Early in the morning, the old-fashioned electronic alarm clock at the bedside struggled to play a bright-paced tune after the last second of 6:59.

It's just that perhaps because the battery is about to run out, the bell sound has become distorted and weird, less like an energetic wake-up call, more like an elderly priest's vague chanting requiem.

Tommy Hawk opened his eyes, reached out to turn off the button on the electronic alarm clock, then jumped out of bed, walked to the improvised hanger next to him, took out his T-shirt from it, sniffed it, and put it on after making sure it could be worn for a day.

The landlord, Aunt Meloni, has already gotten up early to go out to earn money, and as a substitute teacher who is still looking for a stable teacher job, today she is going to help a paid substitute teacher at an elementary school 40 kilometers away.

A warm espresso and a croissant sit on the coffee table in the living room, next to a half-pack of Kimberley cigarettes that Melonie left for him.

After a quick wash, Tommy sat on the couch and lit a cigarette.

He is a traveler, I don't know why, in 2022, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese student studying in business at Boston University, Hawke, traveled to the United States in 1982 two months ago and became the seventeen-year-old American high school student named Tommy Hawke today.

Hawke only remembers that when he was shopping with his girlfriend near Boston's Chinatown that day, he happened to encounter two robbers robbing a nearby convenience store, and were arrested by the police who rushed there, and the two sides opened fire, but the police were fine, the robbers were fine, and Hawke was shot by a stray bullet.

Then as soon as he closed his eyes and opened them, he changed from Hawke, a wealthy second-generation Chinese student, to Tommy Hawke, an American high school student today.

Today, he has fused the memories and emotions of two people, and has to face the bleak reality.

That's his life now, poor and desperate.

He lives in the smallest state of Rhode Island in the United States, in Warwick, Kent County, Rhode Island, the second-largest city in the state with a population of 80,000, but it is slightly larger than a bustling town in his hometown of China.

A bike ride will take you to explore the city in an hour, and you'll have plenty of time to ride around Providence, the state capital, 17 kilometers away.

And the timing of his crossing is very unfortunate, his family has just changed from worry-free food and clothing to a mess because of his father's unemployment.

This made him not enjoy the privileged life of blue-collar workers under capitalism, but only saw the misery and desolation of the people at the bottom of the United States.

Tommy Hawk's father, Colin Hawke, who is of German descent and previously worked at GM's parts factory in Rhode Island, lost his job five months ago when GM laid off its production line, and now earns money by working as a casual worker in a small shipbreaking yard and shipyard.

Mother Alida is Italian, died in a car accident in 1981, a pair of young white garbage with hemp grass, driving a stolen family car on the street when she ran wildly, hit and killed her who was opening the mailbox on the side of the street to collect family bills, it was a pair of poor ghosts, in the end there was no compensation, no apology, and was prosecuted for driving and hit-and-run death and manslaughter, according to state law, should have been in jail for four years, but because the pair of white trash is Irish, and the total population of Rhode Island, Irish is 70%, Based on race and votes, the Rhode Island court sentenced the two men to six months in prison, suspended for three years, and as for the $5,000 in damages, they couldn't possibly come up with it.

Brother Tony Leon, one year older than Tommy, should have been called Tony Hawke, but Italy issued a bill in 1980 to allow children to take their mother's surname, although the mother is a third-generation Italian immigrant born in the United States, and has never been to Italy at all, but the women's equality movement has been popular in the northern states of the United States in recent years, in order to respond to the Italian bill, and at the same time to show support for the women's equality movement, the mother and father discussed and changed the elder brother Tony Hawke to Tony Leon, a typical white boy in a small town, after his father lost his job, He decided to drop out of high school and try to be a man to earn money to support his family, and is currently working as an apprentice in a car repair shop with a salary of 80 yuan a week.

