Thunder on a Cold Night

During the Spring Festival of 2000, a New Year's Eve dinner worth 10,000 yuan in Shenzhen's Fairview Garden became the last straw for a family. Five-year-old Zhao Jing was forced to eat leftovers by her grandparents because she was a girl. Zhou Jie, the mother of an executive, pushed the door open and saw this scene. Years of forbearance turned into thunderous rage. She publicly exposed the truth that her parents-in-law had been sucking blood all year round and that her husband was cowardly and incompetent, and announced that they would divorce her in seven days. The novel takes this storm as the starting point and traces the fateful entanglement of two generations. Zhao Wenbo and Zhou Jie were high school classmates. One was a math genius with low self-esteem and the other was a smart and tenacious physics master. They knew each other during their poor years, but were dragged into the abyss by their original families after marriage. Zhao Wenbo's parents, Zhao Yonggui and Qian Hongying, were patriarchal and greedy. Their daughter Zhao Wenjuan was vain and snobbish, and her son-in-law Jiang Guicai was a romantic. Zhou Jie supported her family with an annual salary of five million, but in exchange her parents-in-law abused their daughter and coveted their property. When Zhao Wenjuan discovered her husband's cheating on the spot, and when Zhao Wenbo wrote down thirty-three years of humiliation in his suicide note, this seemingly glamorous family completely fell apart on the third day of the Lunar New Year. The novel cuts open the abscesses of the Chinese-style family with cold writing, describing the poison of patriarchal preference, the lock of the native family, and the tragic song of a cowardly man from silence to destruction.