Lin Xiulan was born in a small town in the south of the Yangtze River in 1910. Her mother was rejected by her husband's family for giving birth to three daughters in a row. She eventually died of a hemorrhage after giving birth to her younger brother. Her father soon remarried, and her stepmother was cruel and cruel to the Xiulan sisters.
Xiulan secretly listened to a class outside the private school window and was discovered by her husband. Because of her talent, she was given the opportunity to attend classes. However, when she was twelve years old, she was forced to drop out of school by her father and was forced to learn housework from a female celebrity.
At the age of sixteen, Xiulan was betrothed to Mr. Zhou, the owner of Mihang, who was twenty years older than her, as a house filler. After marriage, she discovered that her husband was tyrannical and often subjected her to domestic violence.
Xiulan gave birth to two daughters one after another, but was scorned and abused by her husband and mother-in-law. During her third pregnancy, her husband was violently drunk while she was drunk, which led to a miscarriage and massive bleeding, and she lost her fertility.
After her husband married another concubine and gave birth to a child, Xiulan was driven to live in the backyard and spent the rest of her life in loneliness. Before she died, she watched her daughters repeat their own fate but was unable to change it.
