Time Flies by the Riverside: the Long Journey of 70 People in a Small Town

This is a long realistic novel about the small town era spanning thirty-six years. Taking the ordinary town of Binjiang as the hometown coordinates, with the protagonist Xiao Yicheng and his classmates born in the 1970s as the core group portrait, starting from the high school days in 1988, it has gone through teenage ignorance, youth wandering, middle-aged ups and downs, through studying, choosing a career, working hard south, marriage and love gatherings, cognitive iteration, and destiny divergence. A generation of people has moved from a small backwater town to the tide of the times, with workers moving south, industry iterations, and social changes constantly making choices, hitting walls, awakening, and being reborn. Individual ideals collide with reality, original intentions of character compete with the secular world, friendships between classmates diverge over time, and life patterns widen with cognition. The novel uses the micro-destiny of ordinary people to reflect the changes of the times over the decades of reform and opening up. It records the struggles, tenacity, regrets and growth of a generation of people in the 70s in a small town, and depicts the most authentic fireworks in the city, the ups and downs of the world, and a half-life review.