TBW - 1

Chapter 1: Little Sweet Potato Records the Trivial Matters

The text message from the Xicheng Housing Security Center arrived on a languid afternoon bathed in scattered sunlight. 

Cheng Simin sat aboard the G821 high-speed train from Jicheng to Xicheng. It was summer vacation, and families traveling together filled the train. Unfortunately for Cheng Simin, her seat was surrounded on three sides. 

Just as the child in front of her stopped screaming and crying, another child in the aisle to her left began loudly reciting poetry for the elders. By the time the “Poet Saint” finally drifted off to sleep, the backrest of her chair started receiving frequent, dull thuds, sending waves of irritation through her lower back. 

The e-book on her screen blurred with the constant shaking, making it impossible to focus on the romantic tale of celestial lovers meeting morning and night. Taking a deep breath, Cheng Simin turned around and peered through the gap between the seats to glare at the culprit behind her. 

The little boy appeared to be not yet school-age, his small face scrunched up under a buzz cut. He clutched his mother’s silver bracelet, which had turned black from wear, tugging at it insistently. “Mom, let me play for ten more minutes!” he pleaded, his voice desperate. 

“Children shouldn’t play with phones! We agreed on thirty minutes—do you want to ruin your eyes?” 

The mother in the backseat remained unmoved, scrolling rapidly through short videos on her charging phone. Ignored, the boy’s face crumpled like a deflated eggplant deprived of moisture. 

Cheng Simin frowned and cleared her throat, attempting to catch their attention. The mother ignored her completely, her eyes glued to the rapidly changing colors of the screen. As for the unruly boy directly behind her, he didn’t flinch under her glare. Instead, emboldened by her stare, he found a new source of amusement. 

With a defiant smirk, the boy flipped open the tray table, propped his shoe-clad feet onto it, and crossed his legs like an adult, rocking back and forth provocatively. 

Their eyes locked in a silent battle of wills. Cheng Simin stared at the gum-stained soles of his shoes, her stomach churning and her complexion turning pale. Just as she was about to reprimand him, her phone vibrated violently. 

A temporary ceasefire. 

Cheng Simin blew a strand of hair from her nose, the fine wisps fluttering in the air. She straightened in her seat and checked her phone. 

Her hair settled gently back against her delicate brow as her lips curved into a smile. The anger sparked by the mischievous child dissipated instantly. 

The public rental housing she had applied for in Banshan City, Xicheng, had been officially approved. According to the text message, she only needed to attend a lottery at a designated location the day after tomorrow to secure a private apartment with a monthly rent of just 200 yuan. 

This was truly fantastic news! 

Everyone knew the economy was sluggish this year, with prices soaring. In the post-pandemic inflationary period where even “breathing” seemed to cost money, finding a rental unit that would never increase in price felt like winning the lottery. 

Cheng Simin’s joy was well-founded. Overwhelmed with excitement, she took a screenshot of the message and saved it. In her elation, she opened her WeChat contacts. 

But flipping through them, she realized none of the two thousand contacts were people she could share her happiness with. Her contact list, filled with various titles and nicknames, mostly consisted of professional connections accumulated during her time working in Jicheng. 

Cheng Simin, female, twenty-six years old, graduated four years ago from an ordinary university in Xicheng. 

Describing her was difficult because, like most individuals in the world, Cheng Simin’s achievements throughout her life had been average. Her defining characteristic was her lack of distinctiveness, making it impossible to define her with a few standout moments like a dramatic protagonist. 

If one were to describe her, it would have to start with trivial details. 

In elementary school, Cheng Simin dreamed of becoming the conductor of the marching band during Children’s Day parades, dressed in a crisp blue-and-white uniform. 

Every evening after dinner, she would stand in front of the mirror at home, wielding a rolling pin as a makeshift baton, practicing her marching steps. But when the military drum corps held auditions, the music teacher with her Hong Kong-style perm only selected the two tallest girls in the class. 

Cheng Simin’s height was average, failing to meet the drum corps’ required stature. Not only did she miss out on being the baton-wielding leader, but she also didn’t get to wear the fashionable pleated skirt or march alongside the trombone players. In the end, she was relegated to the waist drum team, wearing a white sweatband and old cloth shoes. 

