Reading About Wanqing at Dusk

This is a long novel about loneliness and emotional struggles in later life. The protagonist Zhang Licheng retires at the age of sixty. He originally looked forward to spending a leisurely old age with his wife, but he received a divorce agreement not long after retirement. For the next three years, he lived alone in a small apartment, experiencing the transformation from "finally clean" to "so clean that I felt panicked" - the bed was always cold, the food was always makeshift, and when he woke up at night, he could only open his eyes and wait for dawn. He tried to go on a blind date, try to remarry, and try to start a new family with a woman with children, but he repeatedly ran into obstacles in front of the triple threshold of property, children, and trust. The novel uses delicate writing to describe the emotional window period of an ordinary old man under the Chinese-style pension dilemma, as well as his hesitation and struggle between "It's a good life to have a wife" and "When can these days come again?"