Lin Jianguo was born in 1962 in a poor peasant family in northwest Fujian. After graduating from high school, he worked as a substitute teacher and later became a civil servant in the county. He is diligent and honest, working step by step from the grassroots level. He was once responsible for case investigation and received many awards for his outstanding abilities.
When his career was on the rise, he became friends with a local entrepreneur. Because he was implicated, he was transferred to a remote town to work. At this time, the eldest son unfortunately died of cancer. At the bottom of his life, he separated from his original wife and reorganized his family with female cadre Zhou Min.
Since then, he has traveled to many towns and villages to promote local economic development and achieved remarkable achievements. During an important position selection, he did not run around, and ultimately missed the opportunity and was transferred to a casual position. He began to use his spare time to invest in small hydropower in partnership with others, and for a time accumulated a lot of wealth. Later, he retired early and took a management position in a friend's company, but left due to a shareholder dispute. He tried to invest in mining, catering and other projects, but caught up with the fluctuations in the industry and suffered serious losses. His life in his later years became dull.
He had two sons with his ex-wife. The eldest son died young and the younger son was estranged from him. He had a son with Zhou Min, who worked hard in a coastal city. Facing the expectations of his children, he felt deeply powerless.
At the age of sixty, he returned to his hometown alone, stood under the old camphor tree at the entrance of the village, and looked back on his half-life: from a boy in a mountain village to a county cadre, from high-spirited to empty-handed. He asked himself: What has been lost and what has been kept in this life?
The novel spans forty years, using the ups and downs of an ordinary civil servant's fate to reflect the changes of the times and the ups and downs of people's hearts. The story has twists and turns, the characters are vivid, and it is full of rich local flavor of northwest Fujian.
