Yangsu Ruyi

The Swap is the third chapter of the PolEc Trilogy, comprising Wandering Marxwards (1998) and The Three Failures (2006). It features the same character as in the previous episodes, but now reduced to a lost, exhausted soul roaming Shanghai's cityscape from the remotest periphery to the financial district. Another narrative, spoken this one, takes us to September 2008, as gigantic bailouts put the financial system on life support instead of letting it collapse, thus seizing our reality and replacing it with a fiction tailored for the situation. These two streams end up meeting on a Shanghai dancefloor, where unresolved contradictions can finally be performed.

Inside a luxurious hundred-year-old mansion, the protagonist Ming Yi is a blind single mother, raising her daughter Huan Huan, and running her florist shop. After Ming Yi was treated by Gao Mu who is an ophthalmology doctor, she regains her sight due to a cornea donation and fell in love with the eye surgeon who operated on her, but her daughter Huan Huan is still emotionally attached to Ming Yi's ex-boyfriend, Zuo Lin. Therefore, in order to let her daughter get used to a new life, she moved into the old mansion, and from this point got entangled with the spirit of the mansion.

A group of strangers wake up in a tourist bus in the middle of a desert, without any memory of who they are or how they got there.