In 1976, the Qingming rain washed away the red brick walls of Jiangnan Textile Factory. When Chen Jianjun, deputy director of the technical department, was improving the dust collector, the gears of fate turned quietly. When his wife Su Yulan's admission ticket for the college entrance examination was stained with blood in the delivery room, when secret letters from Hong Kong stirred up the Shenzhen River with gold bars from the Republic of China, and when Taiwanese engineers crossed the martial law line with the drawings of the Southwest Associated University, an industrial epic spanning the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and three places suddenly began.
In this era of intertwined quenching and radiation, Chen Jianjun carries the memory of his past life and cracks the uranium conspiracy during the Japanese occupation amidst the steel roar of the dust collector; Su Yulan uses a scalpel as a pen to write about the kindness of doctors on examination papers and X-ray films. From the mysterious cloud of hidden piles in Baosteel's blast furnace to the tracking of nuclear waste on the snowy top of Yushan, from the dusty archives of the University of Tokyo to the annual ring code of the sacred tree in Alishan, the couple took the genetic map of radiation burns to find the survival equation of the nation between steel and flesh.
When the sky lantern wrapped with activated carbon filters rises in the Taiwan Strait, when the cherry blossom badge of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries falls into the boiling molten steel, and when the fluorescent blood of the little flower illuminates the negotiating table in Geneva, an ultimate answer about salvation emerges in the quenched and cooled blue light: Those souls burned by the flames of the times will eventually be tempered in the ashes of industrial civilization to produce the light of life that transcends radiation.