Tommy also has a younger sister, Bessia, who just turned seven years old this year, and was forced to live in a foster home temporarily by the Child Protection Bureau at the beginning of the year on the grounds that domestic abuse triggered the protection mechanism, simply because her father was busy working as a temporary job to earn money after losing his job, which caused Bessia to be noticed by the teacher when she wore dirty clothes to school for several days in a row, and when the teacher visited her home, she happened to find several "Loft" magazines in Becia's reach, which made her just get the new "Adoption Funding and Child Welfare Act" Now Bethea is fostered in a middle-class family in Providence, the state capital, and her life is well-off, and the father's biggest obsession is to bring his daughter home, but it is easy to be taken away, and it is difficult to bring it back, even if Bessia agrees, the foster family agrees, but the cold provisions of the bill do not agree, that is, according to the provisions of the bill, it must be met that the child must have a large enough independent bedroom, and the minimum monthly income of the family reaches 850 US dollars, The court can only decide to return the child to the family after spending no less than $70 per month on the child's growth and education, and the child is approved by the foster family.

If Tommy's father had not lost his job before, it would have been easy to meet the conditions for getting back custody, but because RB cars quickly seized the U.S. market, local auto factories have cut production lines, so that a large number of blue-collar workers who originally earned two or three hundred dollars a week and could easily support their families quickly became the bottom of society, for example, my father's weekly salary in Ford's factory could reach 275 US dollars, and now he is settled according to the hourly wage in the shipbreaking yard, less than four US dollars per hour, eight hours a day, and five days a week, and can only earn about 170 US dollars. And because the shipbreaking yard is high-intensity manual labor, basically at the end of the day, there is no energy to go to other jobs part-time, and 170 US dollars, for a family's water and electricity expenses, car loans, various insurance expenses and daily expenses, can only be said to be barely supported by credit cards, not to starve to death, but don't want to save a penny.

When Tommy crossed over, his father and brother were trying to persuade him to drop out of school and find a job so that he could meet the income conditions as soon as possible and bring Bethea home, anyway, in the eyes of his family, there was no difference between graduating from high school and dropping out of school halfway, and going to college was never in the family option.

But Tommy, who crossed over, knew that going to college was the only chance to change his fate, and if he didn't go to college, he would have the same life as his father, find a factory in Rhode Island to work, or go to a leather goods shop or an auto repair shop as an apprentice, and then spend the rest of his life in such a small border town on the northeast coast of the United States, marry a woman from a similar background, have children, and support a family until death.

If you want to change this fate and break through class rigidity, the only chance is to be admitted to a university that is good enough, and only then may you have the opportunity to barely get in touch with a completely different America.

Because the family was lent by Tony to those friends from time to time to party, to earn a little money, Tommy who crossed over and wanted to be admitted to college was unbearable, so he chose to move out of the house and rented a bedroom in an old British apartment in Warwick Harbour District to study hard, and the landlord Meloni was a distant cousin of his mother who did not know how far away the family relationship was, and was moved by Tommy's attitude of studying hard, and rented the small bedroom of the apartment she lived in to him for thirty dollars a week.

In the month he moved out, he worked hard to take AP courses and prepare for the STA exam while squeezing out four hours of part-time work to earn money, but unfortunately, because of his family, Tommy has not been able to save a single coin so far.

If you want to concentrate on your studies, you have to solve the problem of money first, Tommy Hawk finished his cigarette, picked up the extremely bitter espresso, drank it one by one, then put away the cigarette on the table and stood up and walked towards the door.

In the corridor outside the door, a white office worker wearing a tweed hat and a suit carried a briefcase in his left hand and a newspaper of the day in his right hand, reading as he walked.

The front page of the Boston Globe in his hand was plastered with a photo of President Ronald Reagan and a black news headline:

"President Reagan: In the face of the Soviet Union, we need to do whatever it takes to break all the rules!"

"Good sign, there's finally a reason to convince yourself to make some money, and if you're to blame, blame our president, who said to me that we need to break all the rules." Tommy Hawk glanced at the newspaper cover in the other party's hand, smacked his lips, and whispered:

"Unscrupulous means."