After graduating from Peking University, Yanzhou entered "Xiangjiang Literature and Art" with journalistic ideals in mind, but he repeatedly encountered obstacles in the cracks between market transformation and the system: his persistent reports were withdrawn, his marriage was broken under the pressure of reality, and he was eventually unemployed and moved south in the cold winter of print media.
In Shenzhen's urban villages, express delivery vehicles and late-night blogs, he rediscovered the dignity of existence. Middle age is like a river flowing in the middle reaches - it loses the clarity upstream and does not reach the openness downstream, but must continue to flow in turbidity. When his daughter sent him a broken ancestral inkstone, and when the restorer used gold paint to paint the cracks with stars, he realized that the true integrity of life lies in calmly accepting all the brokenness and wrinkles.
This is a survival epic dedicated to all the "sandwich generation", about the dusk of ideals, the weight of responsibility, and how to learn not to sink in the rapids.