Of course, this wasn’t her first shattered dream. 

In middle school, she became obsessed with radio programs, aspiring to become a host at her school’s broadcasting station. Every day on her way to and from school, she lingered in the local audio store, saving every penny of her allowance to buy pirated cassette tapes. 

Unfortunately, her persistence once again bore no fruit. Over three years of junior high, she submitted five applications to the broadcasting station and attended countless auditions, all without success. It wasn’t that she lacked knowledge of pop music trends—it was her hardware that failed her. The station director critiqued her, saying, “Your tone isn’t sweet enough, and your Mandarin isn’t standard.” 

By high school, a similar pattern followed. Cheng Simin experienced her first ideological awakening. 

She realized that fashionable pleated skirts and catchy pop songs weren’t the keys to unlocking her destiny. Abandoning frivolous hobbies, she devoted herself entirely to her studies, hoping to follow her homeroom teacher’s advice: to change her fate through hard work and education.

She set her sights ambitiously on Tsinghua and Peking University, with Fudan and Zhejiang University as backups. 

But as the saying goes, “Man proposes, God disposes.” In Cheng Simin’s eighteenth year, the national exam (Gaokao) for the Yi paper was notorious for being the most difficult in history, leaving candidates across Xicheng in despair. 

Even the top student in her school lost twelve points on a major question. Cheng Simin, who was part of the middle-tier group, was no exception. After failing the college entrance exam, she was unable to leave her hometown for her dream university—or even leave the province. Instead, she settled for Xicheng University, located just 191.2 kilometers from her home. 

And so, this ordinary girl from a small county town, possessing an average mix of luck and opportunity, found herself in her senior year receiving an offer that promised to propel her career skyward: an e-commerce position at a promising company. 

Dragging her suitcase and clutching her laptop, four years ago, Cheng Simin boarded the green-skinned train from Xicheng to Jicheng alone. She transformed into “Lily,” the junior engineer colleagues referred to, tasked primarily with developing algorithms for one of the company’s new ventures: membership-based e-commerce. 

Working for a publicly listed company certainly sounded prestigious and respectable. 

However, what Cheng Simin didn’t realize at the time was that the golden age of vertical e-commerce had already peaked in 2018 and was on a downward spiral. The rise of comprehensive e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo and live-stream shopping would soon obliterate all once-thriving B2B industries. The opportunity she had seized was merely the last gasp of a dying era. 

Four years of relentless overtime and continuous learning kept her from being laid off. Her dedication to working while ill earned her two promotions in four years. But no matter how hard a cog works, it cannot prevent the collapse of the machine it supports. 

In 2020, Jumei Youpin delisted from the U.S. stock market. The PS ratio of Cheng Simin’s e-commerce company shrank from four times to two. 

By 2023, Secoo faced 3,343 complaints over refund disputes reported to the Consumer Association, and the company’s stock price fell below one dollar for the first time. 

Her streak of good fortune ran out, and she plummeted back to the average life of an ordinary person. 

On the day she resigned at the start of the year, Cheng Simin was diagnosed with multiple bilateral breast nodules after experiencing prolonged chest pain. There were four nodules in total, the largest measuring 1.8 centimeters, irregular on the surface, and showing abundant blood flow signals internally. The doctor’s expression turned grave as he recommended immediate hospitalization and surgery. 

The next day, after undergoing general anesthesia, Cheng Simin was wheeled back to her room, bound tightly by a pressure bandage that felt like it might cut her in half. Alone, waiting for the on-duty doctor to deliver her biopsy results, she struggled to breathe under the suffocating compression. As oxygen deprivation clouded her mind, she kept replaying the pre-surgery conversation with her doctor. 

The doctor had asked whether she would consider a breast-conserving surgery if the nodules turned out to be malignant, reasoning that she was still young, unmarried, and childless—surely she’d want to reconstruct her breasts for aesthetic purposes later in life. 

But at the time, her expression remained numb, showing little attachment to the flesh on her chest. 

True love is a rare stroke of luck, and Cheng Simin had never experienced a passionate romance. Nor did she believe she would ever find eternal, rock-solid love. Her only concern was this: If she were diagnosed with breast cancer, would she be able to attend the team-building event scheduled for two days later? 

