Back to 1986

Shen Guodong slowly opened his sleepy eyes.

“What time is it? Why didn’t my secretary wake me for the meeting?”

He was the chairman of a large foreign trade conglomerate, currently preparing for a public listing. There were countless matters to attend to, and every side demanded his attention. Lately, he’d been so busy he could hardly see straight. At business dinners, to please his guests, he often drank to excess.

“Ugh, my mouth is so dry…”

He pressed a hand to his forehead and rolled over to get out of bed.

Clang! His foot struck a glass bottle, sending it rolling to the wall. Focusing his gaze, he saw it was an emerald-green, unlabelled liquor bottle, reeking of cheap, abrasive spirits.

“Hilton’s room service is getting worse by the day, how could they leave such a mess?”

He scowled, but soon noticed something even more astonishing. The floor wasn’t the gleaming tile or polished hardwood he expected, but rough, gray cement. The bed beneath him wasn’t a soft and comfortable Simmons, but a squeaky iron bunk with a hard wooden board for a mattress.

The room was barely twenty square meters, with a burgundy wooden wardrobe in the corner, exuding an old-fashioned charm.

“Where am I?”

Shen Guodong was baffled. He slipped on a pair of faded plastic slippers and stepped outside.

The bedroom opened onto a living room: a sofa draped in sheer white cloth, a black, spring-driven wall clock, and a fourteen-inch black-and-white television…

“Is this the set of some period drama?”

Shen Guodong had weathered