Mingyi: A Thousand and One Lamps

In three years, he shut off 1,000 of the 1,001 lights, leaving only the one at the alley entrance.

Mingyi is a novella by Banban Shanyao, written for those who have fallen. Lu Zhao, born in 1998, built a business with 1,001 lights at the age of twenty-four, then took only three years to fall: his partner handed over the records, the office was sealed, and he owed 260,000 yuan to fourteen people. At his lowest, he traded a broken Roman watch for a shop in the urban village. By day, he repaired watches; by night, he listened to the clocks. Zhou Mu stood by him in Hefei, nursing old wounds. Su Li stayed in her car across the road. Lin Zhixia mailed back a postcard without a stamp. Old Mo sat by the door listening to the rain and said, "When all the clocks in a room start ticking, it sounds like rain." The novel begins on the day the lights are hung at their highest and ends on the day the alley entrance lights up. Its five volumes take their titles from the hexagrams of the Book of Changes: Qian, Yu, Mingyi, Kan, and Jin. It is a story about falling, and about someone learning, at the hardest hour of three in the morning, to light a hand-wound lamp again.