This is the 891st story we tell
I am Xiao Chen
(Before the epidemic, my wife and children came to Japan to see me)
I was born in Beijing in 1985 with an only child. When I was a child, my parents worked in the Ministry of Aerospace . At that time, the love between my father and mother was relatively avant-garde and was a sister-brother relationship. My father was 7 years younger than my mother, and the two were also considered trendy people at that time.
The parents have a good relationship and are usually very relaxed. They have common hobbies and often make an appointment to go out for exercise together. They are also considered athletes in their circle. So I didn't have much time to care about me, and I was very relaxed in discipline.
As soon as I left the adult's sight, I was naughty. But in front of them, they are honest and obedient. In the words of the old man, they are "silly".
's almost stocking state made me brave and I escaped several classes. Once, I was discovered by my parents who were off the morning shift and never dared to do it again.
(photo with my father when I was a child)
This also attracted their attention and my discipline began to become stricter. But I am like a free and casual calf, suddenly being restrained, and naturally I am dissatisfied with all kinds of dissatisfaction. In the tug-of-war between you and me, I fight wits and courage with my parents.
In order to divert my attention, my parents signed me up for a table tennis interest class. Unexpectedly, when they participated in the competition in elementary school, they won the third place in , Fengtai District, .
interest is coming, but in order to cope with parents, the cultural courses study with the mentality of being a monk and hitting the clock every day. As you can imagine, the results are naturally unsatisfactory.
When I graduated from elementary school, I went to junior high school with the bottom grades. Because I haven't developed good habits since I was a child, my grades have not only not improved, but I also learned to skip classes, smoke and play billiards from a group of children, and became a bad boy in the eyes of classmates and teachers.
(rebellious middle school period)
When I took the high school entrance examination, there was no suspense and I didn’t get into a key high school. Only an ordinary high school can be admitted to the doorstep. But the school's school spirit is too bad. My parents think that if I go to this school, not only will I have no hope of taking the college entrance exam, but I will not predict what I will be like in the future.
Looking at me as I was in teenager, doing nothing at home, and my parents were also very anxious. Finally, I inquired from multiple sources and learned that there is a national key high school in Hebei. If I pay a sponsorship fee of more than 20,000 yuan, I can let my children go in to study.
At that time, my father had already started his own business and had some savings. In order to allow me to go to a good school and stay away from such an environment, I paid the sponsorship fee and found a relationship, so I was qualified to go in and study.
In 2001, I came to Hebei alone to study. When I arrived at the school, I found that it was far from the city and was desolate around me.
(My mother carries me when she was infancy)
School is military-based and fully closed management. Not only does it have strict requirements for students' hairstyles, but girls' hair is not enough to shoulders, and boys must have board-inch , and even the time for eating and going to the toilet is specified. Because
is too strict, there are only 180 Beijing students who entered the school with me in three months.
I couldn't adapt to it at first, it was completely different from the free and casualness I was in middle school, and I once wanted to leave. Under the pressure, it often cried secretly in the dormitory and did not dare to call their parents. It could only fight alone to survive.
had no choice but to study by himself. After three years of hard work, he reached the junior college score line when he took the college entrance examination in 2005.
can be an ordinary junior college, but there will be no advantages in the future. Finally, I applied for , Beijing United University, and chose the performance department with low score requirements.
(photos of participating in kindergarten activities when I was a child)
Only when I arrived at school did I realize that most of the students in the class were admitted to the vocational college entrance examination, and they had more or less a basic performance, but I was a completely novice.
and even when I was a freshman, I couldn’t understand what the teacher said at all. The next year, I completely understood. In the end, he not only passed the relevant exams, but also ranked among the top.
Most of the teachers in schools are artists, and their teaching is very rigorous. I remember there was a class in which the teacher taught us how to liberate human nature and learn to perform according to the role.Explain and demonstrate while giving students a live performance.
Teacher casually clicked a girl with outstanding temperament to perform a turtle. Unexpectedly, she immediately lay on the ground and learned the turtle's movements. I was stunned.
(When I first met my wife)
What surprised me even more was that the teacher asked the girl who usually didn't speak loudly in the class to perform two jealous women, and they quickly got into the state. The spirit of quickly entering the role and forgetting myself made me stunned, and I began to experience and absorb the essence of this performance.
successfully entered the senior year. The students were busy looking for internships. The school had not many classes anymore. Faced with the upcoming graduation season, I was a little reluctant to let it go, and I was afraid that I would go to society completely in the future.
At that time, school network was popular. The students were looking for their former classmates on it, so I also searched for their old classmates on whim.
As a result, I soon discovered that a girl looked like her junior high school classmate, and she was really good at talking. It turns out that we know her. She is one class lower than me and has not been in contact for many years, so she jokes as soon as she opens her mouth and says that I was a "school gang" in school. Who can forget it?
