Moving North and Looking South

The 41-year-old protagonist found a blue and white chamber pot and an enamel hand stove with a copper body under the bed of an old house in Chengdu that was about to be demolished. The bottom of the chamber pot is inscribed with "Dayu", and the hand burner is engraved with "Yongtai enters Sichuan in memory" - it was a parting gift given to her husband by a Cantonese woman named Lin Qiaoer three hundred years ago. From this, the protagonist embarks on the road to find his roots. Chen Yiqun, a distant relative, brought a fragmented genealogy, and his grandfather Chen Shouye's diary was hidden in the gaps in the accounts, hiding the history of a family's blood and tears: During the Qianlong period, Chen Yongtai went to Sichuan on an order, but encountered bandits on the way, his brother was killed, and his gold and silver were robbed; martial arts exams in the late Qing Dynasty Chen Yaozu, a man who prayed for the people, was attacked from behind with a hoe by his enemies, and his body was abandoned in a smelly ditch; his great-grandfather Chen Zhongfu smoked and ruined his family, so 13-year-old Chen Shouye went to work as an apprentice in a barber shop. In winter, his hands were frozen and cracked while washing customers' hair, and blood seeped into the water. From then on, the Chen family held every penny to their bones—my grandfather was frugal to the point of being pathologically frugal, and his father, Chen Jizong, suffered from mild Asperger syndrome. This family has been repeatedly crushed by the times, but its bloodline has never been cut off - my grandfather's cousin Chen Shouying escaped from marriage and moved to Hubei, where she became a university professor and has descendants all over northern Qing Dynasty and overseas. The protagonist follows the reverse route to Sichuan, from Sichuan to Guangdong, looking for the old site of Dayu Village, contacting the tribesmen scattered around the world, and completing the reconstruction of the genealogy spanning three hundred years in front of the crescent-shaped tombstone restored in the ancestral mountain. He finally understood that finding one's roots was not about retrieving glory, but understanding how trauma is passed down from generation to generation, and in understanding, breaking the chain, allowing future generations to travel with ease.