The Banker

Lin Mu, an attending physician in the emergency department, met Ji Yunchong, a fellow student at her school, when she was eighteen. They dated for ten years and were already discussing marriage. On the eve of their engagement, a family road trip ended in a car crash: her parents died on the spot, her boyfriend suffered severe leg injuries and eventually left her. For a long time, Lin Mu numbed herself with back-to-back night shifts, until financial pressure led her to decide to sell the old Western-style house her grandmother had left her and to apply for a medical aid mission to Vietnam. The buyer of the house is Xiao Huai, a Chinese-German investment banker. He is the China managing director of an international investment bank, from the Xiao family, bankers for four generations; and the house was originally a gift from Xiao Huai's grandfather to his fiancée, who was none other than Lin Mu's grandmother. War kept the two apart for life: the grandmother never married, guarding the old house and waiting her whole life, while the grandfather died in gloom in a foreign land. The grandmother's dying instruction was, "Have nothing to do with anyone surnamed Xiao." Lin Mu therefore refuses to sell the house and deliberately keeps her distance from Xiao Huai. Later, the two meet again on a flight to Munich, and because their luggage is misrouted, they end up staying at Xiao Huai's residence in Germany. Xiao Huai is gentle and restrained, extremely measured in all he does—a sharp contrast to her ex-boyfriend Ji Yunchong. After returning to China, Ji Yunchong reappears, trying to win her back by such means as concealing the severity of his injuries, and enters into a contest with Xiao Huai involving a pharmaceutical company and the capital markets. Through one choice after another, Lin Mu gradually clarifies the boundaries between guilt and love, old debts and the life ahead, and finally moves toward a direction of her own.