Seventeen-year-old high school student Xu Muzhi dropped out of school due to depression. His father Xu Jingming, a history professor, was involved in a whistleblower scandal. His mother Ping Ruan was on the verge of collapse under multiple pressures. Her grandmother Xiulan, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, always clutched an old wooden comb engraved with "Yexian Xu House", obsessed with finding the lost roots of her family.
A root-seeking journey from Zhengzhou to Yexian and Xi'an has involved three generations in the folds of time. Under the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, grandma finally "met" her deceased husband; on the Shaoling Plains, her mother reconciled with her seventeen-year-old self; among the Zhaoling Tombs in the Forest of Steles, her father re-examined the gray scale of history; and Mu Zhi slowly stitched together his broken self with his paintbrush and journey.
When the ancient mulberry trees in Mulberry Xu Village were sawed off, a tender green sprout emerged from the soil—it can grow if its roots are still there. This is a novel about family migration, intergenerational trauma and self-reconstruction. It tells how we salvage the place from the depths of history, and how we learn to take root and grow again on this land.
