Beneath the old locust tree in Qingshan Village, a faded first-aid kit with a red cross always hangs. When 28-year-old Lin Shen walks along the flagstones toward the village clinic, mud clings to his trouser cuffs, while his white coat has been washed until it turned pale. This is his fifth year as the village’s general practitioner after giving up a top-tier position at Peking Union Medical College Hospital to return home. The villagers call him “a ladies’ man”: young wives like to see him for gynecological checkups, praising his gentle touch and kind words; the old folks clutch his hand while he takes their pulses, saying he cares more than their own sons; even the cowherd boys love to chase after him and call him “Brother Lin,” because he can always pull a piece of fruit candy from his medical bag. But everyone knows that beneath this reputation lies a lonely courage. He once missed his graduate school entrance exam while saving a child from drowning, and to honor his grandmother’s dying wish, “Don’t let the villagers go without medical care again,” he planted his youth deep in these mountain valleys.
Then Su Wanqing drove into the village in a pickup spattered with mud. A master’s graduate from an agricultural university and the director of an ecological farming project, she had come to teach the villagers how to grow organic tea, only for Lin Shen to cure her recurring low-grade fever. “You’re just a country doctor. You can read lab results too?” she asked with a raised brow. He handed her a stack of handwritten medical records. “Western medicine reads the numbers; Chinese medicine treats the person. We can’t let our village’s old remedies disappear.” From arguing over the right organic fertilizer mix to driving a woman in difficult labor through the rain to the town hospital in the middle of the night, they gradually learned to work in sync. Lin Shen realized that the girl who always wore a windbreaker smiled like a wild azalea in a mountain stream; Su Wanqing also came to understand that his so-called reputation as a ladies’ man came from keeping every villager’s pain in his heart.
When the clinic needed expanding and the organic tea plantation needed workers, Lin Shen received an offer to return to a city hospital. Su Wanqing pressed a tea seedling into his hand. “Qingshan needs you. I
