A novel about people born in the 1980s.
About our generation, our youth, and how we struggled, compromised, grew up, and grew old in the tide of the times.
Some say ours was the last generation to witness a truly rural China, and the first to be completely swept away by the wave of urbanization. We were caught in between, like pawns crossing a river: unable to turn back, yet unable to reach the other bank.
It sounds rather poetic, but real life wasn't so sentimental.
Real life was this: your mother bent over in the fields, planting rice seedlings, repeating the same motion thousands of times a day, earning just enough work points to trade for a few pounds of white flour; your father hauled cement at a construction site, his shoulders rubbed raw, scabbed over, rubbed raw again, scabbed over again, until they grew a thick layer of dead skin; your sister left for an electronics factory in the south at sixteen to pay for your schooling, standing on an assembly line for twelve hours a day, her fingers scarred by soldering irons, yet always sending money home.
Real life was this: you studied with all your might, moving from the village primary school to middle school in town, from there to the county high school, then on to a university in the provincial capital. You thought you had finally escaped rural life, only to discover after graduation that you had merely jumped out of one pit and into a bigger one.
Real life was this: you bought a home in the city, got married, and had a child. You thought you had finally found your footing, but every night, lying in bed, you dreamed of the old locust tree at the entrance to your village, your mother standing at the village edge calling you home for dinner, and your father driving an ox cart along the mountain road, the setting sun stretching his shadow long, so very long...
