Mud Road to the Top tells the story of Wang Shugen, a country boy who goes from being a nobody who can’t do anything right to stumbling his way through half a lifetime amid the tides of a changing era.
He failed to get into high school, then squeezed onto construction sites with fellow villagers. When his wages were withheld, he didn’t even have the courage to clench his fists. He became an apprentice at a hardware factory, but lost his job after standing up for Su Qing, the kindhearted warehouse manager, when the deputy factory director’s nephew made trouble for him. He squeezed into an office job as a technician, only to be looked down on by clients for being “unsophisticated.” To make up for a parts shortage, he spent two days and two nights waiting outside a supplier’s door. When his business partner ran off with the company’s money, he sold his home and carried on, scraping by on small orders with seven veteran employees...
Along the way, he encountered the moonlight-like kindness of Lin Weiwei, the foreman’s daughter; endured the stern looks and warm teaching of the hard-nosed master craftsman known as “Iron-Faced Zhang”; and was dragged by Manager Zhao into learning how to navigate drinking parties and read blueprints. His stubborn refusal to lie flat gradually turned Gao Rui, a group executive assistant, from a skeptic into an admirer, while wealthy heiress Shen Ruoxi came to regard him as a reliable technical partner.
From the fields to construction sites, from factory floors to office towers, the calluses on his hands formed layer upon layer, and the people around him came and went. He knew the frustration of being blocked by a bully, the shyness of falling for a girl, and the helplessness of being crushed by capital. Yet in the end, with the simple-minded grit to get back up whenever he fell, he took his small machinery company into the new energy sector and became “Boss Wang” to everyone around him.
But when he looked back, what he cherished most was still the sweet potatoes his mother steamed in the courtyard, the way Su Qing smiled and said, “The balcony needs someone to grow flowers,” and the sense of solid purpose he felt squatting on the factory floor to inspect parts, just like when he used to watch his father turn the soil in the fields. This is no legendary tale of a nobody’s rise to the top. It’s just the story of an ordinary young man walking a muddy road
