Moving to Shanghai in the 1990S

[Advance notice: Please add Sixies: I Become a Detective on the Revolutionary Travel Route and Starting Out as a Chinatown Novelist [Sixies] to your reading list~] In 1994, Dongping Village, long rumored to have a coal mine in the mountains, posted a notice: Villagers could pay a fee to claim an area of the mountain and prospect for coal. If they struck a deposit, they would receive half the shares in the new mine. The notice caused an uproar. Some cursed the village leaders for being crazy about money, while others paid up and headed into the mountains with hoes in hand. Yu Lanying and her husband were among the latter. Two months later, they really did strike coal. But before the mine could be built and production could begin, her husband died unexpectedly one night, leaving behind debts that forced her to sell her shares in the mine. For various reasons, she also had no choice but to leave her hometown with her young daughter and lead a rootless, unsettled life. Reborn on the very day they struck coal, she looked at her delighted husband, took a deep breath, and said, “Why don’t we sell our shares in the mine?” Sell the shares, leave their hometown, and go to Shanghai. Advance notices, please add to your reading list: Sixies: I Become a Detective on the Revolutionary Travel Route Waking up one morning, Wang Jingyun discovered she had become a high school student in the sixties, swept up in revolutionary fervor and joining her classmates on a revolutionary tour despite her family’s objections. She did the math and realized that the Down to the Countryside Movement was just around the corner. With an older sister and younger brother at home, her future looked bleak, so she decisively decided to take the train back home. But when she asked to return, her classmates told her that during the tour, their student IDs let them eat and stay for free, and ride trains without paying. After ten years as an overworked office drone in her previous life, Wang Jingyun had died suddenly without ever getting to go anywhere. She promptly changed her mind: “Whether I get to travel for free doesn’t matter. I mainly want to take in the magnificent scenery of our motherland, so that I can do a better job of helping build the country in the future.” * Before boarding the train, Wang Jingyun thought she would enjoy good food, comfortable lodgings, and beautiful views along the way. But just after getting off the train and checking into a guesthouse, one of the students traveling with her unexpectedly died. Drawing on her experience of devouring detective novels and watching crime dramas in her previous life, and wanting to clear herself of suspicion, Wang Jingyun plunged straight into the investigation. After the locked-room murder at the guesthouse came a corpse dumped in the wilderness on a snowy night, then a New Year’s Eve massacre… As the truth behind one murder after another came to light, Wang Jingyun gradually became a renowned young detective across the country. Before the revolutionary tour was even over, police stations across the country were competing to hire her. Wang Jingyun: “Huh? I already have a secure government job?” Starting Out as a Chinatown Novelist [Sixies] Yang Leyi transmigrated to New York City in the United States in the sixties. America at the time was brimming with stars. The Beatles and Elvis Presley were idols to young people, and progressive ideas were steadily becoming mainstream. But none of that had anything to do with Yang Leyi, who had just transmigrated to Chinatown. Her father had recently died, and her mother worked at a laundromat. With their meager income, even working ten hours a day wasn’t enough to support her two daughters. When Yang Leyi arrived, the family was fretting over next month’s rent. To keep them from ending up on the street, Yang Leyi set her sights on Chinese Overseas Literary Front and decided to write a novel in Chinese. Theme: None