In 1985, a young Hong Kong Chinese expatriate returns to China to find his only remaining family, his maternal aunt and her family. After coming home, he buys a villa and drives a Mercedes, leaving the villagers gaping in amazement.
While others are still striving to earn the title of “ten-thousand-yuan household,” he’s already drawing on decades of future knowledge of the textile industry and setting his sights on the “frost-white” cotton fields in Wangjia Village. In the future, this stuff will fetch its weight in gold! But reality hits him hard: he gets scolded for “driving prices down” when buying cotton from farmers, has to pull strings through three layers of connections to buy a German jacquard loom, and is even branded a “foreign-worshipper” for using imported dyes.
To make matters worse, the old foxes at the state-owned textile mill have their eyes on his technology, newspaper reporters are poised to pounce on any mistakes, and even his Hong Kong suppliers are trying to keep him in check. Lin Chen grits his teeth. The jacquard craft passed down by his ancestors must not be lost, and future dyeing and printing technology must be put to use!
So he teaches country boys like Wang Xiaogen to read quality inspection reports, shows embroidery artisan Lin Jianhua how to incorporate Suzhou embroidery into modern fashion, and even has foreign engineers squat in the cotton fields with him to measure fiber length. When the first bolt of fine 80-count fabric bearing the hidden “Lin’s” pattern is displayed at the Canton Fair, when a French designer cries out over the orchid embroidery, and when officials from the Foreign Trade Bureau beam at his export earnings report, Lin Chen knows he’s made his move, and the game is alive.
It's a very warm book that I read straight away 👍 🤭
You are welcome to look for errors in my other books and I will correct them if you find them.