"My Name is Zhang Jianjun" uses delicate brushstrokes to describe the rough life of a rural boy in Henan from 2003 to 2023.
In junior high school, the protagonist struggled between the muddy road to school and the heavy farm work. With confusion about the future, he experienced young and heavy times such as ignorance in class and worrying about tuition fees, and grew up hard between the dirt and the desk.
After graduating from technical secondary school/high school, he was bewitched by fellow villagers and went south to pursue the "money scene". However, he encountered hardships such as intermediary traps and black workshop labor.
From 2010 to 2015, he was lost in the daily depression. He fell into a direct sales scam and then went astray in a telecommunications fraud. He was eventually punished by law and fell to the bottom of his life.
After being released from prison, the protagonist struggles to atone for his sins and is reborn. Finding a job was blocked and he could only work as a coolie. In the midst of hardship, he got to know and fall in love with the female worker Xiaomei, started a family, and regained hope in life with the birth of a child and the support of his family.
From 2020 to 2023, although he was troubled by the epidemic shutdown and tuition pressure in ordinary days, he worked stably in the factory, was recognized for his hard work, and his family was full of warmth. At the end, he joins the torrent of migrant workers, tired but calm, showing the strength of ordinary people to move forward tenaciously in the tide of the times, conveying the profound theme of "ordinariness is the answer, resilience is strength".
