Missing Safety Valve

Sixty-eight-year-old Shen Songnian walked into Songheyuan Nursing Home in the suburbs of Fengchuan, carrying an old suitcase and a jujube crutch he made in prison. In the occupation column on the registration form, he hesitated and wrote "retired worker." He is not here to support the elderly. The author uses very delicate brushstrokes to construct this nursing home - the corridors with the musty smell of disinfectant, the breakfast of alkaline noodle steamed buns with pickles, the Qin opera and gossip in the activity room, everything is as real as the place you have been. Shen Songnian lived in Room 207, and his roommate was a thin old man who held an oxygen bottle all day long. He began to observe everyone: Director Yu who loved to tell stories and showed his gold teeth, the old man with gold-rimmed glasses who played chess alone, the two old men who served each other food but never spoke, and the shadow-like person walking in the corridor in the middle of the night. Six people. Fengyuan Chemical Factory thirty years ago. A gas leak accident. Four lives. Fifteen years of unjust imprisonment. There is a tin biscuit box hidden under the pillow. There is a yellowed photo and a piece of paper with six names written on it. But what makes me think this book is great is not the suspense of revenge itself. It was Shen Songnian who smelled the fragrance of osmanthus in the garden and suddenly remembered the scene of handing an umbrella to his wife when he was twenty; it was Yu Guodong who had been talking about "safety first" for thirty years until he believed it; it was Liu Zhenbang who wiped the oxygen bottle three times a day Half, thirty years ago he forged maintenance records; it was Xiao Zhou, a twenty-five-year-old nurse who worked from morning to night and earned two thousand yuan. She blushed when she received a letter from the postman - she didn't know what kind of story she had inadvertently been involved in. After reading the first two chapters, the pace is not fast, but every sentence is laying hidden lines. It feels like standing in the hallway of a nursing home and you know there is something behind every door, but the door hasn't opened yet.