Building a Dam to Bind the Dragon: Song of My Youth

In the winter of 1978, sixteen-year-old Yang Xiaodong stands at a dam construction site, where the biting wind sweeps across a ground strewn with ice.

No one knows that over the next seven years, this frail young man will rise step by step from an ordinary laborer hauling earth and dredging sand to a blaster, a dump truck driver, a radio announcer, and finally the chief construction supervisor for the entire dam.

Nor does anyone know that after the reservoir is completed, he will return home to get married, work as a substitute teacher, borrow money to attend teacher's college, become a full-time teacher, serve as a principal for seventeen years, and retire in 2022.

He has lived through fifty years of social change, and now he picks up his pen to write his own story...

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