[A nonfiction novel that overturns conventional ideas about parenting] When prenatal tests indicate “high risk,” should you obey the odds or embrace life? A child whom the data predicts will be “imperfect” spends 35 years breaking free from the shackles of a “standard life.” His growing-up struggle reflects the deepest fears and hopes of all parents: Are we raising “excellent” carbon copies, or protecting a soul’s right to grow freely?
The story begins with an accident: an older couple receives the prenatal diagnosis of a “high risk of trisomy 21,” and before the child is even born, his life is swept into the struggle between family and society. From medical anxiety in infancy and the rules of kindergarten to the pressure of school admissions, then young adulthood, entrepreneurship, and clashes with capital, every step the protagonist takes touches a nerve of the times. Again and again, he rejects the “standard answers”: coloring in the sun, handing in a blank exam paper for the high school entrance exam, giving up a place at a top-tier university to attend a vocational college, crowdfunding a business and then resolutely delisting it... Every episode is drawn from real events. There is no fantasy or melodrama, only the raw force of life growing wildly under the crushing weight of the System.
The book is intricately woven into a “3 × 4” structure, with twelve volumes corresponding to twelve steps in a life’s growth. One question remains at its heart: When a child refuses to become the copy his family expects, how much must he sacrifice? And how can his family bear it? The final answer points to the heavy core of “freedom”: it does not mean doing whatever one pleases, but having the courage to bear the full consequences of one’s choices.
This is a mirror of parenting for an entire generation, and also a journey of self-healing for everyone who was once a child shaped by education.
