One day, Li Baolong's riders called him.

"Boss, I'll take some time off. "

"what are you doing? "

"I went to pay a deposit on the house in the morning and bought the opposite door with my uncle. It was more than 70 flat on the sixth floor. "

How much is it (a set)? "

"28000. "

Baolong Li is the agent of ele.me in Hegang City, Heilongjiang Province. What is the concept of 28,000 suites?

Local riders can buy it if they run diligently for three months.

Not long ago, a crew member of Zhoushan wandered to Hegang, bought an apartment for 50,000 and settled in the northeast. A romantic incident made headlines in Hegang, a small town on the northeast border next to Russia.

In Hegang, small advertisements for selling houses are flying everywhere, and the prices are lower than the other: "65 ping 65000", "55 ping 38000" and "48 ping 16000".

But Hegang has more than a few hundred yuan per square meter of house. Here, there used to be 2.6 billion tons of coal and claimed to be 100000 miners. When resources were depleted and workers returned from the mine to the ground, fate was reversed again.

This is the story of a group of people and a city.

"who hasn't run solo in winter to tears?"

The December of Hegang is approaching 20 degrees below zero, "splashing water into ice." Popsicles and frozen seafood were sold outside, and the faces of the vendors were black and red, the same color as the frozen pears on the stalls.

The coldest three months in the northeast are the golden period for takeout in the second half of the year. The more windy and snowy it is, the more the unit volume rises. When Hegang people are in a well-heated house called "cat winter", takeout riders have become a rare sight in lonely streets.

In the severe cold, the riders groped out a set of "extreme survival" equipment.

Wearing a "face Gini" under the helmet, showing only two eyes and one mouth, under the "bulky" body, there are layers of down jackets, sweaters, sweaters, leather pants, and two pairs of socks wrapped in big feet into fur boots. The rider after "fully armed" is like an iron tower.

A "heavily armed" rider

I didn't have such good equipment at first. In the weather of dozens of degrees below zero, the mobile phone has become an "ice brick", unable to turn on the phone and cannot be recharged. the rider got anxious, grabbed the phone and stuffed it into his clothes and slowly "returned blood" close to his chest. now, each of them has a "mobile phone to warm the baby". Taobao dozens of yuan each, charging, heating both.

"two riders must be turned upside down in a snowfall, that's right. "Li Baolong, the agent of ele.me and Hegang, said.

It is even more difficult after the snow. the snow on the road is compacted by traffic and becomes a "skating rink". Walking is like skating, and it is useless for takeout cars to be replaced with snow anti-pulleys.

Snow and ice is not the biggest challenge, long and short slopes lurking in the streets of Hegang, the car slid down, can not be pushed up. The riders had to park their cars in front of the slope and run hundreds of meters to deliver food.

It has to be hard.

Last winter, when the snow on the road was knee-deep, Li Baolong drove his own car and dragged the rider for two days.

Later, he found another taxi, 300 yuan a day, plus gas. After a day's work, the taxi drivers went on strike: the money is too difficult for me to earn.

The rider said, who has not run alone in winter to tears. Sometimes he broke down and cried because of the explosion and reminder of the order, and sometimes it was just because the cold wind blew and his eyes could not help but shed tears.

But the wages of riders in winter are also high, including subsidies and incentives, riders who do well can earn more than 10,000 a month. Li Baolong said that other cities in the northeast, where there are not so many slopes, do not earn as much as Hegang.

When Li Baolong took over Hegang ele.me in 2017, there were only a dozen riders in the city and there were not many orders a day. Just two years later, the average daily order increased more than ten times, with nearly 100 active riders.

No one believed the story about the rider's salary.

At least 10% of the riders of ele.me in Hegang are coal miners. In the past 20 years, "going to the mine" was the first choice for Hegang men in their careers. Because they earned more, they "could get married."

Now, the rider has become a "well-paid profession" in Hegang.

Li Baolong sometimes goes with his employees to post job advertisements for riders, with a monthly salary of 5000 to 12000 yuan.

Locals think it's a "big hoax"-Hegang waiters earn just over NT $2000 a month, while taxi drivers earn NT $3,000 or NT $4,000. the salary of a takeout rider starts at NT $5000.

After learning the truth, a young couple who opened a barbecue shop had an "infighting". The wife encouraged her husband: what are you doing barbecue, to be a rider?

Although the salary is high, Sister Shen, the shop owner in Hegang, is very distressed about the riders. "just say how many good times they have?" Cold winter, icy roads, strong winds in spring and autumn, rain in summer, wind blowing in the sun. "

But the takeout rider in Hegang said it was not bitter.

Luo Qiong said, "it's too easy. "he is the" single king "of hungry Mohegang. He can run more than 100 singles a day at most. After two years as a rider, he gained several pounds.

Lu Jinlong said that takeout riders and miners, "one day a day." He has just jumped from Meituan to ele.me. After working as a rider, he doesn't have to dig coal in the cold ground. His knee rheumatism is better. "he can run alone freely in the street and bask in the sun during the day."

"I earn every day."

Hegang was once one of the four major coal mines in China, and the underground "black gold" has been mined for nearly a hundred years. There are still 50 coal mines in Hegang by 2015, according to official figures.

At 7 o'clock in the morning, the miners went down to the ground and drilled about one kilometer underground. At noon, the canteen fried vegetables and sent them to the well in plastic bags, and they had a meal with steamed buns. At 5 p.m., after the miners came out of the well, they had to wash for half an hour before they could wash out the original color of their skin.

Lu Jinlong described life underground in this way: the miner's lamp on the helmet is the eye. As soon as the beep is off, people fall into the dark and can't see anything.

When Lu Jinlong was 15 years old, his grandfather died in a mining accident. Two years later, he went down the mine with his father and worked as a miner for 13 years.

