Chapter 95

After leaving the shop, Wei Sheng didn’t go anywhere else. He first stopped by the neighborhood wet market, bought a bag of freshly baked sesame flatbread, a pound of marinated pork intestines, two braised pig trotters, two pounds of pig head meat, and his mother’s favorite tiger-skin chicken feet. Then he went home and had a reunion dinner with his grandparents. That same night, he took a flight to the neighboring province to continue filming the outdoor segments of The Wage Earners.

Since the top brass had already spoken, there was no way their little show could continue doing whatever it wanted.

Fortunately, Wei Sheng’s suggestion gave Jin Yannan a new idea. After the new program proposal was submitted, it was said that the leadership was quite pleased and even offered the team an excellent entry point—

A newly recruited batch from J City’s reemployment skills training program was about to depart for a large elder care hospital in the neighboring province for training. The production team could follow and document the entire training-to-reemployment process, creating a perfect narrative arc for the show.

What Jin Yannan hadn’t expected was that Wei Sheng’s idea, by sheer coincidence, actually aligned with J Province’s broader eldercare industry strategy!

As early as last year, talent markets at both provincial and municipal levels had launched free reemployment training programs, with the highest demand being for social workers serving the home-based elderly population.

And this wasn’t just any social worker—it had to be someone with training in basic care and first aid, capable of providing disability rehabilitation, social assistance, and elderly services—a professional technician, in short.

In other words, the city and province would fund and organize a group of unemployed individuals for training. Once they obtained their social worker certificates, they would be assigned based on job preferences to neighborhood-level home-based eldercare centers.

This approach solved the labor shortage at eldercare centers and addressed part of the unemployment issue.

This time, Wei Sheng and the team had come to the neighboring province to document the social worker training segment.

On the plane, looking at the printed program script handed to him by his assistant, Wei Sheng couldn’t help but feel a little heavy-hearted.

He had a good sense of how tough the job market was—after all, people who couldn’t find work on any job site were signing up for social worker training. But he hadn’t expected that the two candidates selected by Jin Yannan would have such heartbreaking backstories—just from a few hundred words of bio, it was already gut-wrenching.

Guest No. 1 was a second-time mother named Qin Fang, 34 years old. She wasn’t a local of J Province; her hometown was in G Province. She came to J Province at 18 to work, following a relative, and met her ex-husband in a factory.

She thought she had made it—married a local with a house and car, left the mountains, and changed her fate.

But young Qin Fang didn’t realize that relying on a man to temporarily improve her environment was not the same as changing her fate.

After giving birth to two daughters, and nearly dying from hemorrhaging on the operating table, she refused to have a third child. That’s when her in-laws turned on her for not bearing them a grandson. Her husband even started openly seeing another woman.

Qin Fang had cried, fought, but her in-laws—whom she had treated like family—kicked her and her two daughters out like they had been planning it all along.

It wasn’t until a community leader asked her for her marriage certificate that she realized—her so-called “husband” had never actually married her.

She was young and naive. In her hometown, a wedding banquet was enough to be considered married. Plus, she had been under the legal age for marriage at the time of pregnancy. Her in-laws didn’t care about legal documents, and she figured—if the wedding was public, what difference did a certificate make?

A huge difference.

Without a marriage certificate, her relationship with that man had no legal standing.

To put it bluntly, the man could legally marry the mistress right now and didn’t even have to tell Qin Fang, his “ex-wife.”

They didn’t need to file for divorce—because in the eyes of the law, they were never married.

The man had gotten seven years of free housekeeping and childcare labor from her.

Luckily, her two daughters were indeed his, and the fact of their common-law relationship was confirmed by many neighbors. The community provided legal aid, helping her secure 800 yuan per month per child in child support.

But with today’s prices, 800 yuan isn’t enough to raise a child. Qin Fang didn’t even own a home in the city. With two kids, she didn’t dare rent a basement. Some roommates didn’t want noisy children, and co-renting was often not an option. Eventually, she had to spend 1,000 yuan a month to rent an old, rundown ground-floor apartment.

Joining the social worker program was a last resort. With two children, she couldn’t even get hired to wash dishes at a restaurant, let alone work in a factory.

A kind community leader told her about the free training program run by the local talent center. It was open to all unemployed locals, didn’t require local household registration—just residency. And the best part? After passing the certification exam, she’d likely be assigned to an eldercare center.

The benefits weren’t comparable to government jobs or official posts, but it was still a steady, reliable position.

Most importantly—

“Neighborhood eldercare centers usually have a children’s play area for grandparents who bring their grandkids. While you work, the older kid goes to kindergarten, and the younger one can stay in the play area with colleagues keeping an eye on them. Hang in there for two years—once the younger one starts school, your hard times will be over.”