(with my son in Beijing)
When it comes to "school grass", I felt a little embarrassed. At that time, Korean waves were popular. Because I looked like a member of one of the group, I became the target of the girls in the association school, and the name "school grass" spread like this.
She was in another school and studied automobile industry design. She was very beautiful and had a gentle personality. We were very good at talking about it, and later we got together naturally.
graduating from university in 2009, we are all facing the problem of finding a job. At that time, I thought that I had learned to perform again because of my appearance, so it should not be difficult to be an actor, but reality slapped me in the face.
There are 70 students in the entire major, and only 1 person entered the performance industry after graduation, and it is just a drama club. It is conceivable how difficult the employment prospects for the performance major were at that time.
(When I first went to Okinawa, Japan)
When I graduated, I was full of confidence and was hit hard at this moment. I was no longer picky. As long as I had a job opportunity, I would do it. Half a year later, a classmate's mother worked as an executive in a brand of watches. With her introduction, she went there to attend the interview.
Unexpectedly, because of his good image and reasonable conversation, he was successfully hired. The workplace is arranged in a counter in Wangfujing Building to sell watches, with a guaranteed salary of 1,500 yuan plus commission.
In order not to let your girlfriend look down on her, she also wants to prove that she is , so she takes her work seriously. did not expect that the knowledge learned from professional performance could also come in handy.
Because I have studied character psychology research, I can also have a general prediction of their temperament for clients of different professions in . , so the transaction rate is very high. It has been the company's sales champion for almost every month. After working in for four years, it also earned its first savings in life.
(When I was a Cabinet Brother)
Four years of work experience have greatly improved my work ability and I also want to show myself on a higher stage. So by submitting my resume, I successfully switched to another brand company for sales.
was originally going to do a big move, but it was a pity that because the store was opened in a new mall, the mall was not very popular. In the end, it barely maintained for a year and then withdrew the store, and I was unemployed because of it.
The family felt that I had been talking to my girlfriend for several years, so I wanted to use this time to hold the wedding first, so we got married in the spring of 2013.
At that time, the hotel gave us a chance to have a dinner party and participated in the lottery. Fortunately, I won the grand prize for a two-person tour in Okinawa, Japan.
is also this experience, which gives us a preliminary impression of Japan. I think the environment there is good and the air is humid. In fact, it was just a thought of traveling. I didn’t expect that one day, we would actually live here.
(Ride a bike with your child)
In 2015, his son was born, but he has been allergic since he was a child. If he is not careful, it will cause cough asthma .
Every time I get sick, I take him to the pediatric departments of various hospitals in Beijing to see them. There are many sick children there, and I am particularly worried about cross-infection, and the cost is also high. Sometimes the registration fee is 300 yuan.
The most important thing is that the dry climate in Beijing is also a cause of the child's condition. But the overall environment is like this, so we had to put a heater, air purifier, , etc. in the room, and try to create a humid environment for it.
In 2019, my childhood friend came back from Japan and chatted about the Japanese environment. I remembered that when I was traveling to Japan, I really liked it. At that time, I suddenly had an idea to take my child to live in a different environment, and maybe my physical condition would change.
(My wife painted the scene when we took our children to the aquarium together when we came to Japan for the second time)
My wife and I told us about my plans to go to Japan, and my wife considered that both parents were old, what should I do if I was in the old age?
Finally, we decided to listen to our parents' opinions. Unexpectedly, they were all very open-minded and said that their physical fitness was OK. Let us take advantage of our youth to make more trouble and see the outside world.
So, we began to collect relevant information about working and living in Japan. I was working in a luxury store at that time. So I quit my job first and began to prepare for going abroad.
Fortunately, my wife is interested in design, she has never stopped learning, and her level has been improving. Later, I became a free photo editing master and could take orders at home. My income was very good, so there was no big impact on where I went to live.
4 months later, with the advice and help of the childhood friend, I first applied for a student visa and came to , Fukuoka, Japan in July.
(with my son)
Student visa requires two years of language school, so I lived a life of studying and working. In order to quickly adapt to life and study in Japan, I went to a hotel and became a helper in the kitchen. There, I bravely opened my mouth to communicate with my colleagues, hoping to improve my Japanese level as soon as possible.
It is a very popular internet celebrity store. The business is so good that I don’t have time to drink water. Although it is 900 yen per hour, it’s really too tired.
Later, his Japanese proficiency improved, so he changed to a duty-free shop job. Because he had domestic sales experience and excellent work performance, the company talked to me about his work visa in 3 months.
was so happy at that time that he thought that with a work visa, he could bring his wife and children. Who would have thought that when the epidemic came, the duty-free shop went bankrupt because it had no customers.
(My wife came to Japan for the first time to see me)
Work visa is gone. It was a student visa, but my wife was able to come with her son and see me through a tourist visa. Now I don’t know when I will be able to reunite with them.
