In the winter of 1998, at Chaotianmen Pier in Chongqing, eight-year-old Zhu Zaiyu saw his father carrying packages for steamed buns for the first time. Hunger carves into the bones and buries holes that cannot be filled in a lifetime.
From patchwork school uniforms to real estate upstarts, from six-square-meter partitions to Nanshan villas, Zhu Zaiyu spent twenty-six years climbing the ladder of desire in "Song of Insufficiency": hunger, clothing, wife, fields, horses, officials, purple clothes, imperial foundation, and longevity. He thought that each level would fill the hole in his heart, until the diagnosis of mid-stage gastric cancer, the figure of his father collapsing from a cerebral hemorrhage, and the old photo with "enough" written on it suddenly woke him up from the capital card table.
This is not a novel that teaches people how to make money, but a mirror to all those who "never have enough". When you overdraft your health for KPIs, betray your mentor for promotion, and stake all your wealth to "not lose at the starting line", do you hear the voice of the eight-year-old child in your heart - he actually just wants his father to stop carrying bags, and his mother to stop selling blood, so that the family can eat a bowl of hot rice in a house of 40 square meters.
Desire has no end, but life does. From "not enough" to "enough", what separates you may not be a mountain, but a thought of turning back.
