In the autumn of 1962, a green train carried Lin Zhiyuan from the frozen fields of the Great Northern Wilderness to a small county town called Nanjiang. A Tsinghua graduate who had once worked in a central ministry, he was a man repeatedly dragged to the depths by his times—yet somehow, time and again, he found his footing in the cracks.At the counter of the county credit office, he processed one ordinary loan after another: draft oxen, grain rations, production equipment. Caught b...