Yang introduces the basic disconnect he feels between China’s official narrative of success—as displayed on a particular Times Square jumbotron—and his own experience. Despite his successful academic career as a PhD student and then professor at Renmin University, one of China’s most prestigious schools, he describes the peripatetic life he has led switching from one undignified housing situation to another. Yang questions how this experience is emblematic of his whole generation, born in the 1980s, and how it is connected to the broader notion of “individual struggle” as part of Reform-Era ideology. He then links this to several prominent post-Mao literary works by Lu Yao and Fang Fang, examining how the constructions of the protagonists’ subjectivities reflect the particular struggles of his generation.