Pudong, 1993

(Reborn + period drama + entrepreneurship) In the autumn of 1993, 45-year-old Chen Xiangdong dies in obscurity, swept aside by the tide of the times, only to open his eyes in a ninth-grade classroom in a Hongkou alley. In his previous life, he was a failed businessman who went bankrupt and watched his family fall apart. In this life, he has hazy memories of the future, but he is no all-knowing god. This is a story about making amends and putting down roots. He must storm into the steel mill the night before his father’s workplace injury, force his mother to get a checkup before she coughs up blood, and hold on to the childhood friends and close companions who were meant to fall. From a five-square-meter clothing stall on Huating Road to office towers on the east bank of the Huangpu River, he feels his way forward through fabric, bricks, and code, guided by his minute memories of Shanghai’s transformation. But being reborn is no cure-all. Hereditary high blood pressure dogs him, his forward-thinking ideas run into roadblocks everywhere in the 1990s, and deep down, he is still afraid of intimacy and commitment. Amid the bustle of Shanghai’s shikumen lanes and the shimmering waters of Suzhou Creek, Chen Xiangdong and his family and friends tell a Shanghai story of flawed people dancing with the times. This is no power fantasy about crushing everyone in your path. It is about clumsily and tenaciously turning regrets into a life worth living, through every rise and fall of the tide.