Chinese man has lived in an airport for 14 years to avoid family
Living with family can be overbearing sometimes, and many may feel annoyed and trapped by constant pestering.
For Wei Jianguo, a Chinese man who is in his 60s, the solution has been to move to Beijing Capital International Airport, where he is understood to have been living for 14 years now, so that he can smoke and drink as much as he likes.
Mirroring Tom Hanks’ Viktor Navorsk in the 2004 movie The Terminal – where a tourist is forced to live at JFK airport – Mr Wei has a set up of his food, belongings, and sleeping bag in a waiting area.
He said he won’t return home because then, he’ll be forced to quit drinking and smoking – a habit he supplies with his monthly government allowance.
In 2018 he told China Daily: ‘I can’t go back home because I have no freedom there.
‘My family told me if I wanted to stay, I had to quit smoking and drinking.
If I couldn’t do that, I had to give them all my monthly government allowance of 1,000 yuan. But then how would I buy my cigarettes and alcohol?’
Mr Wei’s home is in Wangjing, around 12 miles away from the airport. He moved in 2008, and had settled at Terminal 2, which is ‘the warmest’ but has previously told Pear Video that he sometimes visits Terminal 3.
He began sleeping at railway stations and the airport after falling out with his family.
The man said that he’d given up looking for work, and was let go from a job where he worked at an internal combustion engine factory in his 40s for being ‘too old’.
While he goes out if he needs to do any shopping, he doesn’t like to leave the airport because he ‘won’t get cold’ that way’, Mr Wei told Pear Video.
The outlet also talked to staff at the airport, who said Mr Wei is harmless, albeit being a loud drunk.
One worker said that Mr Wei had been encouraged to leave a few times, but ‘every time we mentioned it he was drunk and lost his temper’.
He added that the airport dweller doesn’t bother other passengers and – with the terminals being warm – doesn’t ‘freeze’ in the Shunyi Disctrict’s cold winters, in which temperatures can plunge as low as -13C(8.6F).
According to China Daily, Mr Wei is not the airport’s only resident, and in 2018 as many as six people were thought to be living like him – with one man ‘notorious’ for blasting Chinese opera music from his radio.
Credit: Daily Mail UK