My dad is the richest man in the country, but he told me to deliver takeout.
Three months, ten degrees below zero, and a tiny partitioned room in an urban village. I went from being the heir to a corporate empire to a delivery rider who got complaints every day.
Then one day, a customer humiliated me in public. That very night, she was fired from her company.
My father’s text had just one sentence: “If you want to come back, first figure out the business rules in this area.”
I gritted my teeth and kept delivering takeout, but I realized this job let me see things the people at the top could never see: every shop’s sales, the foot traffic on every street, and the stories behind every delivery rider.
Six months later, I’d turned the entire delivery station into an intelligence network.
A year later, I held the commercial lifeline of the whole area in my hands.
My dad is the richest man in the country, but I’ll reach the top my own way.
When I first started reading this book, I thought it was just another cliché of pretending to be poor and getting humiliated. But as I read on, I realized something was off. Lu Chen's chilblains kept healing and then regrowing, and what he wrote in his notebook wasn't some business secret, but rather, "The eggs at the pancake stall in the east of the city are overcooked."