This prominent epidemic has disrupted all my plans. Seeing that the work visa was hopeless, I made a decision to drop out of school.
The tuition fee for the language school is paid once a year. At the end of the first year, the school asked me if I needed to continue studying, and I chose to refuse.
At that time, I thought about finding a job quickly. If it really doesn’t work, then go back to China and think of another way for the child’s health. When the visa period of
is less than one month left, there is no way out. At this time, I found a self-media company run by a Chinese and was recruiting video anchors. I felt that my image was OK and I had sales experience, so I went for an interview, but I didn't expect to be hired on the spot.
(a beach near home)
For the sake of visa, I took out all my previous work experience and worked hard every day, thinking about how to increase my fans.
Wherever you use your mind, it will bear fruit. After only one month of trial, the number of fans reached nearly 10,000, while other colleagues only had a few hundred, and the number of them did not exceed 3,000.
My outstanding performance attracted the attention of the company leaders. Before I passed the internship period, I signed a contract with me and successfully obtained a work visa.
At this moment, my heart was slightly relieved. Then I applied for a family stay visa for my wife and children. On the day I got the certificate, I cried.For this day, my wife and my children didn’t meet for a full 10 months, which was not easy.
The most important thing about family members is to be together. Nothing is warmer than home, and nothing is more precious than family affection.
(wife and child are together)
Wife's work, as long as you have a computer, you can do it anywhere. But it is a big problem for children to adapt to a new environment.
At that time, the child was already 4 and a half years old. His language had already taken shape. In order to allow him to adapt to the environment here as soon as possible, he sent him to the kindergarten without teaching any Japanese.
At the beginning, we were also very worried, fearing that children would not be able to adapt to the entire Japanese environment. As a result, I was really uncomfortable. In the whole year, except for speaking Chinese to us at home, I didn’t say a word in kindergarten. It really made us very anxious, and the kindergarten teachers were also anxious.
I thought my son was very repulsive to Japanese, but unexpectedly, a year later, he suddenly spoke Japanese in kindergarten and spoke fluently.
So, the environment is the best weapon to learn language. The younger the child, the more conducive it is to master a new language.
What’s more gratifying is that my son’s physical fitness has improved a lot. Nowadays, I rarely get sick, and I feel much better. I think about going out to play with children every day.
(Now our sons have grown taller)
In order to let other children play with him, my wife often takes him out and meets other mothers and takes the initiative to talk to others.
But my wife is not good at Japanese, so she has to hold a translator every time she goes out. Unexpectedly, after seeing this, a mother asked her wife if she was not very fluent in Japanese. It turned out that she was not good at it either. My wife has some basic English, so the two of them spoke English at the same time.
Not only did my wife make friends, she also chatted enthusiastically in English every day. After a few weeks, my Japanese language has not improved at all, and my English proficiency has improved by leaps and bounds, which is really unexpected.
But there are also troubles in Japan, fruits are really expensive. A watermelon of about 10 kilograms costs about 1,900 yen during the season, which is equivalent to 100 yuan, so I often see watermelons here selling them in bulk, which is too expensive.
(My son has to sleep with me every day)
Japanese fruits are all seasonal, and there are almost no off-season fruits. So no matter how expensive watermelon is, you should buy it quickly, because once you miss it, you can only wait for another year.
After my wife and children were around, my enthusiasm for work became more and more important, and later I started to live broadcast the daily life of our family on part-time.
Unexpectedly, he accidentally helped his friend. When talking about the physical condition of a child, the same is true for the children of a friend. Through my introduction, I came to Japan later.
Sometimes it is live broadcasting on the street, and the return rate is quite high. Some Japanese people also like my live broadcast. If you go to one place, there will always be people waiting for me.
suddenly felt that my work had a different meaning. Some people had a different understanding of Japan through my lens, and some Japanese people saw a different China through my performance.
(a family of three is together)
I remember when I first came to Fukuoka, I made a joke. It turned out that haircuts, haircuts and shampooing were charged separately in Japan. Moreover, if you do not explain in advance before haircut, you will not wash your hair. Only when you finish washing will you know that you will charge separately. What made me even more openly was that after cutting my hair, I directly used " vacuum cleaner " to suck the hair, which made me amazed at the speed of my tongue. Before I could react, the barber bowed and told me it was over. I have to say that their efficiency is quite high.
has now slowly adapted to the life here. Seeing the child's health gradually improve and grow up healthily day by day, I feel that it is good to change one mindset and choose another life.
When you can face all this calmly when encountering problems, you will find that all the sudden problems in life actually have their emergency plans.
(Take your children out for fun)
never thought that I would develop in another field. Now my career and part-time job have entered a new stage, and everything is developing positively.
In the next few years, I plan to accompany my family, work hard, and be a happy and ordinary person.
[Oral: Xiao Chen]
[Editor: Dream Hope]
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