Poverty may limit your imagination, but it cannot stop young people from humble families from moving forward. With no wealth, connections, resources, or foundation, they warm one another and huddle together for comfort. The warmth of family, parents, siblings, love, friendship, romance, and children shapes the four Wang siblings’ precarious struggle to grow up. Their story bears witness to the four siblings’ hard-fought journey through urban life: from the countryside to the city, from school to society, from government to business, from one small family to many, from pain to joy, from rebirth through the ashes to a new beginning, and from home to abroad. Step by step, their journey reflects the struggles, rise, growth, transformation, and renewal of rural young people from humble families over more than forty years of reform and opening up. It also bears witness to the countless changes in families large and small, and to the collision of ideas across generations, touching the deepest feelings of people of that era.
