Pump Some Iron with these Beijing Uncles
On the grounds of an old locomotive factory, a bike-shed-turned-gym offers a special community for its dedicated retirees
The Yongding River flows through the western suburbs of Beijing. Not far from the riverbanks, a cluster of single-story cottages is all that’s left of the Erqi Locomotive Factory, once the second-largest industrial hub in Beijing and famous for the Erqi Workers’ Movement of 1923, a strike that ended with the death of 33 workers’ representatives at the hands of the warlord Wu Peifu.
In a nearby residential community housing mostly retired workers and their families, a former bicycle shed without any signage or lettering sits sandwiched between two brick residential buildings. It is home to the Erqi Fitness Club, which Yang Hongzeng has been frequenting for 22 years. For at least five days a week, the 84-year-old Yang, who needs crutches to walk, shows up in the dim light and air thick with the scent of sweat, rust, and mildew. He greets each person one by one, before slowly taking off his jacket and putting on a pair of dirt-stained white work gloves to get ready for some exercise.
Li Shulin, 65, works out his upper body at Erqi Fitness Gym. He comes to exercise four times a week.
The majority of the gym’s 60 current members are former employees of the Erqi factory, which mostly produced locomotives and wagons. When the gym first opened in the late 1980s, these forgers, clampers, and electricians made its earliest fitness equipment from factory scraps. Most members here first met during the heyday of Chinese industry, then drifted apart when laid off from state factory jobs following the reform period, but eventually found their way back to this windowless shed—as exercise buddies and chess companions, trying to regain their physical glory while reminiscing about the past.
Yang Hongzeng smiles as he talks to other gym members in between workouts. Behind him are the clothes that members have hung out to dry.
“Ask any child playing on the streets, they would tell you their parents worked at the Erqi factory,” Yang, who is the oldest member of the gym, says of the neighborhood in the old days. He joined the factory in the early 1960s and witnessed its transformation from a few workshops in a cornfield into a local economic powerhouse with over 10,000 employees.
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