Everyone in Haojiang Town knows Niu Ze.
At seventeen, he rides a motorcycle, wears flip-flops, smokes, and causes trouble as he scrapes by in the market. Everyone shakes their heads and says he'll never amount to anything.
Only Xu Weiran has seen another side of him. He tucked crumpled bills into her textbooks, and on the day she left to study in the north, he stuffed all the money he'd saved by working from dawn to dusk into her bag. He said only, "Focus on your studies. I'll earn the money."
Years later, after earning her master's degree at a top university, she didn't join an investment bank or stay in a big city. She returned to Haojiang Town. Standing before his leaky market stall, she slapped a business plan down on his old scale. "Sun Yuze, this time, let me help you rise." From a stall in the market to ringing the bell at the stock exchange, she read the books he never got to finish, page by page, until they became the road to his IPO. He got her through the hardest years of her life, and she lifted him to where he had always belonged.
The books he never finished, I finished for him.
The road I never got to travel, he walked first for me.
