Novel of the Republic of China: Thirty Years of Divorce in Troubled Times

In the autumn of the eighth year of the Republic of China, 19-year-old Chen Yixun returned to Shanghai from the United States. What he took over was a cloth shop with peeling paint on the door, a pile of debts that he could not repay, and half a house waiting for him to support him. He was originally a dandy from the Daotai family of the former Qing Dynasty. It is ridiculous to be sixteen or seventeen years old. At the age of seventeen, he was sent abroad by his father to avoid trouble. When he came back, his father was old, his uncle was ill, and his third uncle was dead. The cousin who stayed in Japan colluded with the enemy to uproot the Chen family. He started from a piece of cloth, built a cloth shop, opened a bank, and ran a shipping company, and worked among the youth gangs, warlords, and foreign banks. The Japanese gave him a pass, the Nationalist government gave him an order, and the Green Gang bosses invited him to tea - he was neither anyone's sword nor anyone's flag. He only relied on a pair of eyes that rolled through the crowd to find a way out of the cracks. There are also a group of women in the house: Mingque, the first-in-law girl, the third aunt in the accounting room, the widowed aunt, the blond British girl Jenny, the girl Meiyun from Suzhou, and Ivory from San Francisco. Each of them had their own difficulties and dignity, and they fought and cried in this deep courtyard. Finally, they hugged each other and kept the lights on for the family. In 1937, war broke out in Shanghai. After his father died at the hands of the Japanese, he moved west to Chongqing with his entire family, converted a cloth shop into a munitions factory, turned a shipping line into a transportation line, and blazed his own path between Japanese-occupied areas, Kuomintang-controlled areas, and liberated areas. He doesn't do hero work. He was just trying his best to protect a whole family of Chinese people in troubled times. Fireworks in the market, deep grudges at home, business wars, chaos at home and country - this is a long book about the survival of businessmen in the Republic of China, written for everyone who refuses to sink in the torrent of the times.