Golden Ruins

Lin Wang was born in 2000 in Beidu, a declining industrial city in Northeast China. My father was an eighth-level fitter and had stood in front of the lathe for twenty years. Iron filings fell on his shoulders like golden snow. In the winter when he was seventeen years old, he heard the truth in the toilet - he found out that Chen Mo was framed for theft, and he knew who did it. The perpetrator stopped him and said: You still have the college entrance examination. He opened his mouth but did not say those three words. That night Chen Mo sent a text message: Wang, I know you saw everything, it doesn't matter. Six years later, Chen Mo died of an overdose in a rental house in Dongguan. Five years later, he found the monument in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city - the name engraved on it was wrong. In the spring when he was 20 years old, his father died in the corridor of the hospital that was closed due to the epidemic. He was unable to rush back. My mother said on the phone, "When people leave, they leave, and we still have to live our lives." For the next five years, he wrote push notifications in a six-square-meter windowless partition room in Beijing, using a broken person to produce healing content for strangers to consume. My first love, Su Wan, said in her last phone call: I can't wait any longer. He sat with his phone in his hand all night. At the age of thirty, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He resigned from his job and returned to Beidou. One morning, his mother looked at him, smiled, and asked: Whose child are you from? You are so handsome. He didn't cry. He knelt down and said: I am from the neighbor's house. This is a novel about subsidence, not crashing, but sinking inch by inch. It is also a novel about coming back. After everything is broken, a person squats down and picks them up piece by piece to look at them. Not to restore them, but to confirm that they were once complete. The lights are on and people are still there.