In the winter of 2023, Lin Haisheng died beside the walk-in freezer at a seafood wholesale market. When he opened his eyes again, it was April 1983, on Shidao Island in Jiaodong. The tide was out. It was 4:20 in the afternoon. He was eighteen, and his hands had none of the thick calluses he'd built up over twenty years of hauling frozen fish. Someone delivered a note to the door: two hundred and forty yuan for his share of the sunken ship, eighty for his mother's medical treatment, three hundred and twenty in total. The first eighty was due by noon the day after tomorrow. People on the beach picked over the shore once, then headed back. He kept going farther in, until his calves sank into the mud. Only then did he crouch down to inspect the sand. Beneath that “little opening that seemed barely open at all,” there was something. A basket of clams weighed twenty jin, and six jin of swimming crabs sold for one yuan and twenty cents. That evening, for the first time, the family had thick porridge. Haixia licked the rim of her bowl, while Granny stared at his hands. He remembered how this stretch of sea would change over the next ten years. But right now, all he wanted was to place every last cent of that eighty yuan on the team office table.
