This is a story about growing up and migration.
Li Xuanyi, a boy from a mountain city, leaves home at fourteen with grades that put him last in his class and no idea what the future holds. He heads south to work in the kitchen of a restaurant in Yangcheng, where, amid cooking smoke and clattering dishes, he gets his first taste of the hard reality that comes with earning a living. As his hands grow callused and he learns to carry steaming plates with ease, fate pushes him farther afield to Rongcheng, into the bustling world of logistics.
At fifteen, he sprawls across the passenger seat of a truck, watching the rice fields ripple across the western Sichuan plain. On mountain roads late at night, he shares a warming drink of baijiu with his mentor; at a city delivery depot, he clumsily learns to write by copying figures from account books. From dishwasher to apprentice trucker, from hauling goods to dealing with clients, he has seen exhaustion beneath Yangcheng's neon lights and felt the chill of Rongcheng's first snow. Amid the smell of diesel and sweat, he slowly comes to understand the weight of the word survival.
This is no legend of a spectacular comeback, but the true path of a working-class boy struggling, observing, and learning in the cracks between city streets. Standing on a street in Rongcheng and looking back at the mountain city's fog and Yangcheng's winds, the eyes that once dimmed with uncertainty are gradually kindling with a light of his own, warm with the everyday bustle of life. This is a novel about youth, labor, and urban memories, capturing the resilience and hardship of ordinary people as they measure the world with their own hands amid the tides of the times.
