My parents got married in 1984. Me and my twin were born in 1986. My parents did not come to own their first house (which was technically a 60-square-meter unit in an apartment building) until 1989.In between these years, it was the era for most Chinese households to see a whole new lifestyle coming up-close.
When I say they owned their first apartment, it is not the same concept of ownership as we define it today. To be precise, the apartment would be owned by my dad's school. We were just given the privilege to live in it.
The first three years of my life (1986 - 89), our family lived in a shared apartment with another working class family. It was given to my grandpa by his danwei (unit of work), which was a major steel mill that employed almost half of the city. I still have some memory of the dark (and tiny!) room and shared bathrooms that we could barely call home. Not a fun place to be. But since everyone else was almost living the same way, no one seemed to complain.
In fact Dad was with his job in Ningixa, 200 kilometres from home, until 1987. When he was finally transferred back to Baotou, he had to begin from scratch and work all his way up in the new school we called DianDa, or Radio-Television University. It is a distance-education college where he ended up working for 20 more years. It might sound like an improbable idea today how distance-education colleges could even exist before the age of the internet. But they did. Students learned through recorded video courses, radio broadcasting, and of course lots of traditional correspondence.
Anyways, by 1989, two years into his new danwei, my dad was in a solid enough standing in the school to secure him a unit in the apartment building the school decided to build. A college builds an apartment building on his own campus and accommodates its own staff? Yes, this is what Socialism is about. The money would be collected among the staff themselves. My family chipped in 7000rmb. I won't bother doing an inflation calculation and tell how much it would have equal today, but basically, this amount was more than their total savings at that point. They borrowed from their parents of both sides.
The school then does what's called Fen Fangzi (分房子), distributing the apartment units. All 50+ staff members were to receive a unit each, but the size of your unit depends on where you rank amongst your colleagues. All employees on the payroll were ranked by their hierarchy and seniority, mainly depending on how many years you have worked in the school. My dad earned some extra credits for making sure of the construction quality of the building, as he was the only employee that had an architecture background. Thus, he was given a pretty decent 一室半 (1.5 rooms) unit, consisting of a living room that we called the "big room", a small bedroom, and a nearly-non-existent corridor that we called living room. But still, having our own little nest with separate kitchen and bathroom was totally a dream come true.
As soon as they got the keys, my parents moved in happily despite not having much furniture at all. The day we went into the room for the first time as a family, I could vividly remember how my parents were filled with joy and excitement about their life.
Moving into the campus of my dad's school also meant the commuting distance was much shorter, both for my parents' own work and sending us to kindergarten. It was a big relief of burden. My dad could spend lots of lots of time playing games with me and my brother. To this day, I am more thankful about this than anything else they did for us in our early years.
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