The Cosine Rule of Fate

Chen Xiangyang, a poor boy from a humble family, saw his life split in two by a highway crash. On New Year’s Eve in 2010, with a blizzard closing off the mountain roads, his migrant-worker parents rescued a Guangzhou official from a burning Audi. The phone number they received became the key to changing their fate. When news arrived that his grandmother had suddenly passed away, the left-behind boy from a Guizhou mountain village was forced to transfer to a school in Guangzhou. In a patched shirt and speaking with a rural accent, he stumbled into the world of status and privilege at an elite high school.

Amid the dazzling glow of Lin Chuxia, a wealthy heiress, he tasted both the humiliation and the excitement of class disparity. Chalk dust from rooftop tutoring sessions, sweat on the ten-thousand-meter track at the school sports meet, and the windfall profits of the driving-school brokerage gray market pieced together the boy’s wild growth. He thought getting into Shanghai University of Finance and Economics would let him cross the divide, but he watched with his own eyes as his first love vanished into the morning mist on the far side of the Pacific. Tossed about by the stock market, he charged blindly ahead like a quark in a particle collider. A fortune worth tens of millions and three shattered romances ultimately sent him plunging into the depths of Shanghai’s financial maelstrom.

Fate’s wheel began turning again when he met a physics professor. To pursue the icy beauty Shen Qinghuan, he abandoned business for science, only to glimpse the truth of life in the maze of quantum mechanics. When the starlight from a drone show fell over Dianchi Lake, and a withdrawal application sat beside a securities license, he finally understood why his father had hidden that red envelope all those years ago: some faint lights need to travel through twenty years before they can appear in the data stream of a dark matter detector.

This novel sets the chaos models of financial markets against the uncertainty of quantum physics, and uses three romantic encounters to measure the cost of rising through the social classes. From a rooftop wager in Zhujiang New Town to the stars above the Swiss nuclear research center.