标题: With first car, a new life in China [打印本页] 作者: tmhua88 时间: 2008-9-3 11:39 标题: With first car, a new life in China
Several months after he bought the car, Mr. Li's elder son, Fengyang, did indeed find a girlfriend, Jin Ya, a beautiful young saleswoman for China Mobile, a cellphone service. In the space of five months, they had gone to the local marriage registry and been legally wed. Today, both say they want a child someday.
At the family dinner this week, Ms. Jin bridled at the idea that young women in China consider a man to be marriage material only if he can take them on dates in a car.
"Not me, not me!" she said passionately, before reluctantly acknowledging that "other girls do say that you need a car."
But as their Geely King Kong was bringing the Li family new joy -- Mr. Li's increased business, Fengyang and Ya's courtship -- tragedy struck: Li Rifu and his wife, Chen Yanfe, were each found to have cancer.
Ms. Chen's reproductive tract cancer has gone into remission after $7,000 in medical bills. But Mr. Li's fist-size malignant prostate cancer tumor -- which turned out to be the cause of the mysterious back pain that was bothering him when he first bought the car -- has resisted two operations and four rounds of chemotherapy. The cost: more than $40,000.
With payments from the local health insurance fund capped at $4,300 a person per year, Mr. Li has had to sell many of his possessions, and still he has had to go into debt. He wore a cap to the family dinner this week, self-conscious about the loss of his hair from chemotherapy.
In two weeks, he will go to a leading hospital in Shanghai for more surgery, a five-hour drive to the north, followed by two more rounds of chemotherapy. But he will not be going in the family car: he sold it for nearly $8,000 last year to help cover his medical expenses.
It is a common occurrence in this country, but with little or no safety net. While many families are scrambling into the middle class and buying cars, others are falling out of the middle class because of business reversals, medical bills or other problems, and are unable to buy replacements for their first car.
Zhu Jinyung, a machinery repairman who lives close to Shuang Miao, said that his family had bought a cheap domestic car in 1994 after enjoying initial success in the plastic injection molding business.
"The business didn't work out," and the car had to be sold, he said.
Sadly, the Li family has known new tragedy recently. Their younger son, Fengwei, had also found a girlfriend with the help of the family car, the daughter of a manager at a large factory, an impressive person to Li Rifu. But the girlfriend's father was killed two weeks ago when a construction crane at the factory accidentally dropped its load on him after a steel pin broke.
Despite it all, Li Rifu tries to remain optimistic. He now dreams of regaining his health, earning back the money he has spent on medical care and then -- like a growing number of his countrymen -- buying a bigger, more impressive car than the Geely compact he had to sell.
"If I get another car," he said, "I'll get a better-quality car, with even nicer seats and better steering."作者: pader2 时间: 2008-9-3 13:03
in china ,now ,car is the deputy of money.so if you have one car, you will have another type of life.作者: tingroom 时间: 2008-9-4 08:51 标题: 回复 2# 的帖子
