Twenty-year-old He Yuzhu works as a kitchen assistant in the cafeteria of a steel mill. Three years ago, his father, He Daqing, abandoned him and his eight-year-old sister without so much as an explanation. And so the days pass by the stove: stir-frying, serving meals, getting off work, going home to cook for his sister, then sleeping. His salary is 38 yuan and 50 cents. After rent and food, there's barely anything left, but life goes on.
Nobody thinks He Yuzhu will amount to anything. The people in the courtyard call him “Silly Zhu”: stubborn, clumsy, hot-tempered, and good for nothing but tossing a wok.
But He Yuzhu doesn't see it that way. He believes the work in front of the stove deserves to be done well: cook good food, live well, and take life one day at a time.
Over the next thirty years, he goes from kitchen assistant to head chef, from overseeing one pot of food to running an entire cafeteria. He watches the courtyard residents come and go: Yi Zhonghai is kind on the surface but calculating underneath; Liu Haizhong is sharp-tongued but kindhearted; Yan Bugui is stingy to the core; Xu Damao is so shrewd he can't be trusted. He watches Qin Huairu marry into the courtyard and struggle until she finally makes it; he watches Jia Dongxu ruin himself step by step. And he watches his little sister grow from a crybaby into an adult with more ideas than he has.
He's helped many people and offended quite a few. He's taken the fall for others, shouldered the blame, spoken harshly, and gotten into fights. In the end, he realizes he's only good at two things: cooking good food and protecting people.
This isn't a story about transmigrating or being reborn, and it doesn't rely on a golden finger to cheat its way to success. There's no face-slapping or punishing scumbags. It's simply the true story of a cook making his way forward through the tides of the times: the warmth and bustle of life by the stove, and the chill of being frozen through by life's hardships.
Half a lifetime of warmth, half a lifetime of cold.
