Series

Clearing out her grandmother's house, Lin finds a box of letters nobody ever posted. Each chapter is one letter, and what it explains.

Afu resents being made to help at his grandfather's dying noodle shop for the summer -- until he learns the one soup's thirty-year-old stock was his late grandmother's, and someone has to keep it going.

Azhe leaves a small northern town for a customer-service job in Hangzhou, terrified of the phone. Twenty everyday situations: an agent and a lease, a bank, a first day, an angry caller, a clinic, a neighbor, a raise.

Song Xiao leaves the city to teach for a year at an eleven-pupil school in the Yunnan mountains. One boy hasn't spoken since his mother went away to work. He only draws.

A student running from her parents' plans and an 82-year-old man going back to the desert where he planted poplars in 1962 share a sleeper compartment for three days and four thousand kilometers.

Laid off in Shenzhen, Xiang Yun goes home to her Hunan village, where her mother's chilli sauce sells out at every market. Twenty everyday situations in starting a tiny online business -- licences, a broken jar, a bad review, a livestream, ten thousand orders -- and a recipe that has been in the family for three generations.

In 1994 Yao Hui let go of her little brother's hand for one minute in the crowd at Zhengzhou station. Thirty years later she sells steamed buns beside the same station, still looking -- and two thousand kilometres away, a truck driver with a scar on his forehead keeps dreaming of snow and a girl singing.

Li Xia, twenty-three and newly qualified, is put on nights in the emergency department of a big Wuhan hospital. Twenty nights -- a drunk, a car crash, the first patient she loses, a baby born at three in the morning -- under a terrifying head nurse, and a lonely old man who comes in with chest pains every Tuesday.

Fourteen-year-old Zhuo Yuan is sent from Shanghai to spend the summer with a grandfather he barely knows: a Weifang kite maker whose hands have started to shake. In the back room lies a fifty-section dragon he promised his late wife, and only half of it is painted.

Qu Lei delivers takeaways in Kunming; his guitar has been under the bed for ten years. On his rounds he finds a lonely retired music teacher, a bank teller who can only sing when no one is listening and a schoolboy drumming on buckets behind his father's back -- and a noodle shop with an empty stage.

Du Yue, twenty-three, from a Shandong farming village, takes the only job she's offered: trainee estate agent in Qingdao. Twenty clients, twenty everyday conversations about homes -- students, a broken boiler, a first flat and a mortgage, a fake landlord, a typhoon -- and an eighty-year-old professor who will only sell his red-roofed house to someone who'll keep his twelve thousand books.

Ji Yu hosts a midnight phone-in in Taiyuan for the people awake while the city sleeps: a trucker in the snow, a baker at three a.m., a security guard alone in thirty floors. Every night at ten past two, someone calls and says nothing -- just breathing and an old clock. Then the station cancels the show, and Ji Yu sets out to find him.

Lu Yuan misses medical school by four points. His mother, who sells steamed buns at dawn, pays for a repeat year at an exam-factory school in Hengshui: up at half past five, running drills, a hundred to a class. There he meets Xu Nuo, on her third attempt, whose hands shake in every exam -- and Teacher Ning, who never praises anyone and knows everything.

Qiu Yang quits his job in Shanghai to look after his grandfather in Xiamen, a retired Gulangyu ferry captain with dementia who gets up at half past five every morning to take out the first boat, and who keeps asking for a boy called Haisheng.

Ke Chuan, from a Guizhou mountain village, joins a Guiyang fire station: lifts, pans and stuck rings, a captain who never praises anyone, a veteran driver who knows every steep street, a smoke room he can't get through -- and a smoke alarm he fits for Granny Long that one night goes off.

Bai Lu has a degree in animal medicine and a secret: she's been afraid of big dogs since she was seven. Her first job is at a tiny pet clinic in an old Nanjing lane, run by a vet who never says thank you. Twenty owners, twenty everyday situations -- the phone, a bill, a midnight call, a stray, a pet passport -- and an old man whose old dog comes in every Tuesday.

Burnt out from shooting perfect faces for Shanghai magazines, Mo Fan takes a job at a tiny wedding-photo studio in Lijiang. Twenty chapters, twenty couples -- one who can't smile, a groom late for sunrise, a seventy-year-old bride, a deaf couple, a soldier on two days' leave -- until his father, a village photographer who never praised him, falls ill.

Li An is a Guangzhou accountant so quiet her colleagues forget she's in meetings, and when she's nervous, she stammers. Dragged to a tiny comedy bar, she writes her name on the open-mic list before she can stop herself. Twenty chapters: a set that dies in silence, a taxi driver who's the best comedian in town, a notebook of embarrassing truths, a heckler, a break-up -- and a final where her stammer becomes her best joke.

Five years after Grandma died, Xiaoxi's grandpa announces at Sunday dinner that he's marrying Auntie Qin, a retired bus driver from his calligraphy class -- and Xiaoxi's mum walks out of the restaurant. Twenty chapters: a worried uncle, the other family's objections, a night in hospital, a letter Grandma left behind, a wedding dress at sixty-five, and a wedding on the Xiang River.

Young Hangzhou doctor Zhou Nan is sent for a year to the clinic on Qingyu Island, two hours by ferry off Zhoushan, where gruff Dr Shao has been the only doctor for forty years. Twenty chapters: seasickness, a dialect she can't follow, a girl who dreams of nursing, a baby born in a typhoon, an old fisherman who won't leave, a call from Hangzhou, and the morning Dr Shao collapses.