At the age of thirty-four, Lin Shen lost everything.
The company laid off employees, the mortgage payment was cut off, and the fiancée left. He stood on the balcony in Beijing, unable to see the stars or the road. A missed call from Zhongnan Mountain was like a seed buried in the cracks in his heart.
He went up the mountain with his last bit of stubbornness. There is no poetry of seclusion, only a leaky hut, hands with blisters, frozen winter nights and a taciturn old Taoist priest. There, he learned to grow vegetables, chop wood, count his breaths, and face his own fears and incompetence. He met bankrupt factory directors, depressed investment banking elites, aphasic middle-aged teachers, confused fresh graduates - a group of people left behind by the times, licking each other's wounds on the mountain.
But the mountain is not the end.
When his pregnant ex-girlfriend appeared in the snow, when the child's cry came from the delivery room down the mountain, when his friend collapsed in front of his critically ill father's bed, when the wave of economic crisis swept through every ordinary person's job - Lin Shen discovered that the real practice is not on the mountain, but at the foot of the mountain. He returned to the city with the soil from Zhongnan Mountain, delivered food, slept in a tin shack, and picked up a hoe again on the wasteland of Chongming Island. From two acres of vegetable land to a hundred acres of farm, from one person to a group of people, he cultivated a home called "Gui Qu Lai" with his hands.
This is not a story about success, but a story about "enough" - about how a person rebuilds his life on the ruins, how he finds what is truly important after losing everything, and how he walks his own, winding but always forward path.
