Heartbreak in the Mortal World

Her name was Bai Wu. She had an ordinary face and a barren heart.

In the 1970s, Jinjiang Town was full of shabby, low-rise homes.

Now she was turning the house upside down, looking for her college admission letter. Just moments ago, a classmate had told her that her parents had sold it to her mother's supervisor for 2,000 yuan.

Bai Wu was the eldest child in the family. She had a younger sister and a younger brother. Because she had to look after her brother, who was six years younger, she didn't start school until she was ten.

She had known from a young age that if a poor child wanted a chance at a better life, they had to study hard, get into a good school, and leave this impoverished place.

So, after doing the housework and looking after her younger siblings, she would finish her chores and spend the evenings studying the lessons she'd been taught at school that day.

Bai Wu's father was an ordinary worker in town. Her mother had been unemployed until Bai Wu was three, when the town's elementary school hired substitute teachers. Jiang Li, her mother, had been a high school student during the Cultural Revolution's final years. She passed the exam and became a substitute teacher at the town school.

Both her educated mother and her father, who could barely write his own name, favored boys over girls.

When Bai Wu turned three and was old enough to lift the little iron shovel used for stoking the coal stove, she began a lifetime of hard labor.

Although Bai Wu's father had little education, he was a veteran who had found work in town after leaving the army. He often came home drunk at night, and whenever anything displeased him, he would beat his wife and children in a drunken rage. As the eldest, Bai Wu naturally became his punching bag.

It all came to a head on the day Bai Wu's admission letter was sold…