Testimony…
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The house is not the most important thing, love is! Xiao Wangong
My husband and I both got to the top 2 from the Hubei fifth-tier small county, he was Peking University Physics, and I was Tsinghua Architecture.
I am currently in charge of high-end residential properties at a top developer in Beijing; He is a high school teacher and a physics leader in Beijing’s top high schools. We have been in Beijing for nine years since we graduated from undergraduate school, during which we have moved six times, and the latest seventh time is packing up and preparing to move back to Wuhan. Recently, I saw that my circle of friends was flooded by many articles by Tsinghua graduates who could not afford to buy school district houses and fled back to the second line, and the articles were full of questions, regrets, and dissatisfaction. I especially want to record our stories over the years, the same story about houses but with very different painting styles.
We moved six times in nine years, but every time we moved, we were happy.
After graduating in ’08, I moved from the Tsinghua Bauhinia Apartment to a new staff dormitory in Shunyi. The company is in Chaoyang District, far from the dormitory, 1 and a half hours by car. But I just graduated with a meager salary, I can’t afford to rent a nearby house, and I’m really grateful that the company provides dormitories. Less than 400 per month, small studio facing north. I spent almost all of my time at work, and moving from a four-person room at school to a small room for myself, I felt that my living space per capita had increased significantly. The deepest impression during this period was that my parents brought their mother to Beijing once, it was summer, my father insisted on not staying in a hotel, our family was bunk in my small single room, the two grandmothers slept on the bed, and my parents and I slept on the floor.
My parents were actually a little distressed when they saw my situation at that time, after all, the only daughter, although her family was working in a fifth-tier small city, also lived in a big house, and she felt that after reading so many books, the quality of life in Beijing was so low. I comforted them and said that I like my work in Beijing, my colleagues are excellent, the leadership is also very good, and I am alone, I can’t sleep in two beds, and the small single room is just right. In this small studio in Shunyi, I finished my first suburban small market, when Beijing house prices were just starting to take off, and 400 houses were sold out in a day.
The second move was a year later when I married my boyfriend, who was still studying for a master’s degree at Peking University at the time, and for his convenience, we moved to Wanliu and rented a small apartment. The landlord is an old Beijing couple, I heard that we rented a wedding room, specially painted the walls, green doors, and windows, and terrazzo floor clean. Posted with happy words, we held a grand and simple church wedding under the witness of relatives and friends, and we were happily naked. It was really a naked marriage, and I remember using that quarter’s bonus to pay for the rent and wedding, and I only had two thousand dollars on hand. But especially happy, the two of us met at the age of twelve, six years in the same class in middle school, six years in college love, and finally able to marry the person I love the most, it is really a feeling of drinking water. Wanliu is very close to our university, newlywed Yaner, too lazy to fire to ride to school to eat, weekend walks next to the unnamed lake, go to purple exercise to play football, although the living is simple, the memories are sweet. At that time, I passed by Wanquan New Home every day at work, and I also thought sourly whether I could live in such a good community one day, I remember that the unit price of Wanquan was 20,000 at that time, but it was already astronomical for us at that time. So for the house, just think about it, have clothing, food and love people to live together, it is very content. In the year I lived in Wanliu, Beijing’s land market was still very active, and in addition to being in charge of a suburban market, I did more than 30 land acquisition projects, worked overtime day and night, and finally obtained the first piece of land I handled through bidding.
