Ruan Jianshu was born at the twilight of the severe cold winter during the "Three Years of Difficulty Period". He is the fourth life born from his mother. His birth brought joy to his eager parents, who had given birth to three children before him who had all died. His parents failed to raise their children satisfactorily, and later his younger brother died in infancy, leaving him an only son with neither brothers nor sisters. In order to ease the pain of losing a child, her parents adopted a girl, Tong Fangying, and thus began the unique journey of their special family.
The novel spans more than sixty years and puts the stamp of that era on Ruan Jianshu's life legend - the poison given to them by that absurd era made them ignorant and ignorant. Fortunately, he was recommended as a water conservancy worker, which allowed him to devote his persistent love to his career.
The novel takes Ruan Jianshu and Tong Fangying's life experiences of mutual support and struggle as the longitude, and the social environment around them as the weft. It reproduces the earth-shaking social and historical changes in rural China for more than half a century, and shapes the unyielding image of the Chinese people's persistence in moving forward.
The novel faces the reality directly, praises the good and criticizes the evil, and describes the content of rural water conservancy construction in a rich and colorful way. It is a rarely mentioned work about water conservancy people.
The novel adopts a symbolic approach and uses the three trilogy of "flow of source", "flow of surge" and "flow of convergence" to summarize life - although life is a process of living towards death, and although its road is tortuous and rugged, under the law of inevitable development of the overall social trend, it will eventually be like the rushing of the Yangtze River - after all, it flows eastward!
