The story began with a woman named Zhao Yingfang taking her son and leaving her unfaithful husband, Gu Fengyuan, to raise her young child, Gu An, alone.
But finding work was already extremely difficult for a mother raising a child alone, let alone one without any qualifications.
So she could only find manual labor. Perhaps out of a desire for revenge, Zhao Yingfang never asked the man for a single cent, stubbornly believing that she could raise her child well on her own.
And that was indeed the case. Even without asking the man for a single cent, after working for two or three years, she did find her footing. Her income gradually increased, and life gave her some breathing room.
But as her child gradually grew older, Zhao Yingfang began disciplining him strictly, while his features developed and he came to resemble his father more and more.
Zhao Yingfang's feelings toward Gu Fengyuan were deeply complicated. She longed for his attention and love, but also hated his infidelity.
So her feelings toward their child, Gu An, held both a mother's love and her complicated feelings toward her partner.
She was a victim of an old-fashioned upbringing, longing for a man's love and longing to prove her own worth, yet never learning to love herself or to love her child properly.
So Zhao Yingfang could only keep disciplining her child strictly. It was as though she had two faces when dealing with Gu An, sometimes showing him a loving mother's tenderness, sometimes brimming with resentment.
But even she did not know whether that resentment was directed at Gu An or Gu Fengyuan.
Under his mother's strict discipline, Gu An had once had a friend or two, but Zhao Yingfang's scolding had driven them apart on the grounds that they would