The third time I moved was two years after marriage, I was pregnant and he was about to graduate, and considering that Wan Liu was too far from where I worked, and I didn’t have enough children to live in, we rented a two-bedroom near the company in Chaoyang District. During this period, I found that the children of the collective account of the unit could not settle down, so I put the purchase of a house on the agenda. In 2010, house prices had skyrocketed, and we quickly picked out the only small two-bedroom outside the fifth ring road that we could buy among all the real estate in the company at that time (especially the project I bid for earlier:). The down payment was 300,000 yuan, and the parents of both sides supported part of it, after paying the down payment and various handling fees, there was no money in the card, and they were a little worried that the next month’s salary would be enough for the cost of the birth and birth examination. We welcomed our first baby in the rented Unity Lake 2-bedroom house. My aunt came to help me watch the children, and when her daughter graduated from college, I invited my cousin to come to Beijing to find a job and live in our house. During this time, my good friend was evicted by the landlord and could not find a house for a while, so I asked her to live in our house first. So this small two-bedroom of 50 square meters in Unity Lake has lived with 6 people at most – it is so crowded that my mother said that it is not a good time for me to have children at this time, and I should wait until the house is ready. But every day when I ride home from work and see a cute baby, I feel very happy, as long as it is a child born of love, in fact, it does not matter what kind of house, it does not matter what good timing. In this six-person room in Unity Lake, I completed our first large-scale commercial complex project of 200,000 square meters, and because the company never found the right person to take over, I worked until the day before the birth of my child.
The child was weaned at the age of more than one year, and we finally moved to our own small house outside the Fifth Ring Road, from renting old and dilapidated to our own home far and new, seeing the neat and clean bathroom and kitchen, living happiness burst, children and the elderly are also very happy. At this time, my husband has graduated from graduate school, in fact, when I graduated from the physics department, I still have many choices, you can search for companies, large enterprises, and high school teachers – many offers in high school teachers are the lowest income. He asked me what I expected, and I said let’s see what you want to do the most. He said he still wanted to be a teacher, maybe he could earn more by doing something else, but he always felt that doing education was the most rewarding job. I said Okay, anyway, I’m busy with work so you can watch the child in the future haha, so he really became a high school physics teacher. When we moved to the south, he was originally in contact to transfer to the middle school at the doorstep, but it was the first batch of students he brought with him, and there was no college entrance examination yet, so he thought of sending them away and transferring them again and began the painful commute from the southwest fifth ring road to the northeast fifth ring road, and there was no way but to live in school in the middle of the week and go home on the weekend. I was in charge of Beijing’s first subway superstructure project, building commercial complexes, ordinary houses, and public rental housing on top of the subway depot, with all kinds of regulatory restrictions, and it was particularly difficult to do and often not be at home. After half a year, although we lived well, we all found it unbearable, and my children and I could only see my father once or twice a week – if the family can’t live together, what’s the point of a good house?
In order for him to be able to finish his senior year with peace of mind, we moved for the fifth time. They settled in the dormitory provided by their school in the East Fifth Ring Road, where all the furniture was a bed, a wardrobe, and a chair. My daughter is very opinionated, she likes our own house, but I told her that although living here is very small, you can see Dad every day. She thought about it and said: Well, the house is not important, or the family is the most important! So in this small house of less than 30 square meters, our family lived for ten months, and every day the father had time to accompany the child, although the things in the family were so small that the children could count it, so what – in fact, the things necessary for people’s lives are very few, and the space required is not much. In this small house, I completed the only project since I became a real estate designer – a large pension apartment; What’s more, in this little house, we have a second child of our own.
Before Erbao was born, the sixth move in the sixth year after graduation, we finally really moved back to our small home outside the South Fifth Ring Road, and my husband also began to work happily at the school at the doorstep. Our house is indeed very comfortable to live in, subway room, big shopping mall, big park, from kindergarten to middle school OEM full education. To be honest, looking at the scheme I saw in the model and PPT before, now it has become a real building, a living community, and living in it with my own family, is particularly wonderful and fulfilling, which may only be experienced by people who do architecture. Sometimes I think of living in this two-bedroom apartment with the lowest decoration standard of our company, in charge of the most high-end hardcover villa project in the Beijing market, and often laughing at myself as a “sericulture farmer”.
The aunt continued to help bring the second eldest child, and the husband was responsible for picking up the eldest who was attending the kindergarten next to him. The years are quiet, the world is stable, and our income is gradually getting richer. Thinking that his parents were about to retire and his children needed a private room when they were older, he sold the small house he had last year as a down payment and took out a loan to buy a four-bedroom apartment. We were planning to move for the seventh time to live in a big house with our parents, but we decided to return to Wuhan unexpectedly.
