A shiny ancestral abacus once mapped out a clear upward path for rural boy Chen Xingxing: study, settle accounts, and get promoted. Life should be as stable as a balanced balance between loans and debits. However, when he spent his youth and climbed to the top of the doctorate, he was shocked to realize that fate had secretly tampered with the rules. The open-mindedness in the hospital that looked down on life and death was no match for the academic qualifications in the administrative siege; the painstaking academic hard work was defeated by the understatement of "resource replacement" by the rich man Chen Hao; even the hard-won letter of appointment from the university was turned into waste paper with a slight cough of power.
With cold and restrained writing, the novel outlines Chen Xingxing's twenty-year "step-by-step" struggle trajectory, and finally falls into the huge ironic trap of "knowledge changes destiny". When he sold all the books and diplomas that symbolized the "right path", abandoned his ancestral abacus on the platform bench, and boarded the train with no destination, it was not only the defeat of an idealist, but also the defeat of an entire society that seemed fair but was actually full of invisible gaps. A sharp questioning of the logic of promotion - when the "calculus" of a small town's problem maker can never adjust the abacus of "relationships", when the price of hard work has been marked before the starting line, that big dream in the name of "struggle", whose feast is it and whose sacrifice is it?
Intention: He spent half his life plucking the beads of the abacus, just to calculate a "fair" account, and finally realized that the pillars of this temple had long been hollowed out by someone else's golden abacus. Simply throw away your wooden beads and go to the wilderness to seek a living.