Back to the 1980s: I Helped My First Love Take Off

In 2026, fifty-nine-year-old Tan Jiaming signs the equity transfer papers, then collapses from a heart attack in an office building in Shenzhen.

He got everything he ever wanted in this life, except the girl from 1986.

That year, he was nineteen, in Qufu County in northern Guangdong. A black bicycle, a ten-square-meter tailor shop, and 3,800 yuan in bride-price money: Li Qiufeng was shoved onto the back of the wedding bicycle by her own father. Tan stood in the dust at the bus station, too afraid to say a word.

When he opens his eyes again, spring has returned to 1986.

This time, he goes to get her first. He smashes a bowl at the dinner table, then meets her at the ferry crossing in the middle of the night. Qiufeng cuts off her braid and climbs out the back window. “This time, I’m the one taking you away.”

From setting up a street stall at Maba Market to squeezing onto a green train south to Guangzhou to buy stock; from a small Dongguan workshop doing processing for foreign companies to building a factory in Shenzhen, the Hainan bubble, the August 10 stock market frenzy, WTO-era orders, and the financial crisis: Tan Jiaming knows what the future holds, yet keeps stumbling over the things he cannot control. He bets on the wrong goods, gets beaten to a deal, cannot save his father’s life, and finds that he can guard against the market but not the people around him.

What gets him to the end is not foresight, but the courage to fight for what he wants and the wisdom to know when enough is enough.

And Qiufeng spends her life doing only two things: cutting ties with her parasitic birth family, one cut at a time, and rescuing, one by one, the people that family destroyed.

Forty years, from a mountain town in northern Guangdong to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, from 3,800 yuan in bride-price money to a family empire.

On the last page of the handwritten Book of Changes left by his father are four words: “The proud dragon will have cause to repent.”