People on the Other Side

1978, Spring. Twenty-three-year-old He Mingyuan stood on the terrace of a shantytown by the Suzhou River, holding a bowl of steamed rice so thin that people could be seen, looking at the brightly lit workers' new village on the other side. That was his only ritual every morning - to take a look at the world he couldn't enter, then turn around and walk into his alley, get on the clanking tram, and go to the maintenance shop to work as his third-year apprenticeship. Thirty-two dollars and a half a month. He has been repairing radios for three years and repairing other people's voices for three years, but he has not heard the slightest sound in his own future. Until that day, he walked into the Peace Hotel. A room with thick carpets, a silver Sony tape recorder, and a ten-yuan foreign exchange coupon. At that moment, he stepped onto the clouds for the first time, opened up a world he couldn't afford in his life for the first time, and saw for the first time - it turned out to be like this inside. The foreign exchange coupon was pressed under the glass plate by him, like a seed buried in the soil. From Hujiang Electric to Shiliupu Pier, from repairing domestic radios to repairing smuggled Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba, from thirty-two and a half yuan to sixty-five yuan, and then to... A number that he dared not think of. He Mingyuan walked step by step along the Suzhou River. The water was still dark and the wind was still fishy, ​​but there was a light in his heart, shining brighter and brighter through the window of the Peace Hotel. This is a one-person long march. What he wants to cross is not just a Suzhou River, but an era.