And so, Qin Fang began her life as a single mother raising kids on her own.

No matter how hard it got, she never thought about giving up her daughters.

Surprisingly, the second selected trainee was a man!

Shao Ping was just over thirty, but he had already resigned himself to a life of bachelorhood.

Due to an accident in childhood, he permanently lost the ability to become a father. When he grew up, his mother once considered spending money to bring home a rural wife—preferably someone poorly educated and easily manipulated. With today’s science, they figured they could bypass certain biological limitations and still make her pregnant—maybe even with twins!

That was how the older generation thought. They didn’t care how miserable that woman’s life would be, stuck in a loveless marriage. In their eyes, a woman’s life was just about marriage and childbirth. And compared to marrying a poor rural man, their son Shao Ping was a much better deal—even if the marriage was sexless.

But Shao Ping refused.

He couldn’t let his family’s selfishness ruin another innocent girl’s life.

Even though no one ever said it to his face, he knew they all considered him doomed to a life of loneliness.

Thankfully, life in the city was different. As long as he kept to himself, no one would pry too deeply. Plus, more and more young people today were choosing not to marry or have kids. He figured—

Blending in with that crowd was actually quite safe.

Shao Ping was currently a web fiction writer. The best part about this job was its isolation—it protected his privacy. He had been writing since college on a well-known green-lit platform, and after seven or eight years, while not a top-tier author, he had tens of thousands of fans. His annual royalties weren’t any lower than his college classmates working regular jobs.

More importantly, he didn’t date, didn’t marry, had no kids, and no bad habits. His only hobby was collecting high-quality keyboards—not exactly a costly vice.

Honestly, for a man making hundreds of thousands a year with no family to support, life was incredibly cheap. Since graduating, Shao Ping—seen by relatives as an “unemployed loser”—had quietly saved over 3 million yuan for retirement.

This time, when Shao Ping signed up for the social worker training program, he told his parents it was for research purposes related to his writing. In truth, he just wanted to scout things out ahead of time… ahem!

He’d heard that some poorly managed eldercare facilities had many methods of abusing the elderly. The thought of growing old with no children to care for him and likely having to rely on a community-run eldercare center made Shao Ping feel it was absolutely necessary to infiltrate the “inner workings” while he was still young—get a grasp on all the shady stuff inside these facilities. That way, when he got old, no one would dare bully him!

Of course, in an ideal world, Shao Ping would prefer to invest in an eldercare facility himself—or even just buy a stake in one. Be the boss.

Naturally, that wasn’t something he could write down in the personal information he submitted to the show’s production team. In his application, he simply stated that he was a staunch non-marriage advocate who was concerned about his own retirement, and so he wanted to become a social worker to gain early insight into the workings of public eldercare institutions.

Wei Sheng guessed that Jin Yannan picked Shao Ping mostly because the guy was good-looking and they wanted him to be the “face” of the episode. Ahem—these days, trying to make a feel-good, socially conscious show that still appeals to viewers is no easy task!

At that moment, Wei Sheng still didn’t know Shao Ping’s full story, but he deeply resonated with his mindset.

In fact, Shao Ping’s thinking reflected the views of most people in their generation.

The older generation assumed they just wanted to enjoy life and were too selfish to settle down and raise a family—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

They grew up with the internet, matured early, and had seen far too much of life’s hardships. On top of that, they were simply born in the wrong era—waves of unemployment, delayed retirement, and a brutally tough job market had all landed squarely on their shoulders.

They were already struggling to make ends meet, never knowing where their next meal would come from. Many were still living with their parents after college, surviving off their folks’ pensions. How could they dare say they had what it took to support a family?

And getting married meant having kids—and kids are money pits. Once you had a wife and children, you couldn’t very well keep sponging off your parents, right? So you’d have to buy a house, shoulder a decades-long mortgage, and on top of that, take care of one or two little money-eating monsters who cost a fortune the moment they opened their eyes each morning…

So the more rational among them decided: If I can’t handle this kind of pressure, then it’s better not to drag someone else down with me. Let’s all just stay single. We’ll meet again in the nursing home someday—sounds great!

Wei Sheng truly admired Shao Ping’s boldness. He himself didn’t have the guts to tell his mom he didn’t want to get married or have kids.

Luckily, he’d now entered the entertainment industry. In order to hang on to that golden rice bowl, he’d already lied to Hu Qianqian multiple times, saying that a young idol like him would lose fans if he dated too early—so to protect his career, he couldn’t date for the time being…

The more he thought about it, the more Wei Sheng envied Shao Ping.

(End of Chapter)