The Old Family of Mountains and Rivers

In 1911, in the countryside of Shandong, 20-year-old Zhao Deyi married Li, a girl from a neighboring village. No one knows what a magnificent century this ordinary farmer and his descendants will go through. Zhao Deyi has four sons and three daughters. The eldest son, Zhao Wenyuan, carried a gun and fought in the war, and learned what responsibility was under heavy fire; the second son, Zhao Wenbo, opened a grocery store in the occupied area and used a steel scale to weigh out the Chinese people's backbone; the third son, Zhao Wenhan, walked thousands of miles to study at the Southwest Associated University and wrote about the unyieldingness of a nation with a pen; the fourth son, Zhao Wentao, guarded the few acres of thin farmland at home and raised five children during the famine years. When it came to his grandchildren, Zhao Jizong became the production captain and led the whole village to build canals and open terraces; Zhao Jiguang became an educated youth and learned what the motherland was in the ice and snow of the Great Northern Wilderness; Zhao Jichang joined the army and stood guard on the border, where he stayed for twenty years. When the spring breeze of reform and opening up came, great-grandson Zhao Yaozu was admitted to college and became the first person in his family to leave the mountains; Zhao Yaozong went south to Shenzhen and became a factory director from an assembly line worker; Zhao Yaoting stayed in his hometown to contract orchards and sold apples from the valleys to Beijing and Shanghai. Entering the new century, great-great-grandson Zhao Chengzhi returned from studying abroad. Instead of staying in a big city, he returned to the village and started an e-commerce business, selling the sweet potatoes that his grandfather had grown all his life all over the world. More than a hundred years have passed, but the old locust tree is still there, and the old house has been demolished and rebuilt, built and demolished again. Some of the Zhao family left, some came back, and some never came back. But every New Year's Eve, a light is always lit under the old locust tree That's the direction of home.