The Chinese New Year is approaching, which inspires the desire of migrant workers to return to their homeland. Everyone is eager to spend a festival in their hometown and welcome a different Spring Festival feast. However, not everyone can succeed in the road of hard work in a foreign land, and not everyone can have a brilliant career outside. Every year when I go back to my hometown for the Chinese New Year, I find a strange phenomenon: those who are richer are more low-key, while those who are financially strapped are more willing to show up.
First of all, some young people who work hard outside the home wear designer clothes and fashion watches, even if they may be imitations, which makes people mistakenly think that they have made a lot of money outside and become big bosses. However, in fact, they may just be working the assembly line, holding the screws tightly, and their lives are not as rich as they seem. What's even more exaggerated is that some people who eat and drink for months in other provinces to save face, only to come home renting a luxury car and showing off in the village in a high-profile manner, when in fact they may be struggling to pay the high rental fees. This phenomenon of gritting one's teeth and insisting on it for the sake of vanity makes people sigh.
Every time I go back to my hometown, I hate to participate in some dinner parties, because at the dinner table, once people get drunk, they start to brag about their achievements: they have won millions of projects, the company is unwilling to go with a salary of 8,000 a month, 10,000 is the bottom line, and so on. I can't stand these rhetoric, as if a group of low-key rich people are roasting charcoal fires, sipping cheap rice wine, and partying in special ways.
However, people who are really successful outside the world seem to be very low-key. One of my cousins runs a restaurant chain with an annual income of more than a million, but every time he comes home, he doesn't show off at all. He was dressed plainly, and the car he drove home was just an ordinary car of two or three hundred thousand. When chatting, he never talks about personal income, only about the difficulty of starting a business outside and the current severe economic situation. At the same time, he made a lot of practical contributions to the village, donated money to renovate an ancient bridge, and sponsored tens of thousands of yuan in the village to hold dragon boat races during the Dragon Boat Festival every year. This is the actual action that really pays for the hometown, in stark contrast to those who have a good face and hypocrisy to show off.
Speaking of good-looking, show-off people, I remember an uncle who had a dinner party with relatives during the Chinese New Year and asked about the monthly income of one of my cousins who graduated from college. My cousin smiled and said that the salary was not high, about four or five thousand. However, it is clear to me that this cousin is a department manager of a large company with an annual income of at least 500,000.
After hearing this, the uncle immediately came to his senses, probably because of the strength of the wine, and bluntly ridiculed that his cousin's income was not as high as his reading, and his income was nearly tens of thousands a month. The cousin smiled faintly, did not refute, and continued to eat silently.
In fact, I learned that my uncle was just a security guard, and in order to earn more money, he often worked for others, working fifteen or sixteen hours a day, and usually picking up garbage in the work area, and his monthly income may only be a few hundred yuan. Regardless of his income, he did the dirtiest and hardest work, spending a lot of time in exchange for a small pay. This kind of low-level work has nothing to show off at all, but he pays silently without regrets.
That's how I feel when I go back to my hometown for the New Year, where the rich are usually low-key, while the poor are pursuing vanity and deliberately creating a luxurious appearance. As everyone knows, all these show-offs and vanities are just to save face. Sometimes I really can't understand why someone likes to disguise so much, so hard to hide their true self. Isn't that tiring?