Daughter of the Broken Mountain

In Beiping during the Republican era, young Lin Wei is kidnapped by human traffickers and sold to the Yuchun House, where she plunges into a dark, unending abyss. She witnesses Xia Tianyu being nailed alive into a coffin and hears Tong Daxiang’s anguished screams as she is branded with a hot iron. Under the whip of the brothel madam Li Cuifen, herself once a prostitute, Lin Wei comes to understand the despair of being “walking flesh.” The women here are sold by their parents or coerced by criminal forces. Venereal disease, beatings, and death are commonplace, and even death becomes a way for the madam to cut costs. In 1949, the call of liberation pierces the night. Lin Wei and her sisters are sent to a reformatory, where the smell of disinfectant washes away their humiliation. They learn to read and acquire a trade, experiencing the dignity of being “human” for the first time. Years later, when she sees people romanticizing the Republican era, dreaming of life as a “famous courtesan,” or even defending prostitution, she opens her yellowed diary with trembling hands. In it are every cry from the Yuchun House and the first ray of morning light by the reformatory window. She knows she must speak out and bear witness with her scarred body: those years of being reduced to objects were never a legend, but a warning written in the blood and tears of millions of women. This is an epic of destruction and rebirth, and a lament and battle hymn that will never fall silent in defense of women’s dignity.