In the midsummer of Binhai City, the life of Chen Fan, an assembly line worker at an electronics factory, is like a stuck old clock: the dialysis fee for his mother's uremia makes him breathless, the difficulties of his mean supervisor, the ridicule of his ex-girlfriend, and the landlord's rent push, trapping him in the cracks of survival. Even the electronic watch with tape on his wrist has become a footnote to the struggle at the bottom.
Until that late night, the brass tool box unearthed from under the bed accidentally opened a gap in fate - the neatly stacked watch repair tools in the box, the yellowed "Chen's Watch Repair Notes", and the motto left by my grandfather, "A hand with a thousand pounds of skill and a heart with an inch of sincerity", hid old craftsmanship that he had never cared about. In order to collect medical expenses, he used his mother's old silver necklace to repair the broken teeth of an antique pocket watch. He actually made the Patek Philippe "ticking" sound again after it had been dormant for 20 years, and earned the first "life-saving money" in his life.
After being fired from the factory, Chen Fan entered the antique city with a toolbox and relied on the identification tips in his notebook to spot fakes, which won him the appreciation of the down-and-out old shopkeeper. He became famous after restoring a bronze bell made by the Qianlong Emperor, but was slandered by a local restorer. "Bad business rules"; he teamed up with Lin Wanqiu, the second generation of a pawnbroker, to open a studio and use live broadcast treasure appraisal to break industry barriers; he took over the restoration project of the chime bell leaked from the Forbidden City, competed with his opponents on parts the size of needle tips, and finally exposed the fraud and gained a firm foothold.
This is a story about a small person at the bottom breaking through with his skills, and it is also a hymn hidden among the gears and hairsprings - no matter how difficult your life is, as long as you are sincere, you can finally make the suspended time bright again.
