Beijing Bicycle and a Degree of Futility

I remember the first summer I worked at Starbucks. I had taken time off school to get the job, and by May I had completed my training to become a certified barista. A bonus to having completed training was being able to collect tips for working non-training, real shifts. Suddenly, I had thirty dollars in my hand, cash. I bought a pair of shoes. They were lovely, with a silver-grey strap and a rhinestone ring ornament. And they were 100% mine, my first luxury item purchased as a working citizen. When the shoes disappeared one afternoon, I was heartbroken and angry. I found out later that my cousin had borrowed them to complete her own outfits. Bitch.

There is something about the emotional satisfaction that material items will give a person. To me, those shoes marked that I had accomplished something; their value was far beyond the twelve dollars I used to purchase them. Those shoes were the mental breakdown I had when I chose to take a semester off school, the ten job applications I filled out in December, the half-dozen interviews that were never followed up, and the three months of training I endured after finally being hired at Starbucks.

For protagonist Guei in Beijing Bicycle, this bicycle is one hundred times more valuable than my pair of silver shoes.

The opening scene of Beijing Bicycle sets the tone for the whole story perfectly. Several country boys introduce themselves by name and origin, smiling and laughing, adorably nervous. They are unique individuals trying to find a place in the world with new opportunities. Immediately following this introduction, their manager strips them of their identities and humanity by giving them hair cuts and uniforms. Now, the boys represent the company, not their own interests.

Guei does not give up the bicycle to the bullies.

Four of the initially named boys fade into the background, further emphasizing the harsh class divide as the story focuses in on the protagonist, Guei. The theme of class divide runs through the whole plot as many of the Guei begins the cutthroat dance of furthering their circumstances and is cheated out of opportunities by those above him in economic and social hierarchies.

During the manager's identity-stripping rant, the shrewd business man informs the new employees that, in order to pay for the company-issued bicycles, the company will claim an additional 20% on top of the 50% already taken from each young man's earnings per delivery. Each messenger boy earns only on commission when the pick-up and delivery of packages is complete. The steep cut in earnings breathes gross injustice on its own right, and the commission-based earnings makes a miniature shark tank within the messenger company. Not only is there capitalistic competition between this delivery company and the many in Beijing City, the Manager pits each man against each other within the company.

In his article, "Where Did The Future Go?", Randy Martin categorizes the messenger company's behavior as securitization, debt in the guise of security. Martin refers specifically to the practice of home and car mortgages; for Guei, the bicycle puts him in debt, but it's a debt that secures his job with the company. The bicycle equals work equals money equals the potential for a better life than what he might experienced in the Chinese countryside as a farmer. The messenger company's capitalism more resembles the broken feudalism seen as recent as the sharecroppers in the American South. The wealthy land owner lends land to former black slaves for a percentage of the produce; sometimes that land went right back to the plantation owner after the farmers were cut or cheated out of the land.

This enslavement of the less fortunate is not isolated to a hundred years' past or across the Pacific Ocean. Securitization is what the American economy thrives on, especially in public education. A recent poll by NPR, college graduates were asked simply the subject of their bachelor's degrees. Overwhelmingly, college graduates pursue business or medical degrees on the fundamental of securitization: will this debt or investment get me a job after I've finished? It's the butt of liberal arts majors' jokes, the potential for work post-graduation, but the issue is as real as an empty pantry. Time and money and physical prime are given to the education corporation, but what is the student going to get out of it? Worse, whether or not the student gets a job after graduation, they must continue paying for the bicycle for the rest of their lives.

"A Degree of Futility" by Austin Smith

Works Cited

Beijing Bicycle. Dir. Xiaoshuai Wang. Taiwan Arc Light Films, 2001. DVD.

Bui, Quoctrung. "What's Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 09 May 2014.

Martin, Randy. "Where Did The Future Go?" Class Handout.