《Fifty Years Old, I Came to My Own Wu River》Synopsis

This is a true story. The first two chapters are complete.

A boy is born in rural Henan, China.

In the same family, he and his younger brother seem to live two entirely different childhoods.

His younger brother receives affection, food, pocket money, freedom, and protection.

The older boy slowly learns one rule:

Ask for nothing.

From around the age of six, he sleeps in the kitchen while his younger brother remains close to their parents.

While his brother goes out to play, he works alongside his parents.

He carries water, shoulders sacks of grain, washes clothes, and prepares meals, forcing his young, frail body through cold and heavy labor it can barely endure.

He keeps believing that if he asks for less, does more, behaves better, endures more, and makes himself useful enough, perhaps his parents will finally love him.

They don’t.

The things a child should receive from his parents—love, protection, nourishment, education, and guidance—are almost entirely absent.

In their place are rejection, extreme inequality, and what he experiences as hatred from his parents.

The damage is not only emotional. It is physical as well.

Years later, a doctor examining him tells him that his body still bears signs of poor nutrition in childhood.

He believes the emotional scars run even deeper.

As a child, he often cries alone beneath the covers at night.

When life at home becomes unbearable, he runs away.

Not once.

Again and again.

The first time, at seven or eight, is during Chinese New Year.

He runs to his grandparents’ one-room home just across the street and stays there for roughly ten days.

His parents never come to bring him home.

But a child cannot truly escape.

He has no money, no home of his own, and nowhere that can take him in for long.

So every time he runs away, eventually he has no choice but to return on his own.

Back to the home he is desperately trying to escape.

Years later, a DNA test finally reveals the truth:

He was born from an affair his mother had outside her marriage.

The man who raised him is not his biological father.

Looking back, he comes to believe that the man who raised him probably knew—or at least had long suspected—the truth.

Only then do the rejection and hostility he experienced as a child, and at times what felt like disgust and hatred, begin to have a possible explanation.

But the DNA test cannot explain someone else.

His mother.

She is his biological mother.

Yet he remembers years of rejection and hostility from her as well.

Why?

He never finds an answer.

His mother remains in the marriage.

And he has no choice but to remain in that home.

Later, his mother and the man raising him have a biological son together.

His younger brother has a natural place in the family.

He spends his entire childhood trying to earn one.

The adults made their choices.

A child had to live with the consequences.

By the time he reaches adulthood, he feels that he has already cried a lifetime’s worth of tears during his childhood and adolescence.

At fifteen, he begins earning money.

He wants money because money means escape.

He begins to understand that earning his own money may be the only way he can truly leave.

But he enters the working world with little education, few skills, no family support, and no one to show him how to navigate life.

To survive and earn money, he has to keep asking people for jobs and opportunities, repeatedly humbling himself before those who might be able to help him.

He endures the humiliation because returning home is even harder to bear.

He wants money to buy freedom and dignity.

But to earn that money, at first he has to sacrifice much of his dignity.

Still, he keeps moving forward.

Eventually, he builds a career.

He marries.

He becomes a father.

When his first marriage ends, he makes a decision:

He will not remarry.

He will raise his son himself.

With almost no real help from anyone else, he earns a living while carrying the primary responsibility of raising his son.

Eventually, his son becomes more than his greatest responsibility.

His son becomes the center of his life.

For many years, his son becomes the entire meaning of his life.

For his son’s education, he moves to Shanghai.

Later, he sends him to Britain.

For more than a decade, he puts being a father ahead of his own life.

Then comes a second DNA test.

This time, it is between him and his own son.

Eventually, the child grows up.

At around sixteen, his son says to him one day:

“Don’t call me baby anymore. I’ve grown up.”

The words suddenly wake him from the life he has been living for more than a decade.

For the first time, he truly realizes that the child around whom he has built his life now has a life of his own.

His son needs independence.

He needs boundaries.

And one day, he will leave his father and live a life that belongs to him.

Only then does the man begin to look at his own life again.

Later, he remarries.

His second wife is eighteen years younger than he is.

After they marry and move to the United States, he gradually comes to believe that the relationship he once thought was love had, to a large extent, been built around money and the life he had been able to provide.

After moving to America, his career in China comes to an end.

When he can no longer provide the life he once could,

the marriage collapses as well.

What he loses is more than a marriage.

Years of marital conflict and emotional strain leave him exhausted in both body and mind.

The man who once dared to face hardship, take risks, and start over begins to feel that the strength and will he once possessed have been consumed by those years.

By the time the marriage ends, he no longer has the emotional strength or confidence to start another career and rebuild his life from the ground up.

He is now fifty.

Only then does he begin to see what may have been the most fundamental mistake of his life.

Through all those decades, he had almost never truly stopped to ask himself:

What kind of life do I want for myself?

At fifty, he finally understands:

Perhaps he should have learned long ago to take his own feelings seriously—to care about his own needs and the life he himself wanted to live.

But by the time he understands this,

too much can no longer be undone.

Looking back, he begins to wonder whether the seeds of this failure were planted before he was old enough even to understand life.

He entered adulthood carrying enormous physical and emotional wounds from childhood.

He did not have enough education.

He had almost no guidance.

There was no one beside him to teach him how to make the decisions that shape a life.

For decades, he fought desperately to escape the place where his life had begun.

But effort cannot restore everything that was missing from the beginning.

At fifty:

His career in China is gone.

His money is running out.

His marriage has collapsed.

He lives alone in a foreign country whose language he cannot speak.

His body no longer feels healthy.

He feels surrounded on all sides.

Throughout his adult life, he has not cried.

He believes he cried all his tears away in childhood.

But at fifty, looking back at the life he has lived and where it has brought him,

for the first time in decades, tears fall again.

He thinks of Xiang Yu ending his life at the Wu River.

In that moment,

Xiang Yu’s choice feels as though it has become his own.

He feels that

he, too, has reached his own Wu River.