Guo Xiaojuan (Canada)
Third Prize
Author Biography:
Guo Xiaojuan earned her Ph.D. in Epidemiology in Japan. She previously served as a professor and head of the Department of Preventive Medicine at a medical university in China and was a specially appointed expert for the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, and the World Health Organization. She currently serves as a board member of the Canadian Women Writers Association, the North American Overseas Wenxuan Writers Association, and is a lifetime member of the Canadian Chinese Writers Association. She is also a playwright and contracted actress for the Canadian Chinese Drama Troupe. She contributed to the medical textbook Preventive Medicine at China Medical University. Guo has won nine awards for outstanding literary works, included in anthologies such as Crawling Forward and The Best Short Stories by Overseas Chinese Writers 2025. Her mid-length suspense novel The Bauhinia Sways in the Wind has won three film festival awards and the Second World Chinese Weekly Science & Technology Book Award, and was adapted into a stage play in Vancouver to wide acclaim. She has starred in films including Floating Duckweed, Floating World, Norwegian Wood, and Silent, and appeared in films and stage plays such as An Unnecessary Spring Gala and Our Courtyard, Charlotte’s Troubles.
Award-Winning Work: The Bauhinia Sways in the Wind (60 Episodes)
Synopsis:
In the courtyard stands a North American Bauhinia, blooming in early spring, symbolizing new life and hope after winter. Its pink-purple petals drift with the wind.
In March 2023, a mysterious murder occurs in a white house on Garden Road, shattering the community’s peace. Biostatistics Ph.D. Lu Tao and his wife Shu Qi are found dead, while their daughter Lu Xiao Qian falls into a coma. There are no signs of violence or forced entry—only scattered cat food and a piece of tree bark shaped like a small bird. Chinese-Canadian detective Duan Jin and his partner Matt investigate, initially tracing three calls on the day of the incident to Shu Xiangdong, Shu Qi’s nephew who had lived with her for two years. Through Shu Xiangdong’s perspective, the seemingly happy family reveals hidden tensions involving parental pressure, pharmaceutical conspiracies, and bloodline entanglements.
Shu Qi and Lu Tao represent a typical elite immigrant family. Shu Qi is domineering and obsessive, projecting her unrealized “scientist dreams” onto her daughter, even threatening her with suicide to coerce her into applying to an Ivy League medical school. Lu Tao appears mild-mannered but secretly administers experimental, unapproved drug NRX-78 to his depressed daughter to maintain the illusion of her “excellence.”
NRX-78, co-developed by retired professor Li Qiwen and German collaborators, is acquired by Lu Tao under the guise of a volunteer. While it stabilizes emotions temporarily, it can induce hallucinations, neurological disorders, and heart failure. Li smuggled it using slow cookers, inadvertently involving cleaning worker Wan Hua.
Eighteen-year-old Lu Xiao Qian suffers under her mother’s pressure and school bullying, struggling to find her place between Eastern and Western cultures. Her cousin Shu Xiangdong and friend Wa Wa become her emotional sanctuary, while her cat and painting provide small comforts. Although she enters her mother’s preferred prestigious school, the chosen major is not her own. On Valentine’s Day before leaving for the U.S., witnessing Shu Xiangdong confess to Wa Wa shatters her mental stability. That night, she takes her father’s leftover drug and falls into a coma.
The deaths of Shu Qi and Lu Tao reveal deeper human and familial fractures. Lu Tao, a man pursuing success, faces psychological and professional collapse overseas. Suspended at work and discovering Wa Wa is his illegitimate daughter, he struggles with parental responsibilities, drug risks, and financial pressure. After accidentally pushing Wa Wa into a river and witnessing his daughter’s attempted suicide, Lu Tao snaps—killing his wife before dying of a sudden heart attack, resulting in family tragedy.
Wa Wa, Lu Hua’s daughter and a neuroscience graduate student at Brown University, understands NRX-78’s side effects. She confronts Lu Tao over the past suffering inflicted on her mother, pushing him to take responsibility. Although she survives, she leaves with unresolved familial tensions. Wan Hua embodies the tragic core of the story, enduring betrayal and hardship, yet remaining compassionate. She had supported Lu Tao’s education in her youth, only to be abandoned and forced to raise Wa Wa alone as an immigrant in Canada. Ironically, she lives in the same community as Shu Qi and aids Wa Wa unknowingly, unaware that Shu Qi’s husband is the man who abandoned her. When DNA testing reveals Wa Wa’s parentage, Wan Hua chooses silence, selling her house and burying her past in the foreign snow.
The relationships form a complex web: Xiao Qian suffers under her mother’s suffocating love, Lu Tao is torn by dual fatherhood, Wan Hua endures humiliation, and Wa Wa rationally navigates her pain, becoming the only one to break free.
The case concludes with Shu Qi and Lu Tao dead, yet lingering doubts remain. As Duan Jin watches Wan Hua board her flight home, he glimpses a figure resembling Lu Tao, hinting that guilt and remorse have never truly ended. Shu Xiangdong brings his cousin home to care for her. Beneath the Bauhinia, Xiao Qian’s fingertips twitch in response to Wa Wa’s song. The swaying Bauhinia, its meaning of “family harmony,” provides bitter irony yet glimmers hope amid her tears—those crushed by fate may still find moments of peace.
The Bauhinia Sways in the Wind blends suspense with human insight, exploring generational trauma in immigrant families. Shu Qi’s domineering nature stems from fear of social failure, Lu Tao’s weakness reflects intellectual ethical dilemmas, and Xiao Qian and Wa Wa’s mirrored fates reveal the distortions of elite education and moral challenges. Through symbolic elements like dumplings with beef and cilantro, bird-shaped bark, and slow cookers, the script weaves suspense and emotional metaphor, portraying a vivid tableau of overseas Chinese life caught between cultures, each seeking renewal.
Professional Review:
The series uses a murder as its narrative anchor, peeling back the ethical shadows and emotional fractures of elite immigrant families. Pharmaceutical conspiracies, bloodline entanglements, mental oppression, and cultural conflicts create layered dramatic tension. It is a high-intensity, realistic micro-series combining suspense, emotion, and social critique.
