Old Times

In Chongqing in 1993, when Zhou Mingyuan, the accountant of the soda fountain factory, was altering numbers on the ledger, acid rain was falling outside the window. The chimneys of this industrial town emit thick black smoke day and night, and the fingers of migrant workers in the work sheds are stained permanently gray by machine tool oil. The work uses Zhou Mingyuan's family of four as a microcosm to unfold the anatomy of that era: As a technical backbone of a state-owned enterprise, Zhou's father was falsely accused of stealing public funds because he refused to sign a consent form for layoffs and diversion, and ended up stabbing his own throat with a pen in a mental hospital; Zhou's mother was setting up a stall in the vegetable market. Unsold pig heads were rolling out of the basket that was overturned by the urban management at four in the morning. She secretly picked up the muddy braised pork and stuffed it into her daughter's schoolbag; After Zhou Mei failed in the high school entrance examination, she met the illegitimate son of a corrupt official while working as a bartender in a nightclub. The other party folded a hundred-dollar bill into a paper airplane and threw it at her; When Zhou Mingyuan himself was working in the south, he witnessed workers who were poisoned by trichlorethylene being transported to barren mountains in ambulances and abandoned by the factory. He recognized the names of his old classmates on the death list. The novel is interspersed with a large number of real historical events: the tax-sharing reform in 1994 and the stability maintenance operations before Hong Kong's return to the motherland in 1997. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.