The Roguish Villager

The Roguish Villager is an urban-themed novel by the web novelist Guan Zhong Lao Ren (Old Man of Guanzhong), originally serialized on Zongheng Chinese Network. It launched on December 15, 2016, and concluded on January 25, 2024, running to roughly 3.7755 million Chinese characters, and it won the 2016 China Online Literature Annual Good Works Award. The story opens with the line "The poorest can only beg; so long as you live, you will rise." In Phoenix Village, deep in the Qilian Mountains of Qinghai, the orphan Zhao Chuxi has drifted for more than twenty years. Though the villagers see him as a lazy loafer, a "rogue," a hidden circumstance drives him to leave the mountains. On the night before his departure, he talks until dawn with a young woman teacher who has spent a year and a half teaching in the village, and from her he learns just how vast the world beyond the mountains is. Carrying the resolve "no wealth, no homecoming," he boards a long-haul truck loaded with mountain goods and heads for the provincial capital, Xining, then moves on to ever larger cities, starting out on construction sites and at the bottom of the ladder, fighting and scrambling all the way. The novel offers both the bustle of street life and the undercurrents of the building site, as well as business rivalries and personal grudges; through ups and downs Zhao Chuxi makes friends and meets rivals, and step by step gains a foothold amid setbacks and hardships. The work focuses on how an ordinary man carves out a path in the cracks of his era, and has been called "a pure, moving, tragicomic history of striving by a nobody." It has been adapted into the web series of the same name, I Am Zhao Chuxi.