Life Is Worth It

Lin Yuanzhou, a student from a poor family of China's post-80s generation, once believed that passing the college entrance exam, getting married, and raising children were all the answers life required. Then his two sons were diagnosed one after another—one with severe asthma, the other with autism—and fate's blows came down all at once. Medical bills emptied the family's savings, the marriage fractured under the weight of exhaustion, and debt piled up like a snowball rolling out of control. Yet in his darkest hours, this father found light in the words of China's sages across the ages. Alone in a rented apartment late at night, he opened the Chu Ci and read Qu Yuan's vow—"Though I die nine deaths, I shall not regret." In the rain that followed his divorce, Su Shi's verse steadied him—"With a straw cloak amid the misty rain, I will live out my days as they come." And in the darkest moment of building his school, Wang Yangming's teaching of "unity of knowledge and action" pointed the way forward. This is no fantasy; it is the story of a father driven to the brink by life, who found a lamp in the spirit of the ancient sages. He took his asthmatic son to Wudang Mountain to learn Taiji breathing techniques, and took his autistic son from one intervention institution to the next, until at last he forged a path to recovery built on traditional culture, natural therapy, and healing of body and mind together. His two sons rose from their sickbeds to prestigious schools and the stage—and Lin Yuanzhou went on to extend the experience that saved his own children into one school after another for "troubled youth," using the spirit of the sages to light the way for more than twenty thousand children the world had given up on. Twenty years. Ten sages. Ten lamps. A life spent swimming against the current—and as long as the lamps keep burning, the road does not end.