Silence in the Frozen Soil

When Chen Chen wrote his ninth correction next to the eighth multiple-choice question in the mathematics paper, his father, Chen Sheng, was sitting on the 12th leather chair in a conference room of a corporate affairs department in Shenzhen. The provincial accent and his associate's degree-to-bachelor degree diploma were like double seals, nailing this man to the cross of deputy director of the administrative department. There is always a mountain of books stacked on the desk of a boy in the southwest, and the fax machine in the southern office spits out wrinkles with discrimination; department dinners are always held at a Chaoshan restaurant where he does not understand the dialect; the supervisor always precedes his lecture with "Xiao Chen, not everyone can be a deputy supervisor." This is the story of two men trapped at the bottom of the chain of contempt trying to find each other. When the resumes of fresh graduates cover the reading glasses at his father's workstation like snowflakes, when the study teacher crushes the judgments of two critical students in the ranking list, the deliberately lowered air-conditioning temperature, the sweat stains on the test papers, and the lamps and computers that light up at the same time at six in the morning will eventually form a beacon of breakthrough in the coordinate system of fate.