A Mother’s Heart, Beyond the Distant Mountains

At thirty-five, Li Juan was once an elementary school teacher. After losing her job, she struggled to make ends meet, and she had always favored her eldest son, Leilei. At thirteen, Leilei entered junior high, then dropped out and stayed home for two months. Years of favoritism and a fractured home had made him withdrawn and violent, and he would bully his ten-year-old younger brother, Yangyang, who was still in fourth grade. Their father spent most of the year on the road as a long-haul truck driver, rarely paying attention to the family and unable to mediate the brothers' conflict or the growing rift between mother and son. Long-simmering tensions finally erupted. Li Juan and Leilei fell out completely and cut off contact, and Leilei was forced to move to the countryside to live with his grandmother. The child who had once been the most beloved drifted farther away. Favoritism had torn a rift in the family, and amid the mundanity of daily life, Li Juan regretted her past parenting mistakes while confronting a mother-son relationship that seemed impossible to repair, separated by both distance and resentment. The whole family was trapped between the debts of love and the hardships of reality.