Amber Reborn

Zhang Wei, fifty-five, works compiling county gazetteers. He thought he’d led a steady, uneventful life, but on the eve of retirement he got drunk in his old house in Zhepu. When he woke, it was summer 1992. He was twenty-four again, a recent agricultural college graduate awaiting his job assignment. In his previous life, he had watched opportunity after opportunity slip away: cross-border trade across three provinces, going into business, the building-materials boom, the rise of e-commerce. Every one became someone else’s legend. His father’s carpentry skills, his friend A Gui’s gift for writing, even Zhepu’s secret recipe for baojiu, all had slipped through his fingers. His life was like a jar of wine left unsealed: its strength had evaporated, leaving only a bitter taste. This time, with thirty-three years of memories to guide him, he gets to live it all again. He isn’t trying to defy fate; he just wants to do the things that need doing, one by one, and do them right. In Panling, he’ll turn chestnut growing into an industry. At the county Party committee office, he’ll make his written reports count. He’ll help his father put the Zhangji Hardware sign up on a street in Shanghai, then record an old brewing craft called “Seven Turns to Gold,” along with Zhepu’s roots, in the gazetteer, stroke by stroke. He carries a destiny compass that can predict market trends. But it can forecast the building-materials market, not the turns of people’s hearts. It can predict business ten years from now, but not who will stay to share a bowl of hot food with you. This is the story of a man given a second chance, using the perspective of two lifetimes to turn everyday life into amber. It is both the history of an ordinary family’s entrepreneurial journey and a chronicle of a small city across more than thirty years.