"Chasing Sleepless" looks at a home through the eyes of the first person "I" (Shen Zhixing). The time stretches from around 1978 to around 2010.
The territory starts from Wangjiang City in Northeast Liaoning Province, adjacent to Heisongtun in North Korea, and extends outward to Shanghai, the provincial capital Binzhou, and Gyeonggi Province. Beyond that is North Korea across the river and the Russian border in the north.
The book is divided into five volumes: the darkness in human nature, the game of business war, the struggle of power, and the conflict of interests between black and white, all mixed together.
Father's "face" is both a moat and a lifeline;
The gray and black of border trade bite back at the turning point of the times;
The mystery of the whole company's solitary life, the background of Guan Jiuye's last wish, and the hidden story of his mother's educated youth, are three suspense threads intertwined, and the whole story is revealed only at the end.
Winter in the Northeast is long. People in Heisongtun are accustomed to swallowing words back into their stomachs, like holding frozen pears in their mouths, slowly melting. There are a lot of things that no one in my family has ever said openly. My brother grew up in Shanghai, listening to my grandmother's soft talk about Wu Nong; I grew up in a village, listening to the sound of wind, the sound of saws in the forestry, and half of my dad's sleep talk when he drank too much.
Later I slowly worked hard. Piece by piece, put together the fragments from the old man's mouth, the comments on the side of the account book, an old unsigned letter, and the wind that drifted across the river. Spell out the rise and fall of a family.
This is not a heroic legend. My dad is not a hero, he is just a Northeastern man who is good at martial arts, has a sense of justice, and happens to know a lot of people. My mother is not a martyr, she is just a Shanghai girl who wants to go home. My brother and I are not great people - we were just walking on the road paved by our fathers, and found that it was empty under the road.
We have all lived hard.
