Reborn: Selling Roasted Sweet Potatoes at the Bank

At thirty, Xu Guoguo has spent seven years behind a bank counter. With no hope of promotion and mortgage and car payments weighing him down, he can barely catch his breath. An accident sends him back to age twenty-three, to the summer when he had just started working at the bank and was full of uncertainty about the future. This time, with only a few hundred yuan in his pocket, he looks at the passersby bundled against the cold outside the bank and suddenly remembers the roasted-sweet-potato stalls that were always picked clean during the winters of his past life. On one side is the “iron rice bowl” of a stable job; on the other, a steaming business opportunity full of everyday warmth. Xu Guoguo grits his teeth: he’ll start by selling roasted sweet potatoes outside the bank and make a life of his own choosing. This is a story about choices, perseverance, and turning one’s life around. From a bank counter to a street stall, he uses a stove full of warm sweet potatoes to roast himself a very different life.