When Chen Shouye was thirty-eight years old, his life hit rock bottom.
The company went bankrupt and his wife divorced. He took his ten-year-old daughter Nian Nian back to Qingshi Lane after fifteen years of absence and took over a dilapidated noodle shop left by his father. His father suddenly disappeared when he was twenty-three years old, and there was no news for fifteen years. He hates him.
But Zhou Dayong, a car repairman next door to the noodle shop, has kept his shop for fifteen years; tailor Qin Guilan cleans the noodle shop for him every month without receiving a penny; retired teacher Fang Zhiyuan went through the county annals to help him preserve this century-old street.
Chen Shouye opened the noodles recipe left by his father and made bowl after bowl of noodles. Every time a bowl was brought out, someone was touched: someone who cried while eating, someone who ate in silence without talking, someone who came again the next day, someone who came with the whole family...
He gradually discovered that the truth about his father's disappearance was hidden in every corner of the noodle shop - in a book of noodles, in a ball of dry dough, and in a dark alley buried by a bluestone slab.
Qingshi Lane is about to be demolished, and someone is secretly watching his face, but the man who has disappeared for twenty years is still alive.
This is a novel about "going home".
A bowl of noodles, a street, a group of people, a lifetime.
The noodles are in the pot and the road is at your feet.