If she couldn’t attend, would the Stanford-educated subordinate who had been eyeing her position seize the opportunity to take over? 

If the high-achieving newcomer replaced her, where would she get the money to pay for her commercial water and electricity bills and her housing loan next month? 

For this surgery, she opted for minimally invasive technology, using two expensive disposable blades not covered by employee health insurance. 

After years of scrimping and saving in Jicheng, Cheng Simin had only managed to scrape together the down payment for a loft apartment. She had nothing left in savings. 

She had poured all her time and energy into her work, hoping to achieve the kind of happiness society deemed worthy. She wasn’t naive; she knew that when it came to property rights, household registration, and school districts, lofts were practically worthless except for their low price. But who could blame a single young person for seeking security by taking out a loan to buy a small apartment in a big city? 

Would those who looked down on her crowdfund to buy her a house? After all, she couldn’t afford an old, run-down 56-square-meter apartment either. No one was going to do charity for someone like her, who was neither exceptionally successful nor utterly destitute. She could only rely on her own body as armor. 

With borrowed money came a sense of belonging—but also the crushing weight of monthly mortgage payments. So she worked harder, almost to the point of selling her soul. 

How ironic. Her life might be at risk, yet she was worrying about material possessions. 

Glancing at the endless stream of messages in her work chat, it was clear that her boss and colleagues were only concerned about whether her recent surgery and illness would affect the dealers’ order volumes. 

In Jicheng, she was “Lily”—but the aloof and elegant Lily wasn’t the real Cheng Simin. That name was just a placeholder for a role. Strip away individuality, and once Lily was gone, there would be countless stronger, healthier Lucys and Annies ready to take her place. 

It was laughable how years of gritting her teeth and pushing through melted away in an instant. When the doctor handed her the benign biopsy report, Cheng Simin suddenly felt an overwhelming revulsion toward her current life. Without delay, she scoured the internet for resignation letter templates and submitted her resignation via email to HR that very night. 

The ordinary Cheng Simin accepted her fate: vertical e-commerce could never defeat comprehensive e-commerce. 

She couldn’t sacrifice her body to hold onto the million-yuan mortgage ticket that symbolized her life in Jicheng. She wanted to live longer—even if it meant surviving mediocrity. 

So, once again in summer, dragging her suitcase and clutching her laptop, she boarded the train home. This time, she wasn’t alone. In the cargo compartment was Beibei, the stray dog she had adopted three years ago. 

In the competitive circles of first-tier cities, where success is measured by wit and perseverance, “returning home” is synonymous with failure, often linked to insufficient personal ability. Spending four years struggling to gain a foothold only to leave was already enough to invite disdain. And as for Cheng Simin, who planned to return to an 18th-tier city to survive on odd jobs and public housing—this was seen as a complete lack of ambition, a shameful descent into mediocrity.

On the path of youthful ambition, there are always flowers and applause. But stepping back from the rat race to embrace a life of mediocrity will never earn praise. 

As for the only person in the world who would be genuinely happy about Cheng Simin’s return home—her parents—they were currently languishing on her WeChat blacklist. Their relationship had long been strained, and they had lost contact for months. She had no intention of sharing her life decisions with them. 

After some hesitation, Cheng Simin followed her usual routine and posted photos and carefully edited captions to her red social media app, which she had only started updating regularly in the past month. No one here knew her, so she didn’t have to care about others’ opinions. 

On the same platform where others flaunted their luxurious lives filled with fancy cars and mansions under the spotlight, she quietly scribbled away in a corner, penning what could be called a “beggar’s retirement guide.” 

But it didn’t matter. Cheng Simin, who had already embraced a life of idleness, had reached enlightenment: human society was divided this way. The elite squandered scarce resources, while those at the bottom were lucky to scavenge leftovers. 

In short, stripping away the traps of consumerism that permeated every aspect of life, discarding the fleeting happiness that came from comparing oneself to others, this materialistic world was nothing more than a giant meat grinder that devoured people without mercy. 

Let those who want to compete do so—she was stepping off the treadmill first.