The Hard Road to Success

Rural southern Sichuan in the 1990s.

A life-saving debt of gratitude, and the love and resentment between a man and a woman, laid bare in a farmhouse's main room.

Choose an old love, and you must shoulder a mountain of debt. Stay with the person by your side, and you must sever your hopes for the past. Zhou Yang, a young man from the countryside, makes his choice beneath the gaze of everyone around him.

He thought that learning a trade would let him escape the shackles of poverty.

But the world is full of hardships. There are crushing defeats and agonizing struggles, and all he can do is grit his teeth and keep fighting.

A feather can fly. Getting it off the ground is just hard.

And so begins the story of an ordinary man's ups and downs.

This leaves the story completely open-ended: the blurb only stresses that "getting off the ground is hard," without locking in the ending. Later, you can have him weather many hardships and find a decent home at last, or let fate continue to wear him down. You can even switch his line of work along the way without any restrictions.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.