The Watcher in the Wheat Field and the Wanderer

On a stormy night in a northern Chinese village in 1990, twelve-year-old Lu Shouren rescued nine-year-old Lu Zhuye from the floodwaters. The two boys became sworn brothers in a ruined temple. Over the next twenty years, Shouren put down roots in his hometown like an old locust tree, becoming a “watchman of the wheat fields” who measured the land with his feet and tended the crops with his heart and soul. Zhuye, like a wild horse, ventured south and weathered the ups and downs of the business world, becoming a “city wanderer” worth over a hundred million yet adrift in spirit.

As the wave of rural revitalization swept through their hometown, Shouren, now the village Party secretary, held fast to his conviction that “land is life, and it must not be bought or sold.” Zhuye, now a real estate magnate, returned with his capital, intending to transform their home into a modern resort. Their fierce clash of ideals, long-buried secrets about their pasts, and tangled emotional ties placed the brothers, who had once vowed never to part, on opposite sides of fate.

This is a battle between “roots” and “roads,” and a meditation on “preserving” and “changing.” Against the sweeping backdrop of forty years of reform and opening up, two men make starkly different choices in life, together exploring what home means, what brotherhood means, and the profound bond between a person and a piece of land, a bond that cannot be severed and is impossible to unravel.