BEIJING: A Shanghai grandmother has been nicknamed the “telephone booth princess” for persisting in her post as a public phone booth manager for 33 years.
Shen Yuxiu, who is in her 80s, manages the city’s last staffed booth.
She looks after two very old landline phones. Everyday she arrives at 9am and stays until 8pm.
Despite the fact that the booth is located on Fuzhou Road, which connects Shanghai’s two hottest tourist spots, The Bund and People’s Square, Shen said that she only earns two yuan (3 US cents) a week.
Phone calls inside Shanghai are charged at 0.4 yuan per three minutes, and calls made to other provinces are charged 0.2 yuan per minute. Shen said people can also dial abroad from the phones.
She still has some regular customers who do not own a mobile phone. Also, the booth is also a lifesaver for people who forgot or lost their phones.
Shen said she lives off her pension and keeps working at the booth to resist loneliness.
She began working at the booth as an accountant when it was established in 1993.
Remembering the old days, she said there was an endless stream of customers making phone calls at the booth when their pagers beeped.
The monthly sales volume could easily exceed 6,000 yuan, then US$1,000 according to the exchange rates in 1993.
At its peak days, the booth had five staff working on shifts.
Now there is only Shen.
Shen said she saw the five-square-metre booth as her second home.
When her loving husband died in 1997, he told her to keep running the booth even if it does not make a single penny.
“I know he was afraid of me feeling lonely,” Shen said.
Shen has two sons, but she has been living alone since her husband died.
She owns a mobile phone, but sometimes when there are no customers, she makes calls on the landline to support the business.
She would call her family and friends and tell them that she “misses them.”
The last staffed phone booth in Shanghai was a popular tourist spot among youngsters, especially those who have lived all their life with mobile phones.
They gave Shen the nickname “telephone booth princess.”
A few years ago, the booth also became partly a security booth and Shen shared the space with security guards.
China still has many unstaffed telephone booths, which are rarely used today.
There are many discussions about whether to keep them.
Some believe that they are still necessary, especially in the case of an emergency. These public phones reportedly allow free phone calls for the first three minutes.
Some cities, such as Shanghai, also adapted the unstaffed phone booths into multifunctional stations that also allow people to read and borrow books.
Some praised the Shanghai government for “having the wisdom to keep the old culture despite the rapid modern developments”.
“I did not know that there are almost no telephone booths left at all,” a nostalgic online observer said.
“Thanks to Grandma Shen’s persistence, we can still witness a relic of the old days,” said another. - South China Morning Post
