My Brother's Home Is My Home Too

Three-and-a-half-year-old Xiao Nuomi was abandoned by his birth mother in the hallway of a nightclub. He curled up on the floor, filthy and hungry. When Gu Yanzhou passed by, he bent down and picked him up. He had no idea what he was taking into his arms: a son, a responsibility, a lifelong commitment.

It took Gu Yanzhou three months to go from being called “big brother” to “Dad,” and from being a stranger to someone Xiao Nuomi depended on. He taught Xiao Nuomi to talk, eat, and use the toilet, took him to kindergarten, built things with him, and comforted him when nightmares woke him crying in the middle of the night. Xiao Nuomi went from being afraid to smile to smiling all the time, and from fearing abandonment to saying, “I believe you.” He drew picture after picture: the sun, a house, and two little figures holding hands. In crooked letters, he wrote, “Big Brother's home is my home too.”

The appearance of Xiao Nuomi's birth father shattered their peace. There was a court case, an escape, and one night when Xiao Nuomi walked all the way home from a welfare institution. The three-and-a-half-year-old measured the whole city in footsteps, all just to get back to the place where his big brother was. In court, clutching his toy dinosaur, he stood before the judge and said something that made everyone weep: “DNA doesn't make you a dad. The person who treats me well is my dad.”

It took Gu Yanzhou seven years to teach Xiao Nuomi what home meant, taking him from “big brother” to “Dad,” from a legal stranger to “father and son” on the household register. And over those same seven years, Xiao Nuomi taught Gu Yanzhou what love meant.

This is a story about taking someone in and being taken in, about saving and being saved. They may not be related by blood, but their bond is stronger than blood. Having a dad is enough.