A Child’s Drifting Dream: A Journey in Hengdian

Original title: Being a child drifter and having an expensive dream

Qilu Evening News reporter Song Shiwenjing and trainee reporter Hu Lingling

In mid-November, winter entered in Hengdian. There was no heating in a room in Nanshanghuxi Village. On the wall of the kitchen and living room, six holes were dug with big mouths. The wind came in, and the temperature inside and outside the house was almost No difference. Wu Lan, who lives here, decided to persist because 6-year-old Xiao Yi cried and told her that she wanted to continue acting and continue to have this very sweet dream.

Earned 250 yuan in 4 months

Xiao Yi and her mother Wu Lan came to Hengdian from Jiangxi on May 21 this year. There were dozens of bags of spring, summer, autumn and winter clothes in the house, which were piled higher than a person, showing their determination to “take root in Hengdian”. They are one of several “child slave families” in the small town of Hengdian. Their mother, who knows them, said that the mother and daughter are suffering so much.

In July, the weather was getting hotter and hotter. Wu Lan rushed to various notification groups to submit resumes and materials for her children. Dozens of actor coordinators and agents were pinned to the top of her WeChat account. This was due to Wu Lan’s hard work in Hengdian. The thing you save and cannot lose is your connections. My father who was far away in Nanchang sent a message asking, “Has Xiaoyi recently joined the group and what role?” Wu Lan swiped down the phone screen twice, skipped the top pictures, and clicked on the reply, “I just took a photo recently.” After finishing two micro-short plays, Xiao Yi, who played the heroine as a child, had one or two lines and was very happy. She has not been filming for the past two days and is studying second-grade math problems at home.”

Xiaoyi’s school is 200 meters away from the rental house. The admission requirements for this village’s primary school are very simple. Register in advance and bring your ID card or household registration book to apply for admission. Tuition is not required. In this way, excluding the rental cost of 500 yuan, water and electricity The cost is two to three hundred yuan, and the mother and daughter’s monthly living costs can be controlled within 3,000 yuan. The father, who is far away in Nanchang, is responsible for the expenses. Xiao Yi usually goes to and from school by herself and does not go home for lunch because Wu Lan has paid 1,200 yuan for food and 600 yuan for custody fees to the school. “There are chicken legs! Squid!” Satisfaction and happiness overflowed on Xiao Yi’s face. , look closely, there are still prickly heat marks on the child’s face that are not healed.

The prickly heat marks were left during filming in the summer, because of a group acting scene in “Summer Wear Winter Clothes”. Wu Lan still felt distressed when talking about it. Xiao Yi’s skin is dark, but her delicate and smooth skin makes Wu Lan quite proud. It never appeared when I lived in Nanchang. Xiao Yi was eager to prove that filming is not hard work. “When I was wearing a cotton-padded jacket, I would have a bag filled with ice cubes and put it in the clothes. The next day, the cotton-padded jacket was gone! No ice cubes were given.” Wu Lan added with a wry smile, “40 Wearing a cotton-padded jacket when the weather is 35 degrees Celsius, but the next day when it was 35 degrees, the cotton-padded jacket was arranged for someone else to wear. She wore thick clothes and also put on a woolen jacket and velvet trousers underneath. It was very hot.”

The group performed from show to show, but the 100 yuan payment promised each time was blown into someone’s pocket, and there was no trace of it. Xiao Yi ran around on the set as a backdrop, sweating profusely and happy, but Wu Lan wanted to give up because of the pressure of survival. On the set at 2 o’clock in the morning, there were some women and children scattered in the corner. Wu Lan was shaking his fan, and Xiao Yi fell asleep in the intermittent cool breeze.

Wu Lan has not counted how many times Xiao Yi performed in group performances in Hengdian. What he remembers clearly is that he was given 200 yuan for the filming of “Summer Wear Winter Clothes” over two days. In September, when he was still in school, he asked for leave to perform for half a day. As a group performer, they were paid 50 yuan. In the first four months after arriving in Hengdian, the mother and daughter only earned 250 yuan. Wu Lan felt a little desperate, but Xiao Yi’s happiness was still simple. Her mother bought her “Guka” stickers, and new friends gave her colored skirt papers. There were two classes in the first grade of Lanting Primary School in Hengdian Town. Xiao Yi There are 42 classmates in her class. She said that she has gained 10 good friends after enrolling for more than two months, but the math problems are getting more and more troublesome. It should be calculated like this.” Xiao Yi made several miscalculations, which tested Wu Lan’s patience. Last year, Xiao Yi was able to pass the second-grade questions with ease. This year, filming took up Xiao Yi’s attention, making her study more difficult.

