The Story

Fang Hongjian’s arranged fiancée dies before they ever marry. Yet her grieving father, Zhou Housheng, honors the abandoned family bond by financing Fang’s education abroad.

That generosity gives Fang Hongjian years in Europe, but freedom exposes his aimlessness. He wanders among universities, studies without conviction, and earns no degree worth bringing home.

Because returning empty-handed would disgrace him, Fang Hongjian seeks an easier substitute for achievement. An Irish diploma-mill swindler offers precisely the counterfeit respectability he needs.

Fang Hongjian buys a fabricated doctorate from Carleton University. The document can satisfy distant expectations, yet he knows its impressive language conceals his failure to commit.

Armed with that worthless credential, Fang Hongjian returns to Shanghai in 1937 as war spreads upheaval. His supposed distinction cannot supply either purpose or dependable prospects.

During the voyage, Fang Hongjian is captivated by Miss Pao’s bold sensuality. Their brief affair lets him mistake convenient intimacy for a conquest carrying real significance.

At Hong Kong, Miss Pao steps ashore and rejoins her actual fiancé. Fang Hongjian discovers that the adventure flattering his vanity was merely her temporary amusement.

Back in Shanghai, Fang Hongjian reconnects with Su Wenwan, whose genuine doctorate quietly embarrasses his counterfeit one. Her sophistication also makes their friendship socially useful and emotionally dangerous.

Through Su Wenwan, Fang Hongjian meets Tang Xiaofu and responds with unusual sincerity. Unlike his casual entanglements, this attraction awakens an earnest desire to choose someone wholeheartedly.

Yet Su Wenwan has interpreted Fang Hongjian’s attention as courtship. His interest in someone else wounds both her romantic hopes and her carefully cultivated intellectual pride.

Zhao Xinmei has long loved Su Wenwan, so he reads Fang Hongjian as a rival. Their hostility grows from competing assumptions rather than from either man understanding her intentions.

While pursuing Tang Xiaofu, Fang Hongjian briefly works at Zhou Housheng’s bank. The borrowed employment mirrors his borrowed doctorate: another position granted through obligation rather than earned direction.

Jealousy gives Su Wenwan a weapon. She tells Tang Xiaofu about Fang Hongjian’s compromised past, including Miss Pao, turning old evasions into evidence that his present devotion cannot be trusted.

Tang Xiaofu angrily breaks with Fang Hongjian. Because this was his most authentic love, losing her becomes more than romantic failure: it proves sincerity arrived after his conduct had undermined credibility.

Su Wenwan has damaged the match she envied without winning its place. Still anxious about remaining unmarried, she accepts the attentions of a self-important poet.

Su Wenwan marries the poet, producing a union founded less on intimacy than compatible performance. Literary vanity recognizes social vanity, and each supplies the other an admiring stage.

Once the romantic misunderstanding clears, Fang Hongjian and Zhao Xinmei abandon rivalry. Shared disappointment instead makes Zhao the practical, loyal friend Fang has repeatedly failed to become for himself.

With love lost and career prospects fading, Fang Hongjian accepts a post Zhao Xinmei arranges at San Lü University. Once again, another person’s initiative determines his direction.

Fang Hongjian and Zhao Xinmei join newly recruited teachers traveling overland into the wartime interior. Hard roads and scarce comforts quickly strip professional dignity down to appetite and endurance.

Among the travelers, a pompous hoarder carries medicine not principally to relieve suffering but to exploit scarcity. Fang Hongjian watches respectable foresight reveal itself as petty profiteering.

The difficult journey exposes more than greed. Fang Hongjian also observes a flatterer attaching himself to whoever seems useful, converting hardship into a comic test of everyone’s concealed selfishness.

Sun Roujia travels with the group as a quiet young lecturer. Her modest manner initially keeps her near the edge of Fang Hongjian’s attention, where she can observe without appearing calculating.

At San Lü, Fang Hongjian and Zhao Xinmei find scholarship subordinated to factions, backbiting, and inflated résumés. The university promises intellectual refuge but operates like another contest for insecure status.

Fang Hongjian meets Han Xueyu, whose fraudulent foreign degree resembles his own. The discovery offers no solidarity; instead, Han becomes an uncomfortable image of Fang’s hidden dishonesty.

