The Years of Jingmin

In 1949, eighteen-year-old He Shunzi, a shop assistant at a pickled-vegetable store in the hutongs, married Xiurong, the shopkeeper’s only daughter. The wedding was simple: they set out three tables of food in Houtongli Hutong. From then on, He Shunzi went from shop assistant to something like a junior shopkeeper. Then society began changing at breakneck speed, and the next thirty years swept by mercilessly for this young shop assistant. Was the era moving too fast, or were people slow to adapt? He couldn’t understand it or make sense of it. All he could do was cling to that little patch of hope and somehow get by.