Back to Four and a Half

Keywords: rebirth, rural revitalization, poverty alleviation

That year, Jiang Zhuo woke up on a train and found herself back in her childhood.

In her previous life, she had fought tooth and nail to escape her impoverished hometown. This time, she fought tooth and nail to return.

She skipped grades, bought a rundown apartment and waited for it to be demolished, made money on skyrocketing stocks, and took the civil service exam to make her dream come true. She saved up, bought a home, bet on demolition, and seized the bull market, moving her family step by step from an earthen house into a traditional courtyard home. But she wasn't satisfied. She remembered the villages that had slowly emptied out in her previous life, the young people who had left home for good, and the hometown she could never return to.

So she passed the civil service exam and volunteered for a poverty-alleviation assignment.

There she found an abandoned grove of old tea trees, a waterfall that ran dry for half the year, and a village school with only three children left. The young people had all moved away, while the elderly who remained got by on their meager plots of land. No one believed a girl barely in her twenties could change anything.

But she refused to accept that. She learned to grow and roast tea, made videos, repaired trails, set up tea-tasting areas, and secured project funding. She turned an overgrown tea mountain into tea sold across the country, a dry ravine into a waterfall that flowed year-round, and an empty village into a place young people wanted to return to.

She said, “Education teaches us to understand the world, not so we can escape our hometown, but so we can return and make it the best place in our hearts.”

This is a story about coming home, and a story about change. What changes is not just one person or one village, but the hometown each of us carries in our hearts, the one we can never go back to.