Forty-one-year-old Chen Mo has been pretending to be alive for half his life. He repeated his studies several times as a teenager and managed to get a stable job in the system, but he hid a secret that he could not tell the outside world. At the age of thirty-one, he met the young man Jiang Yu and started an underground love affair that lasted ten years. There were passionate love, repeated pulls, and unexpected betrayals. After ten years of love, the lover left, leaving millions of debts on his shoulders. In front of him, his dignity was as normal, but in the back, he swallowed all the brokenness alone. There was no grand redemption, no happy ending. A middle-aged man has stumbled for half his life. He has loved and suffered pain, but he still has to bear the burden and move forward.
Purpose: This work is not simply about a period of failed sympathy, nor is it a complaint about suffering. It uses the experiences of the protagonist Chen Mo for most of his life to dissect the survival dilemma of ordinary people trapped by the times, secularity, nature, and obsessions. It has several core expressions: