Southerly Headwind

Thirty-six-year-old Lin Yichuan sadly left the company amid a wave of layoffs. With middle-aged disorder and family burdens on his shoulders, he had no choice but to seize the only opportunity - to go to Vietnam and become the personnel and administrative manager of a Chinese-funded shoe factory. He thought he was just dealing with attendance and salary, but what awaited him was a far more complicated overseas workplace than he imagined: cultural gaps, strict local labor laws, a wave of strikes that was about to break out, and the shadow of human trafficking surging beneath the glamorous factory buildings. Starting from being forced to deal with the romantic dispute between a Chinese colleague and a Vietnamese female worker, Lin Yichuan had to struggle to mediate between the headquarters' goals, the rights and interests of local workers, and his own moral bottom line. Every mediation is a subversion of cognition, and every negotiation is a test of human nature. This is a lonely southbound retrograde. Alone in the center of a tropical storm, he must use all his wisdom and courage to find a way out for himself and countless foreign workers on the tightrope between rules and humanity.