The story begins in 1960. Lin Mo, a modern heavy-industry engineer, accidentally transmigrates,
and becomes a sixteen-year-old orphan with no parents and no one to rely on, living in Courtyard No. 95 on Nanluoguxiang in Beijing.
He faces more than crushing material poverty, scraping by on just eight yuan a month in relief from the neighborhood office. He is also trapped in a social dead end:
Yi Zhonghai, the First Master, who styles himself a “moral role model,” tries to bind him with patriarchal notions of “respecting the old and cherishing the young” and “neighbors helping one another,” making him a potential caregiver in his old age;
Jia Zhangshi and her family see him as someone they can drain at will. Her son, Jia Dongxu, constantly ostracizes him at the factory,
while his wife, Qin Huairu, tries to use their warm “sister-and-brother relationship” to get his food and wages. Xu Damao, the projectionist, is jealous that he has had a few years of schooling, so he makes things difficult for him at every turn and spreads rumors that his “family background is bad” and his “thinking is problematic.”
