.
We contacted all the units that could be contacted, and finally had some eyebrows, hoping that he would have the day when the leaves fell back to their roots.
Before the original Measures for the Custody and Repatriation of Urban Vagrant Beggars were abolished in 2003, many homeless people and ordinary citizens who had not issued temporary residence permits would be forcibly arrested into shelters and repatriation stations or fined. After the implementation of the new regulations, the service attitude of aid stations in various places is different, and some homeless people have been discriminated against or even insulted. This all left bad memories for the wanderers.
However, in recent years, the staff of the aid station we have contacted have a very good attitude and a strong sense of service, and have also solved the problems of medical treatment and pension placement for some sick homeless people. Many homeless people do not understand the situation and still look at the aid station with old eyes. Building a bridge of trust between the homeless and the aid station is one of our jobs.
Shanghai's homeless people are not all homeless outsiders. Wandering is like a kind of fate, hit by the dice cast by God, but for different reasons.
Shen Wei, a wanderer who became popular on the Internet a few years ago, is a native of Shanghai, who was once a civil servant who broke off relations with his family for various reasons and wandered for more than 20 years. He often sheltered near the Yanggao South Road subway station in Shanghai, liked to pick up garbage, paint and read books such as history, and he was called a "master" because of his amazing speech.
Zhang Shaohua, like Shen Wei, is a local wanderer in Shanghai, and his life is more complicated, and his long wandering life has not made him a "master".
When he was young, he worked as a zhiqing in Xinjiang, and his hukou moved with him. When He returned to the city in 1980, he wanted to move his hukou back to Shanghai, but his parents had died a few years earlier. Not only did he not receive any real estate, but his brother and sister-in-law did not agree to his settlement, so he was forced to wander around. After the completion of the Shanghai Railway Station, the waiting room became his long-term fixed residence.
Now 82 years old, he never picks up garbage, and he braces himself to do some work in line and earn some change. He often said, "Allah is Shanghai Ning and should not be with them." But his hands were shaking more and more, and no one dared to use him later.
Pictured| Zhang Shaohua, a local wanderer in Shanghai
Even so, the old man still maintained the last stubbornness, as long as the weather permitted, either wearing a shirt or a suit. When receiving meals, he was always at the front of the line, defending the status of the elder of the railway station. But a few years ago to collect food, he only had to walk for ten minutes, and now he is carrying a stick and carrying luggage, and it takes half an hour to move in.
He was too old, and in the nearly half century of wandering, he watched his hometown Shanghai become more and more prosperous, and the tall buildings rose from the ground to become a veritable international metropolis. And all this has nothing to do with him, the hometown is clearly under his feet, no matter how he wanders, he can't reach it.
His old body could no longer withstand the life of wind and food.
At our persuasion, he finally agreed to accept help. For so many years, he has not had an ID card, we took him to the police station again and again to inquire, but there was no result, and later with the help of the city aid station, we found his identity information. His pension placement problem was finally solved.
There is also good news that Wu Zhenggui's household registration will also be resolved recently. After the efforts of the Luoyang police station in Henan Province, he found the household registration file that he had moved into that year, and contacted his sister-in-law. Police said they might help him re-register.
After Wu Zhenggui, who is nearly 60 years old, learned the news, he was very happy, and he also wanted to go back to his hometown to see. When he was young, he liked to wander around alone, but he didn't expect to be trapped in a different place for so long because he had no identity. He also had an unfulfilled wish to take a train to Tibet.
*The information about the characters involved in the article is blurred, cover photo: Wei Wei
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Written by | Jin Jian
Edit | Wu Xun