The Road to Success

Lu Zhixiao was once the picture of success in everyone’s eyes: in his early thirties, a key technical specialist at a major tech company, earning 500,000 yuan a year, with a gentle, intelligent wife and a house and car in the city center. But after a stock-market gamble during a bull run gave him a taste for making money from money, he embarked on the irreversible road of borrowing to repay his loans. Credit cards, online loans, and consumer loans coiled around his carefully built middle-class life like venomous snakes. The moment debt-collection calls blew up his contact list, his wife, parents, coworkers, and boss all learned the truth at once.

His house was gone, his marriage shattered, and his mother was hospitalized after becoming ill with anger. He fell from a high-earning professional making 500,000 yuan a year to someone who had to borrow even a hundred yuan. At his most desperate, he walked into the office of a debt-restructuring broker. The person across the desk smiled and said, “Pay an 80,000-yuan service fee, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

This is a story about greed, shame, and redemption. It tells how, in an age of easy credit, an ordinary person was pushed along by desire and hounded by debt, until he finally learned anew, amid the ruins, what it means to keep his feet on the ground.

This book is dedicated to city dwellers struggling between credit card bills and online-loan messages, to ordinary people jolted awake by debt collectors in the dead of night, and to everyone who feels uneasy in an age of “enjoy now, pay later” but can’t seem to stop.