Lin Xiulan was born in 1910 in a small Jiangnan town. Her mother was scorned by her husband’s family for giving birth to three daughters in a row, and died of a postpartum hemorrhage after finally giving birth to a son. Her father soon remarried, and her stepmother treated Xiulan and her sisters with cold cruelty.
Xiulan secretly listened to lessons outside the windows of a private school. When the teacher discovered her, her intelligence earned her the chance to sit in on classes. But when she was twelve, her father forced her to leave school and made her learn embroidery and housework instead.
At sixteen, Xiulan was married off as a second wife to Master Zhou, a rice merchant twenty years her senior. After the wedding, she discovered that her husband was violent by nature and often beat her.
Xiulan gave birth to two daughters in succession, only to be treated with contempt and abuse by her husband and mother-in-law. During her third pregnancy, her husband beat her while drunk, causing a miscarriage and severe bleeding. She lost the ability to bear children.
After her husband took a concubine who bore him a son, Xiulan was banished to the back courtyard. She spent the rest of her life in loneliness, watching her daughters repeat her fate as she lay dying, powerless to change it.
