This is a group of people looking for the shoreline in the alternation of wind and waves. A normal student who ran away from a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, a seal pressed between the warlord's account book and the bullet, a woman who made a living with needlework in the alley but could not avoid the hook of the times, and an old gentleman who wrote capital, morality and escape routes under the shadow of the Treaty Harbor. They met between the fog and the ringing of bells in the ten-mile foreign market. At first, they were just fragments of each other, and then they were forcibly connected into a rope by the social turmoil and the trend of the times. The fire alarm stopped in front of the concession marker, the whistle in the cotton spinning workshop suppressed the cries, the big clock on the Bund rang early before the war clouds, and the newsboy on the street corner sounded louder and louder. They repeatedly tested their own boundaries between disorder and reconstruction. Love and shame, cowardice and courage, like the inner seams of clothes, are always torn apart and re-knotted by the times. Every time the bell rang in the fog, some people heard it, and some pretended not to hear it. This book uses a realistic pen to describe all kinds of life in Shanghai and Jiangnan in the 1920s and 1930s, and attempts to explore within a historical framework how individuals bear their own names and walk towards the crossroads of destiny.
