Overseas Chinese Homeland: Chasing the Wind Youth

In early spring of 1979, at an overseas Chinese state farm. Under the setting sun, a group of children of returned overseas Chinese are kicking a battered old soccer ball on a barren patch of ground. Leading them is the stubborn Shi Dachuang, along with Qian Xiaopang, Sun Xiaoqiang, the tall and thin Wu Guoping, and the unwilling-to-lose Lin Xueming. They run and chase after that "soccer ball" that could fall apart at any moment.

Bang! With a dull thud, Shi Dachuang's powerful shot finally bursts the ball apart, and the fragments scatter into the muddy water. The children’s smiles freeze instantly, and a huge sense of disappointment falls over them as they fall silent around the wreckage.

Chen Guohua, a returned overseas Chinese who has worked the farm for more than ten years, looks at the disappointed children and the barren mudflat, and the dormant memories in his heart are awakened. He used to be a barefoot boy kicking a football in a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia, and football carried both homesickness and dreams. After returning to the country, the burdens of life buried those burning memories.

The children's lack struck a nerve in him. The news of the provincial football association's founding no longer felt distant at this moment. Then the elderly returnee Lin Zhenbang walks over, silently taking out an old rattan ball polished to a shine. Looking at the children on the wasteland, he says in a low voice, "Looking at them is like seeing ourselves back then, kicking mango pits barefoot. The ball was gone, but our feet itched, and our hearts itched even more. In Southeast Asia, football is our root."

Lin Zhenbang's words seem to unlock Chen Guohua's sealed heart. Looking at the children and that patch of mud, the word "root" echoes in his mind, and the once-silent hot blood is ignited. A heavy sense of responsibility and a faint flame of hope rise up. As dusk deepens, the gazes of the two generations of returned overseas Chinese meet, and their determination to kindle a spark of football for the children rises like fireflies, quietly lighting up the night sky over the farm.