Su Ying looked at the single character ‘Get lost’ Su Jiayue had sent her and immediately replied cheerfully, ‘Right o!’
She then put her phone down, crawled under the duvet, rolled around a bit, and drifted off to sleep.
When Su Ying woke up, it was pitch black outside.
Su Ying rubbed her eyes as waves of hunger washed over her.
She shook her still-groggy head and decided to order some takeaway.
No sooner had she picked up her phone than she was startled by several messages from Su Jiayue.
She hurriedly opened their chat window:
【Senior Brother: Why bring this up all of a sudden?】
【Senior Brother: Hmm?】
[Senior Brother: Speak up.]
……
[Senior Brother: Did you stay up too late last night and are you asleep now?]
The most recent message read:
[Senior Brother: If I don’t receive a message from you by 8 o’clock, I’m coming round to your place to drag you out.]
How on earth did a single sentence get your crush to send you over 99 messages and even ask you out?
Just as Su Ying was about to reply, Su Jiayu’s call came through.
Su Ying answered the phone, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth: “Senior, didn’t you say 8 o’clock? It’s not even time yet.”
Su Jiayu gave a couple of grunts: “I was afraid you’d sleep through it, and I wouldn’t have time to give you your dying wishes.”
“Hehe.”
Su Ying lay back on her bed, phone in hand. Having woken up to a message from her senior and now receiving his call, she was in the absolute best of moods.
“Why are you asking that all of a sudden?”
Su Ying looked at her clean, manicured fingers, wondering whether she should pop out for some Hotpot before getting a manicure.
She’d never been to the Haidilao hotpot restaurant nor had a manicure before; she’d regretted more than once having wasted her 31% student discount.
She’d definitely have to do some research later, see if there were any nice nail colours out there recently. Oh, and she’d have to look up some creative ways to eat at Haidilao too.
“I read a comic about how one should spend one’s twilight years…” Actually, the comic covered more than that, but Su Ying’s ability to summarise was poor, so she could only recall this much.
“Senior shouldn’t be worrying about that, should he?” After all, even if his family circumstances weren’t exactly affluent by Chun City standards, he certainly wouldn’t face financial difficulties. It was highly likely he’d get married and have children, so he wouldn’t end up spending his twilight years alone.
Su Jiayu chuckled softly: “Well, the benefits and security for civil servants are quite good, and then there’s the pension and healthcare coverage…”
Wait a moment—what Senior Brother said was certainly true, but it didn’t quite match what she had in mind.
“Don’t you consider getting married and having children, Senior Brother?”
Wouldn’t a normal person say something like, “We’ll support each other in our old age” or “We’ll have children to help us”?
Su Jiayu clearly had a different perspective: “I’m not considering marriage or children for the time being. But even if I did have a child, by the time I’m old, she’d be quite a bit older herself. Rather than putting my child through the hassle, I’d rather hire a carer.”
“Er…” Su Ying scratched her head.
What a normal person. So normal it’s almost bizarre.
“So, are you worried about your old age, junior sister? Su Jiayu instantly grasped the crux of the matter and asked in return.
“Well…” Su Ying said after giving it some thought, “You know about my grandmother’s situation. I’m worried about what I’ll do when I’m old, and besides, I don’t have any social security coverage…”
Su Ying knew that many families in Chuncheng couldn’t afford to set aside 2 million yuan in savings, but she still harboured fears about the unknown future. What if, as people on social media claimed, there was massive inflation in 30 years’ time, and 2 million yuan would only have the purchasing power of 200 yuan?
Su Jiayu pondered for a moment: “I don’t know how much money you have left, but you could look into the lowest tier of the flexible employment pension scheme, or the highest tier of the resident pension insurance.”
Su Ying was completely baffled: “Eh? What’s that?”
She seemed to recall Fa Caicai mentioning something about the highest tier of pension schemes before.
The book *A Death Alone* had also emphasised the importance of a pension, but she didn’t have one, did she?
With her qualifications, the only way to find a job that covered the five social insurances would be to work in a factory. But she was absolutely unwilling to be a factory girl on an assembly line.
Su Jiayu paused for a moment before explaining to Su Ying: “Put simply, both pension and medical insurance come in two types: employee-based and resident-based. Flexible employment means you pay into the employee pension and medical schemes as a self-employed person. The retirement benefits and reimbursement policies are exactly the same as for those in regular employment who pay into the five social insurance schemes. The only difference is that you have to cover the employer’s contribution yourself.
“In Chuncheng now, the minimum contribution for flexible employment pension insurance is about twelve thousand a year. If you pay for fifteen years, you’ll get roughly two thousand a month in retirement. With resident pension insurance, the maximum annual contribution is five thousand; after fifteen years, you’ll get about… well, seven or eight hundred a month—I’m not entirely sure on that. Of course, the longer you pay in, the more you’ll get later on.”
“So the flexible employment scheme is still the better deal,” Su Ying realised quickly. The contributions for flexible employment are only a little over double those of the resident pension scheme, but the future payout is nearly double.
“Well, the investment is different, after all,” Su Jiayu continued. “It’s similar with medical insurance. Resident medical insurance—formerly known as the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme—costs around four hundred a year. You pay for one year’s cover, and the reimbursement rate is about 60%. Medical insurance for flexible employment is much more expensive—four hundred a month—but I’ve heard a portion of the money is returned to your personal account, and the reimbursement rate is the same as for employee medical insurance, reaching over 80% at the highest. What’s more, if you’ve paid for twenty-five years, you’ll be entitled to lifelong medical insurance benefits after retirement.”
