Floating Boat

"The Floating Boat" is a contemporary Chinese social epic that spans thirty years. With a cold and tender writing style, it outlines the struggle, loss and perseverance of Zhao Yong, Lin Jing's family and their surrounding characters in the torrent of the times. The story begins with the collapse of a five-year-old girl, Zhao Ya, at a piano exam, revealing the anxiety and suffocation of urban middle-class families in the educational arms race. His father Zhao Yong is facing a middle-aged unemployment crisis in the workplace, while his mother Lin Jing is deeply trapped in the identity myth of a "chicken baby" mother. At the same time, Zhao Xiaojun, a nephew from the countryside, carried the family's hopes of entering a prestigious school, but fell into the dilemma of being "unemployed upon graduation" after graduation; while Zhang Hao, who came from a well-off family, seemed to have a smooth path, but he could not escape the emptiness and confusion of his arranged life. The novel follows the three families of Zhao, Lin, and Zhang, from the struggle for the starting line of early childhood education, to the single-plank bridge of the high school entrance examination and college entrance examination, to the survival game after college graduation, to the twilight years of mid-life crisis and the heavy pressure of retirement. It not only profoundly depicts "education anxiety", "midlife crisis" and other social issues that hurt a generation, but more importantly, it always captures those immortal "glimmers of humanity" in this endless cruel reality. "The Floating Boat" is not only a mirror that reflects reality, but also a hymn dedicated to every ordinary person who paddles hard in ordinary life. It tells us that life may be a difficult struggle, but when we illuminate each other, we can gather into a boat and sail through the stormy waves of fate to our own, peaceful shore.