41-Year-old Lin Wei can twist the rusty water pipe with the wrench in his hand, but he cannot undo the dilemma of middle age. In a bungalow on the outskirts of the city, he made a living by doing odd jobs, his bank card balance was tighter than his eyebrows, and his mother's phone calls urging him to get married were like debt collection notes, until Zhang Lan, a woman from the Northeast, broke in with her son Xiaoyu.
He spent all his savings to renovate his old house, and even used the loan as a sweet deal - thinking it was the down payment for a new life. But the bills of fate came one after another: the diagnosis of his father's uremia, the sourness of the wedding, and the second-hand electric car was forced to be mortgaged by his mother-in-law's ICU bill as soon as it stopped. Meituan's reminder text messages for borrowing money were more eye-catching than Zhang Lanxin's Baojiaxian. The numbers for borrowing money and spending money grew wildly at night, and even Xiaoyu's hospitalization expenses for pneumonia became the last straw.
He became the "debtor" of the whole family, owing medical expenses, living expenses, and a decent life to Zhang Lan. But when the hot porridge was stuffed into his frozen hands, when the child held up the perfect test paper and shouted "come on", when his father gave him the scrap money, Lin Wei tightened his grip on the wrench: some debts are IOUs written with love.
In the smoke, the unfinished grape trellis and the succulents on the windowsill were shaking. The road to debt is still long, but as long as you want to live on, you can get through life no matter how difficult it is.
