That Time Loan

The novel That Time of Loans recounts the four and a half years I spent making private loans out of a garage in my residential complex, from March 2015 to September 2019. Under the judicial interpretations in effect at the time, interest rates no higher than four times the bank benchmark rate were legal and compliant. During those years, 475 people borrowed from me, and I was unable to recover 8.98 million yuan across 198 loans. Seeing how well my business was doing, three neighbors insisted on handing me their burial money, saying they wanted to make a little fortune with me. I tried to stop them. I fought with all my might to stop them, but I failed. Later, I couldn’t recover my money, and those three neighbors saw their dreams of getting rich shattered, losing the burial money they had invested. I was sued and had a judgment enforced against me. I had cancer and took sleeping pills. After lying unconscious for fifty-two hours, I was given a final kick by the King of Hell and sent back. I understood then: it wasn’t that I was lucky to survive. I had to stay alive and work hard to repay my debts. I replaced the “Investment Cooperation Agreements” they had signed with IOUs, and made a decision: I would give up the money they owed me, but I would repay what I owed. So I sat in a storage room barely ten square meters in size and spent three and a half years turning those days into a 660,000-character book called That Time of Loans.

This is not a book about “private lending.” It is about “how dignity crumbles” and “how people can go on living while bearing their own debts.” What the people who came to borrow from Brother Hao ultimately put up as collateral was their dignity, secrets, family bonds, and even their entire lives.

Written in a nonfiction style, this is a realistic ensemble portrait, a wordless monument to the souls swept up in that particular “era of loans.”