When saying goodbye to friends, they don’t understand that they have a house, a car, a household registration, and a career, and feel that we are the type of people who are the least likely to “escape”. But in fact, my husband has always wanted to go back, and when he returns to Wuhan, he can also go to the top middle school in China, and the children can be better-taken care of close to their parents. It just so happened that our company had an opportunity to transfer internally to Wuhan, I participated in the competition and found that the changes in Wuhan in recent years were very obvious, under the pattern of first-tier population restrictions, second-tier cities rose strongly, and Wuhan also had career space that was not inferior to Beijing. But it’s really tangled, after 14 years in Beijing, we all regard this place as our second home. After discussing with her husband for a long time, as far as the family is concerned, parents and children who go to Wuhan can have better care, improve overall happiness, and the quality of basic education in Wuhan is also good; As far as personal career development is concerned, the two of us have developed very well in Beijing or Wuhan. In the end, what prompted us to make up our minds was that the two of us felt that going to Wuhan compared to staying in Beijing, although there was a lot of uncertainty, definitely had a greater industry influence and could serve more people who needed better buildings and better education.
The only bad thing is that Wuhan is also limited in purchases, and it is estimated that I will continue to rent a house and continue to move when I go back. But now I feel that this is really the least important. I remember when my husband was working overtime to do physics experiments, in order to urge him to go home, I sent him a WeChat message: Feynman (winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics) said: “I want to thank my wife. In my heart, physics is not the most important, love is!” Later, I went to the real estate company, and I had to toss and buy various houses all day long, and he would ridicule me: “Wife, in my heart, the house is not the most important, love is!” I’m ashamed to say that many people think that house prices are rising, People in the real estate industry are at least beneficiaries, in fact, no, families without accumulation are difficult for anyone, From 08-17 years, we also missed countless opportunities to get on the car, and in the real estate company, obviously look at the lot of real estate they have done know that they will rise if they buy, but there is no money that feeling is so entangled! But so what, I really understand – the house is not the most important thing, love is!
In fact, we have been in Beijing for 14 years, and we really don’t live in any so-called good houses, The only houses that we may have lived in belonging to the so-called upper class are the dormitories of Tsinghua and Peking University. However, in the 9 years of my work, I have personally designed and built tens of thousands of sets of public rental housing, commercial housing, high-end villas, senior apartments, commercial complexes, and kindergartens, affecting and improving the lives of thousands of Beijingers. While these projects may not be perfect, I am truly in awe and do everything I can to take seriously the city I build and the people who live in it and do everything they can to buy homes.
Looking at a lot of recent discussions, it seems that everyone’s character setting for TOP2 is that TOP2 is branded by the upper class after graduation, and it is natural that they should stay on the front line to live in a big house, and their children go to a good school district, otherwise, there is a problem in society and no respect for knowledge. But I don’t think it’s like this, “Tianxingjian, a gentleman with self-improvement; The terrain is kun, the gentleman carries things with great virtue” – our education has never promised us a TOP-level material life, but more so that no matter what kind of environment we are in, we will not lose our morality and will not lose our will. Just like the sage Mencius said, “Wealth cannot be adulterous, poverty cannot be moved, and might cannot be yielded”; As Paul said in the New Testament, “I know how to be lowly and how to be rich, or full, or hungry, or surplus, or lack, and I have the secret whenever I want.” I can do everything by the one who strengthens me
My husband and I particularly liked the motto of Yenching University, the predecessor of Peking University, “Freedom for Service through Truth.” We firmly believe that our education is not just to stay in Beijing to obtain hukou, or for our own better material enjoyment, let alone just for future generations to keep the so-called TOP2 class, but because we have a firm will, since we know the truth through education, we can be free, do not follow the trend of the world, but strive to serve and influence more people, so that more people can live a better life.
As for our children, if they can always grow up in the love of their parents, then what about him in Beijing or Wuhan, or in the scum, or in the cattle, or in a mansion, or in a poor alley? He is always in a higher class than the so-called home-owning class, and he never has to worry about slipping down!