“Goodness me, is that really possible?!” Su Ying’s eyes lit up.
“However…” Su Jiayu changed the subject, pausing to consider for a moment before continuing, “Given your current situation, my personal advice would be to pay for them separately. For pension insurance, if your finances allow, you should prioritise the self-employed scheme so you receive a higher pension upon retirement. As for medical insurance, you’re still young. You’ll mostly just get the odd cold or fever. You could take out resident medical insurance each year, supplemented by a million-yuan medical insurance policy. It’ll only cost a few hundred yuan a year, which should be enough to cover any emergencies. Should anything serious happen, you can always switch to flexible employment medical insurance at short notice. When you reach your thirties and minor ailments start to appear, you can then take out flexible employment medical insurance and continue paying until retirement age, which will allow you to enjoy lifelong benefits.”
Su Ying was taken aback by these words.
She couldn’t help but exclaim, “Senior Brother, how do you know so much?!”
“It’s just common—” Su Jiayu chuckled lightly, the words slipping out before he stopped himself abruptly and changed the subject awkwardly. “Mind you, what I’ve said might not be the latest policy. You’d best wait until the eighth of the month when the offices reopen and check with the community service centre.”
After hanging up, Su Ying immediately opened her social media app to search for related topics, only to discover just how many people were discussing pensions and medical insurance.
She scrolled for ages, only to find that all the heated back-and-forth arguments were nowhere near as clear as what her senior had explained in just a few minutes.
No wonder they say he’s a top graduate from a prestigious university.
Su Ying let out a soft sigh. At moments like this, she was always overcome by a profound sense of helplessness. The gap between her and her senior was more than just a chasm—it was an unbridgeable abyss.
Su Ying glanced up at the ceiling and was suddenly struck by a whim. If you paid into the pension scheme for flexible employment for 15 years, you could receive 2,000 yuan. If she started paying this year and continued until retirement—exactly 30 years—doubling the contribution period, wouldn’t she be able to receive 4,000 yuan?
To test this theory, she immediately opened ‘Teacher D’, the app that had burst onto the scene this winter.
Whilst others used ‘Teacher D’ to predict their future fortunes, Su Ying used it to calculate her future pension.
In a way, it was a case of different paths leading to the same destination.
D-Teacher didn’t provide a specific figure, merely demonstrating the calculation method and offering an estimate, which was roughly in line with her own guess.
However, D-Teacher repeatedly emphasised that the actual amount would be far higher than this, as the contribution base increases annually in line with the average wage, and the average wage at the time of retirement would certainly be substantial.
However, the rise in the average wage brings with it another issue: pension contributions will also increase in line with the average wage.
Currently, with Su Ying’s monthly ‘salary’ of 6,000, she can easily afford the 1,000 pension contribution. But as the average wage rises, her contributions will rise accordingly, and one day, they will reach a level she cannot afford.
Su Ying took a pragmatic view: she would simply pay into the scheme for 15 years to ensure she could claim a pension. If, after 15 years, the premiums became too high for her to bear—and given that she had already spent a fair bit of her money on various things—she could always switch to the resident pension scheme.
She had paid into the lowest tier of the flexible employment pension scheme for several years, yet when it came to collecting her pension, it was still more than what Fa Caicai received from the highest tier of the resident pension scheme.
It suddenly dawned on Su Ying.
Fa Cai Cai could live comfortably in a rural town with 500,000 yuan in savings. Her benchmark has never been the urbanites in developed areas like Chun City, but rather those elderly farmers who toil in the fields all year round, facing the soil and working the earth, yet earn less than 10,000 yuan a year. Or those ‘left-behind women’ who work from dawn till dusk in small shops, yet can’t even make 2,000 yuan a month.
They pay only the minimum 200-yuan tier for the urban-rural pension scheme, and even the 400-yuan resident medical insurance requires repeated persuasion from village officials—and they still might not pay it.
For Fa Caicai, with 500,000 yuan in savings, a house in town, the highest tier of pension insurance, and resident medical insurance, he can indeed live a very comfortable life.
Similarly, Su Ying, who plans to ‘lie back’ in Chuncheng with her five million, is comparing herself to those ordinary workers earning 3,000 yuan a month, without social insurance or housing fund contributions, who, in a place where property prices are 5,000 yuan per square metre, can only squeeze into a small three-bedroom flat with their parents, siblings, and their spouses and children – just as she once did.
Most of them can only commute by electric scooter; even the so-called ‘licenced version of an old man’s tricycle’—the ‘Dopiao Youtou’ model—requires years of scrimping and saving to afford.
So Su Ying, with her cash-purchased flat, able to pay for the lowest tier of flexible employment insurance and medical insurance for herself, is simply living the high life.
In contrast, those with savings in the tens of millions or even over a hundred million who still openly declare they cannot ‘lie flat’—their standard of living is something Su Ying, a member of the working class in Spring City, could never even begin to imagine.
Perhaps property prices in their neck of the woods exceed 100,000 yuan per square metre; perhaps they’re eyeing a holiday villa; their household would surely boast at least two luxury cars worth a million yuan each, whilst purchasing luxury goods is as commonplace as daily meals. As for their children, they’re sent to private schools with termly fees starting at 200,000 yuan from nursery onwards, require the best tutors for one-to-one tuition, and have their overseas study arrangements sorted out…
Of course, all this was merely Su Ying’s imagination; she would likely never come into contact with such people in her lifetime, and her references were drawn entirely from social media and novels.
Still, these wealthy people had little to do with Su Ying.
Things having come to this, she might as well have a meal first.
For instance, she could go and have a meal at Haidilao.