That winter, the rain fell in fine droplets, hitting the windshield of his electric scooter like countless tiny days. Li Ming had only recently arrived in the city, living in a cramped shared apartment, with only an old mobile phone and a second-hand electric scooter to his name. The early days of delivering food were tough: low platform subsidies, inconsistent orders, sometimes earning only 300 yuan a month . From that 300 yuan, he still had to squeeze out money for transportation, phone bills, and a few hundred yuan to send home to his family. Life felt like a narrow zipper, always tight and suffocating. He had considered giving up. But when he thought of his elderly mother at the dinner table in the countryside, wiping away tears and saying, "It's not easy for you out there," he gritted his teeth and persevered. Day after day, he learned the rules of the game from delivery routes , peak order times, and the speed of food preparation at different restaurants. He began...
Real-life story: A single mother transforms her life by attending night school and working part-time while raising her child.
That winter, her four-year-old son fell asleep hugging a worn-out teddy bear, the radiator by the bed creaked, and light snow fell outside the window. She quietly cleared the dishes, her face etched with exhaustion but without complaint—it was just another ordinary night among many. Three years earlier, a sudden divorce had thrust her into the ranks of single mothers: mortgage payments, living expenses, and her son's preschool fees weighed heavily on her shoulders like a mountain. During the day, she worked as a cashier at a supermarket, at night she attended night school to study nursing, and on weekends she took on odd jobs as a part-time cleaner, even delivering food after 2 AM. Others saw her as a "workaholic," but in reality, every step she took was cautious and heavy. She remembered almost falling asleep several times during the first night school class due to exhaustion from her daytime work. But whenever she saw her son secretly holding up a piece of paper throu...