At fourteen, when his family sank into debt and his father fell critically ill, Chen Mo dropped out of school and followed a fellow villager to work on construction sites. He hauled bricks, carried cement, and climbed scaffolding for thirty yuan a day. Every month he kept only two hundred yuan for himself and sent every last cent back home.
Over ten years, he paid 370,000 yuan in full to buy a house for his family, only to have the property deed registered under his elder brother’s name. “We’re family—no need to split hairs,” he said. He also scraped together 200,000 yuan to fund his second brother’s startup, who slapped his chest and promised, “Brothers keep clear accounts. I’ll pay you back double.”
He thought he was the backbone of the family. Until the rainy night after his father’s funeral.
His second brother threw his suitcase down from the third floor. His mother’s blood pressure pills rolled into the mud as he was roared at: “Get out of this house.” In the heat of the fight, his mother let it slip—he was adopted.
A yellowed adoption certificate, thirty-five call recordings saved over a decade, and 167 bank transfer records tore away every mask of false affection. The family debt had been fully paid off three years earlier. He had never truly been one of them. He was just an outsider, raised to be the family’s personal breadwinner.
In court, he laid out all his evidence. He reclaimed the money for the house, the unpaid business loan, and formally petitioned to terminate his adoption.
Later, all four family members knelt outside the door of his new apartment, sobbing and begging him to come back. “We’re still family, after all.”
He spoke calmly through the closed door: “You raised me for fourteen years. I supported you for ten. Nine hundred thousand yuan. That’s enough.”
“We’re done.”
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