The Rivers and Mountains Cannot Be Crossed, but You Become My Boat

A fable of survival in the rift between urban and rural areas The novel begins with the scorching heat of 1998 in Qingshi Village in the south, condensing the pain of China's urban-rural transformation in the late 1990s into a dramatic reversal of college entrance examination admissions. Lu Shiyan's transcript of 587 points glowed coldly under the kerosene lamp, but it was reduced to waste paper due to the "repeat students are given priority" policy. This detail is like a sharp scalpel, cutting through the absurd nature of urban and rural education resource allocation. The author uses the wilting branches and leaves of the old locust tree in Qingshi Village as a metaphor for the mental difficulties of the youth at the bottom. He uses the faded red cloth sign of the supply and marketing cooperative to form a spatial confrontation with the glass curtain wall of the county department store, concretizing educational injustice into a visible class gap.