The Poverty Alleviation Team Leader

I am the deputy director of the county transport bureau, and I am also an abandoned child. By chance, I am assigned to help a poor village. In Juyue Village, I meet Jiang Chunman, a low-income resident whose son was abducted and who keeps petitioning the authorities. I help him get registered as a low-income household, renovate his unsafe home, apply for a public-service job, and search for his son. I also meet Wang Desheng, a cook who gives me trouble over distributing chicks, applying for subsistence benefits, planting oil-tea trees, building roads, and repairing houses. I want to help poor households escape poverty and increase the village's collective income. To that end, I carefully identify eligible households, decide to develop the oil-tea industry, improve the varieties in the village orchard, and bring in daylily cultivation. I make one move after another in the village. Some applaud me, while others resent me. Beneath the seemingly calm surface, turmoil is brewing. Wang Desheng wants to drive me out, while Jiang Chunman keeps petitioning, putting me in a difficult position. A huge conspiracy lies behind my identity as an abandoned child, and the truth about Jiang Chunman's missing son is beginning to emerge. Who is the person everyone longs for? What identities do the people around me really have? There will be no answers until the very end.

This is an uplifting book and a work rooted in hands-on experience. The author has worked in local government since graduating and spent seven years as a member of a poverty-alleviation and rural-revitalization work team in a poor village. With vivid, true-to-life writing, the author weaves the monumental campaign to eliminate poverty together with a gripping search for a missing child. The light of emotion and reason shines side by side, and the book offers profound reflections on rural conditions and the realities of farmers' lives. It is an encyclopedia for understanding grassroots officials.