Lin Wanzhao, who possessed the knowledge of modern social work, turned out to be a junior social worker in Peking Union Medical College Hospital in 1921.
That year, Union Hospital had just established China's first social services department. She shuttled between the ward and the alley courtyard, using professional training beyond the times to hold every hand that was extended - the exploited grocery store apprentice, the impoverished bannerman who sold his ancestral property, the Suzhou embroiderer who was living in the dust, the female artist who performed on the bridge... She used the clumsiest method to practice "helping others and helping themselves" in the cracks of the times.
In that turbulent era, she met the silent and passionate doctor Shen Zhongping, rubbed shoulders in the ward, and walked together under gunfire. They faced a difficult choice together: should they stay in the hospital and save one by one, or join the battlefield farther away?
From Xiehe to Xiangshan Salesian Home, from Jiliangsuo to mental sanatorium, from tuberculosis follow-up line to late-night underground literacy classes - she knocked on closed doors one after another. If the door doesn't open, knock again. Knock until it opens.
This is not a story about a time traveler saving the world. She can't change history, she can just pick up the fragments of humanity in the ruins, fill out her forms as usual, and hold every hand as usual. Thirty-one years later, Xiehe's social work department was closed, but those whose faces she remembered became their own light.
"The social worker is the one who knocks on the door. The door opens and the person comes out. The social worker does nothing else but knock on the door."
