Ping'an City was a second-tier coastal city in the south of Lu Province, with a permanent population of more than 4.8 million. It was, by all accounts, a major city.
As the city expanded, it developed the same problems as other large cities: the mixed and disorderly nature of its outskirts.
Some plots had been claimed and covered with high-rises. Others had not, remaining as their original single-story houses, with unauthorized additions and haphazard construction everywhere.
There were villagers relocated here after demolition, young people who had bought homes in the suburbs because of housing prices, people still living in single-story houses while dreaming every day of getting rich from demolition and moving into high-rises, and migrant workers who chose to rent the cheap single-story houses here.
High-rises on one side, single-story houses on the other; highly educated people on one side, poorly educated or even uncultured people on the other—things like this made the area seem somewhat more chaotic.
But this was the new century, after all. Crime crackdowns, anti-gang campaigns, swatting flies and tigers, along with all kinds of urban development—though it was a suburban village, it was not truly as filthy, disorderly, and shabby as places had been in the last century. It was simply that the population was highly transient and all sorts of people came and went, creating an appearance that lacked orderly beauty. That was why it was said to be a little chaotic.
Yet this place did provide some people with a reasonably stable sense of security.
In the eastern suburbs, at the boundary between the high-rises and the single-story houses, lay a bustling district, a place where the warmth and liveliness of everyday life rose into the air.
In the mornings, breakfast foods from all over the country were sold here. At