This novel is written for the generation of people in the 1990s. It is purely for the purpose of generating electricity, slowing down time a little more and giving us some time to breathe.
In the twelfth lunar month of 1990, Yang Xiaoxi was born in the staff building of the Suzhou Shuixiang State-owned Heavy Machinery Factory. Her father is an ordinary middle school teacher, and her mother is a cook in a factory canteen. Her family is in a tight financial situation. She grew up on rice soup and was cared for by her grandparents across the river from an early age.
She spent her childhood surrounded by the roar of machine tools and the smoke of fireworks in the river, and attended a primary school for children of a machine factory. Beneath the peaceful factory life, abandoned old workshops, strange noises from the river, and the elders' secretive chats all hide the town's dusty past. The novel is based on Yang Xiaoxi's life, spanning the food stamp era, the wave of layoffs from state-owned enterprise reforms, urbanization transformation, aging and the AI era. It records the rise and fall of Jiangnan industrial towns in a realistic way, depicts the joys and sorrows of ordinary working-class families, and reflects the pain of the transformation of the times and the fate of ordinary people in the fate of individuals.
Intention: Life is full of ups and downs, with joys and sorrows. Life in a small town in Suzhou continues, and people are still moving forward.
The novel uses the Suzhou Water Town State-owned Machinery Factory as the narrative carrier and the protagonist Yang Xiaoxi's life as the timeline, connecting the current of the times from the 1990s to the present.
The work uses individual destiny to reflect the group situation, combines the background of current events and the transformation of the times, and writes about the decades of survival changes of a group of people born in the 1990s. It uses the half-life trajectory of small people to freeze the collective memory of the generation of 1990, to record the fate and return of a generation in the changing times, and to leave a unique memory for people of this generation.
