When you come out of the subway in some areas of Beijing, you may often be surrounded by a crowd of tricycle riders asking if you would like a ride. For only about 2 or 3 Yuan per person, they will take you from the railway exit to anywhere nearby. For their convenience and low prices, these tricycles have become an important method of travel for some residents.

But they are actually illegal here, and some local citizens also don't like them, saying that some of them are rude. This makes their business more difficult.

To find out who they are and what their life is like, one chilly night I asked one of them if I could take a look at his home.


The rider's family name is Lin and he is from a village in Anhui Province, in Eastern China. He came to Beijing three years ago, when his land was used to build a local water project.

For the past three years, he has mainly been working the ‘tricycle taxi'. Sometimes he collects garbage. His wife is also in Beijing, doing the same work.

"We know nothing about technology so we can't do any technological work. We can only do simple things, like riding a tricycle. We make money by selling our labor."

He bought the tricycle with less than three hundred Yuan. You get very cold sitting on it and as we went faster, I got very worried that we might fall over. A few days ago one of my colleagues was slightly injured by a tricycle falling onto him.

The road to his home was dark and jammed with heavy trucks. We also had to go through an abandoned farm where there was no road at all.

After more than half an hour we finally arrived at his home.

Lin and his wife live in one room, 12 square meters in size. This is where they sleep, cook, eat and entertain.

There is virtually no furniture in the room. A bed occupies nearly a third of the space. The only things there- are a second hand cupboard, a small black and white TV and a very old cassette player from the 1980s, which had been thrown out by a local resident.

A coal-fired stove keeps the temperature in the room slightly higher than outside.

But Lin says said the stove works well. He is happy.

Lin gave me a broken glass cup, poured some hot water, and started telling me about his work.


Lin says he starts at five in the morning when people are going to work. Sometimes he also goes out at lunchtime, but the best time for work is from five pm to midnight when lots of people are coming back from work on the subway.

Lin makes about 30 Yuan a day. That's five to six thousand Yuan a year, or, about 700 dollars.

However, Lin reckons it's much better than staying at home. If he stayed at home, he would be able to afford nothing but food.

More than 100 people are living in the courtyard, all of them are migrant workers like him.

"Not a single local native Beijinger would live here", Lin says. "We all know each other here; we are doing the same work."

"Local people are pretty friendly, but we have very limited contact with them," Lin says. "Our only interaction is when negotiating the price of a ride. Most of the time, we just talk to other migrants. "

Lin is happy with his simple life here. When they are not at work, they are sleeping. Sometimes they will play cards or billiards together but very few people will gamble anything.

Television is the main way of killing time. Lin's TV set can pick up five channels, though the picture is poor. Or there is the old cassette player.

Lin knows little about the life of rich people and doesn't care. He never wants to go to any shopping malls, because goods there are too expensive. His vocabulary doesn't include words like bar or club. He is not interested in that. He can easily be satisfied as long as if he makes more money than at home.

Lin told me that he's going home for the spring festival. But he'll be back to ride the tricycle next year. Besides higher income, he enjoys working for himself. If he falls on hard times here in Beijing, he will go to other cities.

"I want to save some money and build a new house in my hometown. I also want to make enough money to pay for my only son's schooling."

Among his many hopes, the biggest one is that his son can have a different kind of life.

Back anchor:

That was Liao Jibo reporting. Next Monday, we'll continue our series on migrant workers with a repair worker who have come to Beijing for ten years and now is faced with a dillema - to stay here or to go home.

by Liao Jibo    Contact the author at liaojibo@crifm.com