Unlike Fang Hongjian, Han Xueyu displays no crippling shame. He asserts his counterfeit distinction confidently, showing that institutions rewarding appearances may favor the brazen fraud over the hesitant one.

Meanwhile, Fang Hongjian drifts toward Sun Roujia. Her apparent dependence invites his protection, while her quiet guidance steadily transforms companionship into emotional intimacy.

Fang Hongjian had actively pursued Tang Xiaofu, but with Sun Roujia he mostly responds. Her initiative fills the space left by his indecision until passivity begins resembling consent.

Consequently, Fang Hongjian finds himself engaged to Sun Roujia almost before recognizing that he has chosen. A relationship entered through momentum now carries obligations that momentum cannot fulfill.

Academic intrigue also traps Zhao Xinmei in a compromising relationship with a married woman. What begins as a personal scandal becomes ammunition for enemies already seeking institutional advantage.

Unable to withstand both scandal and factional attack, Zhao Xinmei leaves San Lü. His departure proves that the university’s battles concern reputation and alliances more than teaching.

Without his friend’s protection, Fang Hongjian is equally vulnerable. Faculty maneuvering erodes his position until his contract is not renewed, leaving another borrowed identity abruptly unusable.

Zhao Xinmei moves to Chongqing for government work. His adaptability turns displacement into opportunity, distinguishing him from friends who understand their failures without learning how to redirect themselves.

Fang Hongjian and his fiancée Sun Roujia also leave San Lü. During the return journey toward Shanghai, uncertain prospects and enforced closeness propel them into marriage.

The wedding formalizes what Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia have drifted toward, but ceremony cannot create passion. Circumstance has completed a decision neither mutual understanding nor tested compatibility secured.

In Shanghai, Fang Hongjian cannot obtain stable, respectable employment. His education, doctorate, and university experience now amount to an impressive surface with little economic strength underneath.

As Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia depend upon relatives, his traditionalist family clashes with her domineering aunt over gifts, manners, and respect. Domestic etiquette becomes a struggle for authority.

Neither Fang Hongjian nor Sun Roujia can contain the family feud. Each relative’s slight is carried into their home, where defending one side necessarily appears to betray the other.

Financial dependence injures Fang Hongjian’s pride, while Sun Roujia demands practical security. Arguments over money therefore become arguments over competence, loyalty, and who must bear disappointment.

Career failure deepens the hostility. Fang Hongjian feels judged and diminished; Sun Roujia feels trapped beside someone unreliable, so each protects wounded pride by humiliating the other.

Occasional reconciliations interrupt their quarrels, yet tenderness provides only temporary relief. Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia restore peace without changing the habits and pressures that repeatedly destroy it.

At last, accumulated resentment erupts in a particularly savage quarrel. Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia use intimate knowledge not for understanding but to strike precisely where each is most vulnerable.

After the rupture, Sun Roujia storms out to stay with her aunt. Her departure leaves Fang Hongjian inside the marriage yet physically abandoned, unable either to preserve or escape it.

Alone at home, Fang Hongjian hears the old family clock chime an hour that does not match the real time. Its error fills the silence left by the quarrel.

The inaccurate clock distills Fang Hongjian’s life into sound. Desire, action, and opportunity have repeatedly failed to coincide, while recognition has arrived only after usefulness passed.

Su Wenwan later resurfaces as a harder society figure, still married to her poet. The refined scholar has adapted to wartime society by turning cultivated appearance into social armor.

Zhao Xinmei is last seen prospering in wartime government work. His success does not make him morally pure, but it confirms his ability to act within changing circumstances.

Han Xueyu remains comfortably established, apparently untroubled by fraud. His survival sharpens the satire: institutions obsessed with credentials may punish insecurity more reliably than dishonesty.

Nothing finally resolves Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia’s marriage: there is neither divorce nor reconciliation. They remain caught in the besieged fortress, separated across its walls yet still bound within them.

What it means

Fang Hongjian’s tragedy is not simple bad luck: passivity has been his governing choice. By avoiding decisive responsibility, he loses genuine love, useful work, and perhaps Sun Roujia, proving that drift carries its own verdict.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.