The Character of Fatherhood

It takes a lifetime of learning to understand a childhood

For Zhang Zuo, his father’s darkest moments hold tender memories.

Overshadowed by his intellectual forebears and abandoned by his parents, his childhood in Nanjing with his grandparents was a lonely one. When he visits his father, a scholar sent to a life of agricultural drudgery in the countryside at the behest of the revolution, the two bond for the first time over impromptu Chinese lessons with the hard earth as the blackboard.

Their paths cross years later when the son is tasked with editing the now-famed academic’s writings, though the man between the pages remains elusive. Instead, he discovers his family’s past, a bittersweet story of estrangements and reconciliations at the mercy of historical turmoil. But it is only by tracing the road his father once took that he can understand their lifetimes apart.