Gao Mingyuan, an executive at a foreign bank, received double bad news on his 45th birthday: his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and he became the oldest middle-level person on the group's layoff list. When he pushed open the rusty iron door of his old house in Shikumen with his medical records and separation agreement in hand, he saw his wife Lin Peipei hiding the real estate agency's business card in the collar of her cheongsam - the hostess of a well-known cheongsam customization shop in Shanghai had secretly listed the school district house they purchased when they got married.
The carved wooden stairs creaked, and the sound of her 16-year-old daughter Gao Xiaotang's live broadcast drifted down from the attic. The girl wore a linen gray wig and danced in front of the camera while dancing in a girl group. She did not forget to stuff antidepressants into a Hello Kitty storage box. Under the sycamore tree at the entrance of the alley, his father Gao Jianguo, who was shaking his cattail fan all day long, was quietly remitting his pension earned from thirty years of service to the strange number in his address book that called him "Dad."
When the home emergency bell rang suddenly late at night during the winter solstice, Gao Mingyuan, who was supporting his incontinent mother, dug out the yellowed adoption certificate from the mess on the ground. The daughter brought back from the Chongming Island Welfare Institute twenty years ago, the pawn tickets that fell out of the buckle of his wife's cheongsam, and the hundreds of ambiguous text messages on his father's elderly phone all intertwined into a huge spider web in the blue light of the 120 ambulance.
This family ethics novel set in Shikumen, Shanghai, reveals the lice under the gorgeous robes of urban middle-class families through a sudden disease storm. When school district housing, pensions, and live broadcast rewards become the touchstones of family ties in the new era, three generations have to relearn how to love each other clumsily in the countdown to fading memories.
