The winter frost of the twelfth lunar month in 1985 settled over the loess hills, and into the newborn’s first cry. Carrying the hopes of the generation before him, Fan Shutong slowly made his way out of the mountains’ shadow. From ration coupons to stocks, from village life to mortgages, from the admonition “Raise children to support you in old age” to the desperate cry “Dad, don’t go,” his forty years are a miniature history of a changing era. This is not one man’s struggle, but the story of an entire generation trying to find a place for its roots, marriages, and futures aboard the speeding train of time.
