The Three Tigers of Jiashan

Someone went to America and was gone for forty years, without sending a single word back.

Someone went south to Guangzhou, opened a little restaurant, and never made another phone call.

Someone spent seven years in prison, then came out and started engraving seals on a folding table, charging fifty yuan apiece.

Someone poured a lifetime of savings into a thing called "coin," only to end up not even knowing what a private key was.

Mo Ming was the third of these five men.

When he was thirteen, his father left, his little sister was gone, and his mother lay in bed coughing. He queued for people outside restaurants, traded foreign exchange certificates outside the Friendship Store, and learned to judge the condition of collectibles at the Taiyuan Road postal market. Little by little, he trained his hands to recognize things. Later, he had a shop, a home, a car, and an account balance that once climbed to twelve million yuan. Then, in 2005, it all vanished overnight.

He always remembered a copper coin. Old Shaoxing had given it to him at a dried-goods shop in Laoximen. It didn't recognize people. It recognized age and weight.

He also kept four words. The year he graduated at sixteen, a female classmate had quietly added them to the bottom of a page in his graduation yearbook:

"Don't forget."

This is a novel about the alleyways of Shanghai, and about five ordinary people. It spans forty-seven years, from a summer when your legs went weak walking on asphalt to the days spent sitting on a little stool by the doorway, watching the sun go down.