Love and Fate in a Small Factory

Qin Yongbin belonged to a generation of rural people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was among the last university students admitted before the expansion of college enrollment. Born and raised in the countryside, he was simple and unassuming, and found it hard to adapt to the bustling city. Even after graduating from university, he could only join the lowest ranks of the labor force, taking a job at a dyeing and printing factory. Still, he worked hard and never gave up. Zhang Juan was also a beautiful young woman from the countryside. She left school after middle school to find work, went through many hardships, but faced life bravely and stood up to the forces of evil. She and Qin Yongbin crossed paths in love only once, but circumstances forced them apart. In truth, the dyeing and printing factory was full of young men and women with similar fates, whose lives unfolded in stories of love filled with laughter and tears. This was the world in which young people at the very bottom of society struggled to survive. Though born into humble circumstances, they never admitted defeat and never stopped striving. Their joys and sorrows, their partings and reunions, were all songs: endless stories of life's bitterness. On the northern yellow earth, it was these humble young people at the bottom who brought ripples of life to a silent world.