My Chinese Dream
----Everyone Owns a House
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Martin Luther King had a dream that one day black men could be equally treated because all men were created equal. Today, I have a dream, a Chinese dream that everyone could have a house.
Have you ever seen a movie called Finding Mr. Right? The Chinese version is “北京遇上西雅图”. Yeah, you know. The leading female actress really liked the male lead’s home in Seattle. She was surprised to learn how expensive his house was as it only cost 500,000 dollars which is about 4 million Yuan. This amount only allows you to buy 2 toilets on the Second Ring Road of Beijing.
In China, generally speaking, a house will cost 74 years’ income of an average Chinese. However, according to the United Nations, a reasonable price of a house should be an average man’s income of 3-6 years. What a sharp contrast!
I have a 28-year-old cousin who has reached marriage age. He had a girlfriend. So it was time that they had got married. However, his girlfriend asked him to buy a house before marriage. Of course a house became somewhat a luxury for an ordinary worker like him and his father. The result, as you can imagine, is "Gone with his romantic love" because of a house.
It strikes me that in the future I will be worried about affording a house, too. Maybe I will also pinch and scrape my whole life in order to purchase a house. Maybe
I will get trapped in a pathetic situation where my love wanders about, like a homeless person, could not find a shelter from the rough rain and wind. How pathetic!
As the proverb goes, an Englishman's house is his castle. So, I have a dream, a Chinese dream that one day every Chinese is able to have his own castle.