What is it like to become someone's emergency contact for online loans?

No one can truly empathize with another person's poverty, distress, and destitution—until you become that person's emergency contact for online loans.

In other words, as long as you become someone's online loan emergency contact, you will empathize with them. You will gain insight into all their frustrations, desires, and dilemmas, making it feel as if you yourself owe the online loan company two hundred thousand.

Becoming an emergency contact is often a fleeting moment, like the protagonist in Kafka's The Metamorphosis suddenly turning into a beetle, or like a sudden snowfall in Heilongjiang in winter.

In this role, debt collectors will call you seven or eight times a day and send over twenty text messages. They will advise you, urge you, and interrogate you. They do so tirelessly, only to make you use the same tactics to advise, urge, and interrogate your friend.

You will shoulder a responsibility for someone else's debt, much like an inexperienced boy inexplicably discovering he has a biological son out in the world.

Last year, a collection agency kept calling me in the mornings.

They were earnest and persistent, repeatedly instructing me with a life-saving attitude that I must get in touch with Wang Wei. Wang Wei owed them money, they said, which was a very serious offense, and the consequences of defaulting were unimaginable. Their tone was as if they were discussing a lethal injection.

I answered collection calls for over half a month. I resisted, I argued, I found excuses for Wang Wei, and I put in good words for the lenders. I even negotiated a three-month repayment grace period for Wang Wei.

But the only problem is, to this day, I still have no idea who Wang Wei is.

Such is the nature of online loan contacts: you often have to become someone's contact first before discovering that you even have such a friend.

For a stranger to choose you as their emergency contact—what a massive sacrifice and show of trust; it is almost equivalent to finding themselves a new father or mother.

I have been the emergency contact for three strangers, and I am now filled with paternal love.

No one can guarantee they won't become an emergency contact at some point in their lives, because anyone can list you as theirs; it's a seller's market.

They could be your barber, your business partner, your math teacher, your colleague, or your ex-boyfriend. They could even be your enemy, but the one thing they cannot be is your relative.

On the day you receive that collection call, you will wonder: did they spend that huge sum where it was needed? Did they use that money to make a comeback and finally find a glimmer of hope in life? Have they realized their mistake and plan to make amends? And most importantly, who on earth are they?

A friend of mine who processes loans once inadvertently became the emergency contact for a former client, all because of a business card he had handed out.

He said that everyone in his line of work is destined to become someone else's emergency contact. His phone number will eventually spreads from one person to ten, and ten to a hundred, praised among those in desperate need of funds, becoming the leverage for all gamblers, the unemployed, and entrepreneurs—whether he knows them or not—to secure financing.

I comforted him, saying it was fine, that he wasn't the one who borrowed the money, and he should just block the numbers.

Later, he listed me as his emergency contact.