Widowed at nineteen, forced to remarry at twenty-three, and with her husband sent to prison, Ji Xiaoli’s life is a story of being torn apart by fate again and again, then painstakingly pieced back together with her own hands.
In 1995, she left her three-year-old daughter in her grandmother’s arms, clutched her only 37 yuan, and boarded a green train heading south. At a garment factory in Guangzhou, the steel needle of her sewing machine pierced the fabric and her heart, too, as she ached for her daughter. Then a man with a limp appeared: Niu Guang, a young man who could fix any machine with a wrench. He taught her to pick up not a sewing needle, but a pair of barber’s shears to cut her way out of fate’s grip.
Over five years, they went from coworkers on the factory floor to partners in a barbershop, yet always kept a careful distance between them. She was still bound by the chains of her old love, while he waited silently for her to decide. Then one day, Niu Guang pushed a brand-new pair of barber’s shears toward her. “This time, you do the cutting.”
From the countryside of southern Shaanxi to Guangzhou’s urban villages, from a widowed young mother to a mother of three, Ji Xiaoli spent thirty years making her way through the hardest struggle of a woman’s life.
Her story has no fairy tale ending, only blood drawn by sewing machine needles, calluses worn by scissors, and a stubborn soul that would never bow its head.
This isn’t a feel-good tale of rising to the top. It’s the story of a real woman who lived through it all and clawed her way out of desperation to forge a path to survival.
I'm so angry 😠, Xiaoli is so pitiful 😢