Su Wan is reborn in 1960, in the midst of a famine. Faced with a drafty thatched hut, hungry younger siblings, and widespread deprivation under the communal system, she draws on her knowledge of agriculture and her memories of government policies to turn things around. She secretly plants experimental fields to promote early-ripening crops, starts a sewing group to turn waste into treasure, and leads the villagers in repairing irrigation canals, opening night schools, and building a rice mill. Despite accusations that she is “taking the capitalist road,” she adheres to the principle that “the results belong to the collective, and prosperity is for everyone,” gradually transforming a poor production team into the county’s model community.
She contends with obstruction from conservative forces and uses policy documents from the 1960s to defuse crises. From putting food on her family’s table to leading the whole village in reclaiming land and developing side businesses, she quadruples crop yields, gets women to pick up books and learn to read, and helps them earn work points with their skills. Being reborn isn’t about having a golden finger. It’s about careful planning within the limits of the times: using wood ash to prevent pests, sewing hope with an old sewing machine, and using knowledge from the Agricultural Handbook to fight natural and man-made disasters.
When the famine finally passes, the terraced fields yield a bumper harvest, and the cooperative’s embroidery is sold far and wide, Su Wan watches her younger siblings get into university and her mother move into a brick house. At last, she understands that the point of being reborn was never to look after herself alone. It was to help the hopes once crushed by fate grow full ears of grain again from the seeds she planted with her own hands. This is the story of a woman who used her wisdom and courage to write a history of collective struggle in the countryside of the 1960s, and a portrait of a generation that held fast to the land and reached for the light through hardship.
