The day Li Xiangdong was laid off, he didn't cry. After signing the papers, he even looked back at the workshop he'd guarded for seven years.
Then he was reborn in 1998.
The factory was on the verge of collapse, his father was still alive but had been unjustly suspended.
The factory's most valuable asset was a Soviet photolithography machine that had been dead for three years and written off as beyond repair.
Everyone said the heap of scrap metal was a lost cause. Everyone except Li Xiangdong.
Because after being electrocuted and reborn, his eyes could clearly detect cracks just nanometers wide deep inside the lenses.
What others saw as junk, he saw as wounds that could be healed.
He began taking it apart.
He modified an F1 racing turbocharger to create a light source, replaced the lenses with a tank gunsight, and built a frame from CT scanner parts.
With an old machinist who'd been banished to the warehouse and a bookish college student, he salvaged a future from a scrap yard.
In three months, he had to bring that machine back to life.
Not just to prove himself, but to engrave China's first ray of light before a total chip embargo took effect, for his father and for the entire industry.
Then he could tell the old man who'd died without ever seeing his name cleared:
“Dad, the goal you couldn't reach back then, we've reached it.”
