A Life Through the Years

In 2001, in a poor village on the Loess Plateau, eighteen-year-old Wang Fan squats at the village entrance, facing an endless expanse of yellow earth, while his family struggles to put food on the table. The promise of fifty yuan a day shines into his bleak life like a burst of light, leading him down a thorny path of “fast money.” From unease to accepting it as routine, he struggles along a tightrope between morality and survival. Told in the first person, this documentary-style novel offers a true-to-life account of how an ordinary young man from the countryside is gradually swept into the gray undercurrents of his times: his struggles, his choices, and the road from which there is no turning back.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.