Siheyuan: I Transmigrate into Jia Dongxu and Turn My Life Around

In 1956, Jinghua City, Nanluoguxiang. The late-autumn wind was like a rusty knife, scraping across people’s faces and leaving invisible cuts that stung to the bone. Jia Dongxu’s head felt as if it were swarming with ten thousand hornets. The buzzing pain was so intense that his skull seemed ready to split. Hadn’t he died suddenly after staying up all night to finish a project proposal, then mocking the pathetic protagonist who shared his name in a novel, saying he was “worse off than a dog”? So what was all this in front of him? The peeling, mottled walls, the ceiling pasted over with old newspapers, and the air thick with an inescapable mix of mildew and poverty all felt so real that he could barely breathe. Memories that did not belong to him surged into his mind like floodwaters bursting through a dam. Jia Dongxu, a Grade One fitter at the Red Star Steel Mill.