For the longest time, Lu Jinlong stayed underground for 12 hours. The teammate who went down the well was "fumigated" by gas, and he stayed with his teammate for nearly eight hours until the rescue team carried the body away.

For those eight hours, facing the dark wall of the well underground, Lu Jinlong remembered the scene of drinking and bragging with his teammates. He said that he had been down the well with his teammates for several years, and there was nothing to be afraid of. But he asked the friend who went to the well first to tell his wife that he would be home later today.

Rheumatism, lumbar disc herniation, pneumoconiosis, people who have been miners, have left more or less physical problems.

Luo Qiong, 36, went down to the mine at the age of 22 and worked in the mine for 11 and a half years. Coal mine operations are divided into several types of work, such as excavation, coal mining, auxiliary, mechanical and electrical, and so on. Luo Qiong is the most difficult "digger", opening the roadway before coal mining.

"for a 1.2-meter-high roadway, if you are 1.7 meters tall, you have to work on your knees and get a 1-meter shovel. So why are we rheumatic? what's underground is not dry, it's wet. "said Luo Qiong.

In winter, he worked underground for a day. Sweating in his clothes, he got out of the well and was blown by a wind of minus 20 or 30 degrees. He froze hard and did not dry even after washing, and he had to wear wet clothes to continue to go down the well the next day.

Luo Qiong said that those who work as excavators are the most likely to get pneumoconiosis.

In the pneumoconiosis patient's body, the dust-filled lungs lost the function of internal and external gas exchange, and the breath was inhaled, held back and unable to get out, and ordinary breathing became an extravagant hope.

When you get down the well, survival is a matter of probability. Miners have their own "open-minded": landslides and mining accidents are "natural disasters", and no one can hide when they come, and occupational diseases are "man-made disasters" that they can endure.

They say that they earn money every day when they go to the well alive, and they have to eat a whole bowl of pig's head when they go home at night.

Spectacle of house price

Hegang, located in the northeast border of China, faces Russia across the Heilongjiang River. Seven or eight years ago, coal mine business was still booming, and many people from outside the province also came to Hegang to mine coal. at that time, luxury cars were parked outside the city's barbecue shop.

In 2011, Hegang was listed as the third batch of resource-exhausted cities in China, and the small city booming from coal is in decline.

Before 2012, Hegang achieved 35.8 billion yuan of GDP, maintaining double-digit growth for a decade in a row, then fell off a cliff, and by 2014, GDP fell to 25.9 billion yuan.

People are also lost year after year. According to the official statistical bulletin, Hegang's population at the end of the year fell from 1.085 million in 2012 to 1.009 million in 2017.

But in reality, local residents say, the population loss is much more serious than the data.

After the depletion of resources, Hegang is also trying to transform from a coal city, one of which is to implement shed reform and move mining residents back to indemnificatory housing. According to the government work report of Hegang City, 62000 indemnificatory housing units were built in Hegang City from 2012 to 2016 alone.

The loss of a large population, a large supply of housing, and the imbalance between supply and demand have created a spectacle of house prices in Hegang.

In Hegang, two or three manual apartments are not uncommon, but they cannot be exchanged for real money. Sell, local people who do not have a house, few people are interested in; rent, the local landlord said, as long as the heating fee is paid, you can rent a house "free".

It is said that in order to sell the house, the real estate agent in Hegang will also hire someone to turn on the lights at night to make the neighborhood look like a high occupancy rate.

However, the price of commercial housing in Hegang remains relatively normal. For example, the average price of the European Royal Garden District in the center of the city is more than 4000 yuan per month.

In this five-tier town, there is a strange "opposition"-- two neighborhoods separated by an open space, with a return house of 600 to 700 yuan per square meter on one side and a high-end community of 4000 yuan per square meter on the other, only a few hundred meters apart.

This is the magical reality of Hegang.

The young man left and came back.

Speaking of population loss, almost everyone in Hegang will ask: can you see young people in their 20s on Hegang Street?

The answer seems to be self-evident.

In Hegang, "young" has to be redefined.

According to the 2018 takeout rider Group Insight report, the average age of takeout riders across the country is 29. The average age of Hegang ele.me riders is about 35 years old.

This year, Wallace opened its first store in Hegang, choosing the location of the city center. Business is good, but many of the people who come to eat hamburgers are uncles and aunts. In other cities, Wallace generally requires cashiers under the age of 30. In Hegang, the age limit is relaxed to 35 and waiters to 45.

More young people are about to leave. The son of shop owner Shen Dajie has just been admitted to a non-local public security college this year, and he will almost certainly not go back to his hometown for further development. she feels very natural: what are you doing back here?

But Hegang is not a lifeless ice, many brands began to move from here to the whole country.

For example, Xijia de Shrimp dumplings, which was founded in Hegang in 2002, now has 500 stores in 40 cities across the country. For example, the regional Shang Chao brand "Biyou", which keeps Walmart Inc and Da Runfa outside Hegang, also left Hegang and captured Harbin. At the beginning of this year, the first store outside Biute province opened in Shenyang.

Some of the young people who have left have also returned to Hegang. Luckily, they have more choices than they did a few years ago.

There are several good "post-90s" in Li Baolong, whose main work is to help merchants analyze takeout and formulate operational strategies. "these young people went out to see the world and came back to know that the Internet has potential for development. This is where I am. "

Zhang Kun and Wang Haitao worked as riders in Zhejiang for several years, but now they have also returned to Hegang to be reunited with their wives and children. Using years of experience as riders, they grew into dispatching managers. "I used to run solo outside, but now I feel at ease when I come home to run solo. "

Can these young people who leave and come back bring new vitality to Hegang?