Training, membership, funding

Wu Lan brought her children to Hengdian when she heard a teacher Zhao on the short video platform say that children can come to Hengdian to film. Xiao Yi loved acting so much that she imitated celebrities in front of the TV every day, so Wu Lan paid her husband a training fee of 9,800 yuan without telling him. Teacher Zhao recommended her to the agency. Through the agent’s introduction, the mother and daughter had more opportunities to contact the crew.

“What is a conflict? The teacher said that a conflict is a quarrel.” This is what Xiaoyi learned in the training class. The training course only started in July, and it was promised to be 7 days. Wu Lan did not expect that the next two days would be “practical teaching” – joining a group as an extra, with more than a dozen children crying and running around in the same self-made play, the teacher It is said that it can be seen on iQiyi and Youku. In fact, the final film was only uploaded to the video website by the organization using its personal account. Parents went in repeatedly to review their children’s performance, and the video gained some clicks. After better-than-nothing training, Xiao Yi received a role as a “little devil” in the middle of the night. What made Wu Lan even more “flattered” was that she was later offered the role of the heroine in a micro-short play when she was a child. She was paid 300 yuan a day for just one line. That night in the middle of the night, while running to the set in a hurry, Wu Lan accidentally hit a rock while riding a bicycle. Wu Lan thought it was funny when she thought about it. “This is the most exciting day for me!” Xiao Yi suddenly flashed his hands, as if he was about to take off from the bench. Wu Lan felt that although 9,800 yuan was expensive, it was worth it. “I worked as an extra for several months without any payment through the agency, and I got to know more people, so I had the opportunity to play the heroine as a child. I have no complaints.” Regret it.”

For young children who have just arrived in Hengdian, taking over a role from an agent in a talent agency is an easy way to quickly accumulate connections and find drama appointments. The training fee Wu Lan paid was relatively small. This ordinary family could not afford such a high fee for a dream with an unknown future. The network of connections in the small town is intricate, and it helps a child to quickly accumulate works in a completely unfamiliar town. For a mother, it is a matter of responsibility, and it also requires the accumulation of strong financial resources of the family.

Wu Lan also knew a mother who married from Jiangxi. Her name was Su Chenxi, and she lived with her son in a county in Lishui City next to Hengdian. Not long after Wu Lan came to Hengdian, the two met on the same set. The two “child porn families” each had their own “child porn” methods. Wu Lan couldn’t say he envied her.

Su Chenxi brought her son to Hengdian for filming in January this year. She thought “his son is so handsome”, but when she came here, she felt that Hengdian was very awkward. There were so many handsome kids, and children were “not rare” here. “Catch a lot of them, why should people choose your child to act?” When asked to choose again, her fierce speech suddenly slowed down and she said calmly, “I will choose to give my child a ‘membership’. “

“Membership” is the charging model of several large children’s brokerage companies in Hengdian. “Membership” is divided into levels, with a membership of 20,000 yuan per year. Within a year, you are guaranteed to appear in at least three plays, and you can star in special actors, etc. 50,000 yuan for 3 years, guaranteed to be in at least 8 plays within 3 years, including special actors and roles. There are also “high-end artists”, 80,000 yuan for 5 years, and at least 12 plays are guaranteed within 5 years, with special contracts and roles, etc.

It was not easy for a child who had not signed a contract with a talent agency to get a special role, and it was not easy for him to get a role with one or two lines. This was something Su Chenxi learned later. Therefore, she feels that she is very lucky and has not become a “member” of a brokerage company. Thanks to her child’s good image, she is also willing to “provide funds” and has received roles in many theater movies and large-scale TV series. “Sometimes It still depends on the child’s own ability. Even if you become a member, the drama the agency gives you may not be what the parents imagined. Some children are really not suitable for being on camera, and there is no use in forcing them.”

Wu Lan did not want to accept the “members” of the agency, nor did she have the conditions to accept them. She took Xiaoyi from stage to stage as a group performer. On several occasions, she was lucky enough to “miss” someone who had temporarily missed an appointment and was in urgent need of a special appointment. Role. These “opportunities” to join the big crew appeared in the group from time to time, like a tempting big hand calling, Wu Lan thought to herself, “I said I can join the crew, but I don’t know if the child will have any footage left after the performance.” At this time, the alarm clock for picking up Xiao Yi from school rang. Wu Lan turned off her phone and didn’t intend to pay attention to it anymore.

There is always someone with higher investment

Wu Lan has a group of more than 100 mothers and a group of more than 500 mothers on her mobile phone. These mothers who are raising their babies in Hengdian form a huge collective. The mother in the group who had just come to Hengdian had a simple idea. Her child liked performing and wanted to develop her expression skills and self-confidence, so she sent her to “experience it”.

Simple ideas are often shattered by reality. There are many checkpoints in the casting process, and Su Chenxi can’t figure out where the “funding” comes from. “Is it the crew, the actor coordinator, or the agency or agency?” But Su Chenxi wants to spend money for her children. “A hundred people are vying for this seat. Now someone wants to sell the seat to you. Wouldn’t you like it?” Su Chenxi complied with this rule, but she still felt aggrieved. She said that there was a lot of competition during the summer, and she once “financed” a special role in a major production series. After filming for more than an hour on the set, her agent suddenly told her that she “had to change someone.” The reason was that someone Another girl’s parents were willing to contribute more money, so the script was changed from “mother and son” to “mother and daughter”.

Su Chenxi took her 8-year-old son to a group performance once and never wanted to run away again. “I learned once that it’s very tiring to perform in extra roles, and I don’t want my children to suffer this.” In comparison, filming dozens of audition videos in a hotel seems much easier, and you can also get a lot of good roles. , if everything goes well, we will see our son in a new drama, in which he can speak two lines and play with a number of well-known actors.

She searched for roles in major announcement groups and checked her son’s roles. It was best to be close to celebrities. As a result, Su Chenxi lowered her guard against many people. When talking about the experience of being deceived, Su Chenxi spoke in a higher tone, “The other party asked me to ‘bring in money’ 10,000 yuan, saying that my son could play the role of Luo Yunxi in a big-budget drama. When he was a child, he talked to me and said something like It’s really the same. I was willing to spend money, and I saw that there was already news about promoting this drama on the Internet, so I paid him a deposit of 2,600 yuan. However, this person didn’t answer the phone the next day and blocked me on WeChat. .” There are many mothers who have been deceived in this way. Su Chenxi said a little self-deprecatingly that it was all because of her “greed”. “Later I learned that many big production crews will not ‘sell’ their seats.” Su Chenxi said Chen Xi did not plan to call the police, “I am not the only one who has been deceived in the group, there are also higher-ups, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions! Those of them should not be called scams. For example, those who spent a lot of money are investments. She was cast in a short drama, so her child could be the protagonist, but the drama was not filmed in the end, so it can only be said to be an ‘investment failure’.”

Many confused mothers helped each other in the group. Su Chenxi and Wu Lan shared their anxiety about choosing between “leaving a leading role in a theater movie and taking 15 days off from school.” Wu Lan also enthusiastically introduced certain movies to Su Chenxi. starring role. “What is a mother?” Xiao Yi, who was naughty and troublesome next to her, didn’t understand, but Wu Lan told her, “Sit tight and be good, or I won’t let you film the scene later.” Xiao Yi immediately sat upright and said, “What a scene! Do you have any lines? Really?” A pair of watery eyes were innocent and full of expectation.

Su Chenxi’s son has already been able to receive advertising, catwalk and other jobs in other places. It is common for him to work and study on high-speed trains and hotels. Wu Lan also took Xiao Yi around Hengdian. Shared electric vehicles in the town could not reach those remote studios. An 800 yuan second-hand electric vehicle set out from Hengdian Nanshanghu West Village, carrying Xiao Yi’s dreams. . Wu Lan was not sure how long she could hold on. She only told her husband not to give up her hometown business. The mother and daughter were petite, riding farther and farther away, hidden in the announcements flying in the sky.

(The interviewees’ names are pseudonyms in this article)