Annie Chen is a Chinese-American reporter for a top New York magazine, known for her sharp deconstruction of Western stereotypes of the East. When she was sent to write a report on "Real China" in her family's ancestral town in Guangdong, she found that she had become an "outsider" in her hometown. The humid weather, the unfamiliar rituals in the ancestral hall, and the suffocating care of her relatives all made her build up a wall in her heart with her usual critical eye.
The turning point happened when she accidentally discovered the wooden box left by her great-grandfather Chen Agui. The box is full of letters home he wrote a hundred years ago when he was building the Pacific Railway in the United States. The letter paper is fragile, and every word is bloody: the humiliation of a foreign land, the fatal danger, the bone-gnawing homesickness, and the sentence "The descendants of the Chen family, the backbone cannot be broken" written when he was seriously ill and on the verge of death. The grand history of immigration suddenly turned into a concrete life pain, hitting her.
These letters subvert her knowledge and arrogance. She began to "see" again: the ancestral hall ceremony was the anchor of the wanderer's spirit, and the nagging of relatives was a clumsy but tenacious concern. Her reporting moves from cold observation to a deeply personal journey of roots and reconciliation. The article aroused great resonance among overseas Chinese, and she was also broken and reconstructed. She finally understood the century-old echo across the Pacific and completed her transformation from an indifferent bystander to a bloodline inheritor.
