The book is set in the decades between the mid-1970s and the 21st century in China. Through complex conflicts and entanglements, Zhang Youcai and Zhang Fugui are the images of many ordinary people in all walks of life at that time. Labor and love, setbacks and pursuits, pain and joy, daily life and huge social conflicts are intertwined, and deeply displays the difficult and tortuous paths that ordinary people have taken in the historical process of the great era.