Spring Beneath the Wooden Wheels

This is an inspirational novel based on real events.

In the bitter winter of 1975, a baby girl named Ye Xiaoman is abandoned by her birth parents in front of a mountain god temple and taken in by Lao Chen, a forest ranger, and his wife. But fate is cruel. At two, she is left with paralysis in her legs from polio, and her adoptive parents abandon her beneath an old locust tree at the village entrance on a rainy night. Clutching half of a silver lock engraved with the character “Man,” the little girl struggles to survive in the mud, beginning a life full of hardship.

With no money for school, Xiaoman can only lie outside the village school classroom window and listen in. She is fortunate to meet two teachers, Su Wenxiu and Wang Jianjun, who let her attend lessons for free and even make special learning aids for her. Using a homemade crawling device, she crawls five li along mountain roads every day to study. Her knees become scabbed with blood and the skin peels from her arms in the sun, but she never gives up. In 1993, she sits the college entrance exam and applies to a teachers’ college with the highest score in the liberal arts stream across the city, only to be denied admission because of her disability. Her dream of going to college is shattered.

As an adult, Xiaoman sets up a stall at the market, writing letters home for people. Her sensitive writing draws customers, and after helping settle a dispute involving local thugs, she earns the nickname “Love Counselor.” She spots a business opportunity in mountain walnuts and starts a handicrafts company, but faces one crisis after another, from harassment by urban management officers to arson attacks by competitors. Zhou Dachuan, her childhood sweetheart who has returned from military service, remains by her side, while Lin Zhiyuan, a teacher working in the countryside, quietly helps her business. Their tangled feelings leave her caught in a dilemma.

Just as her business begins to thrive, the adoptive parents who abandoned her and her birth parents each appear with their own troubles. Torn between family ties and the pain of the past, Xiaoman is wracked with anguish. In the end, she not only makes her mark in the business world and takes her company public