There was once a very powerful man, who employed a great number of people. He wasn’t very nice, but there weren’t many other options for the people that worked for him. They were all immigrants, and they had very little voice in the community, so they only grumbled under their breath about the unfair working conditions.
Unfortunately, the man became paranoid, and came to believe that his workers would eventually grow too numerous for his town and had the government come to remove their children so that they wouldn’t overwhelm him.
One of his workers was a young woman who had a small boy. She didn’t want the government to take him away, but she couldn’t keep him either, even though she desperately wanted to. So she put her boy in a box and left him on the factory floor one night, with a note.
The daughter of the man also worked at this factory, and she was of a different mind from her father. She liked to walk the factory floor in the mornings, and by chance, she was there the morning after the baby had been left. Of course, she found him and a note, explaining that his mother couldn’t take care of him any more and that his name was Mo.
The daughter knew nothing of her father’s deal with the government, so she became attached to the baby boy named Mo. She convinced her father to let her adopt him, and raise him as her own, even though she already had one son.
Mo grew up in a loving environment, in a family of excess and comfort, oblivious to his own origins. He became well educated in the ways of business, and became an effective manager for his grandfather’s company.
Mo had been working many years in the employ of the company by the time he learned of his adoption, and more surprisingly his grandfather’s duplicity toward his workers. He learned that he had been the son of one of the women who worked for the company and began to explore his background and his heritage. The more he learned, the more he understood about his grandfather’s shortcomings.
Despite his comfortable upbringing, and the privilege that he enjoyed, Mo left his family behind. He travelled to a completely different country and culture, and there he met a woman, who he fell in love with and married.
They had a family, and he worked in her village for many years, thinking that he had left his old life behind him. One day, unexpectedly, he received a message from someone he couldn’t ignore. This message told of the hardship that his birth mother’s people had been suffering, and told him that he needed to return to the town he grew up in to help them.
Despite having lived many years already, Mo and his wife left her village and travelled back to the place of his birth. He was a stranger there, not fitting in with either his birth mother’s people or his adopted mother’s family. But despite those challenges, he became a bridge between each and demanded reparations from his brother, who had since inherited the company, on behalf of the workers.
Mo’s brother was a very stubborn man, and was too comfortable with the way things had been done. He didn’t appreciate the ultimatums that Mo gave him on behalf of the sender of the message. His brother denied all of Mo’s pleas for the workers, and his business suffered for it.
Eventually, Mo’s brother agreed to the demands and let the workers walk out. Mo led them away from the town toward the land that they had come from, but his brother had changed his mind, and sent the government after them to arrest them.
Thankfully, the people escaped Mo’s vindictive brother and even though he was an old man already, Mo led the people safely back home. It took many years and there were many challenges, and in the end, Mo never really got to see their new home. But the people that he helped never forgot him, and they still tell his story.