On the day of Frost's Descent in 1998, at the boiler room of a textile factory in Linhai City, Li Sulan died in a boiler explosion while working overtime. Yet her soul returned to the spring equinox of 1988, to the morning she received her layoff notice. This time, she was no longer a textile worker who silently shed tears, but a woman who could turn the tide, armed with ten years' worth of painful memories. She would stop her husband from getting caught up in a smuggling case, help her daughter get into university, and, amid the waves of reform and opening up, rise from a street vendor to a cross-border clothing industry magnate. With a sewing machine and legal documents, she would stitch a path to rising without bowing her head through the narrow gap between smuggling syndicates and monopolistic state-owned enterprises.
