The protagonist Zhao Bi comes from a declining scholarly family. His father Zhao Qingyuan is a poor scholar who has failed in many exams, and his mother Zhou is a lady from an official family with a stern and tenacious temperament. When he was sixteen years old, Zhao Bi stood under the leaky thatched eaves, looking at the "dust pile" - those moldy old book fragments that his father had retrieved from the second-hand book shop, and secretly determined to change his destiny through reading.
