My Biological Grandma, Step-Grandma, and Other Grandma

In the county gazetteer, they are cardboard cutouts with fixed labels: hero, traitor, thug. But in the stories passed around the pipe bowls of the old folks in Qianliuzhuang, everything happened very differently. Ninety years ago, on the Yellow River floodplain in eastern Henan, Liu Hanshan, a man strong enough to lift a massive stone roller, married the wealthy Fan Linglong after raising an 800-jin stone roller. From that moment on, he stepped into an abyss. Hou Yuting, whose engagement was broken off, resisted to the death, yet became a stepping stone for others seeking favor with the powerful. The “superhuman strength” that sent shockwaves through the surrounding villages ultimately earned him a cold pair of shackles. The tangled feuds between the Hou, Liu, and Ma families formed a vast web that swallowed up the good-hearted. History books may lie, but the Yellow River remembers. Turn to this page of buried history, and you will find that the backstabbing and reversals of power in today’s workplaces and government offices had already played out in full on these floodplains ninety years ago.