This is a coming-of-age novel of about 800,000 words and 210 chapters (author: Shari Baren). The main plot is that the protagonist Jia Shunsheng fails the college entrance examination in 1980, joins the army, and then gets meritorious service and goes to military school and military camp. The entrepreneur and his love affair with his childhood sweetheart Peng Hui from the same village are set against the backdrop of the era from the late People's Commune period to the present, and a grand narrative unfolds in the urban and rural areas of a thousand-year-old city in the hinterland of Wuling Mountain, from traditional farming society to urbanization, industrialization, and information society.
