In the thirty-eighth year of the Republic of China, wars raged and people died of hunger everywhere. The girl Chun Xingben lived a poor but stable life in a water town in the south of the Yangtze River. A sudden famine crushed her world. The bark of the tree was eaten away, and her parents put her up for sale in exchange for food rations. She witnessed with her own eyes the collapse of human relations, children being abandoned, women being trafficked, and even a hell on earth where children were exchanged for food. On the way to escape, she encountered bandits and plunder, warlords' melee, and was treated as a commodity between different forces. She saw the servility behind the so-called "warlord's wife", and also experienced the humiliation of national subjugation under the iron heel of the Japanese army. From a country girl to a servant in the concession, from being forced into prostitution to rising up to resist, Chun Xing struggled to survive amid hunger, violence and humiliation. Every step she took stepped on the bones of her compatriots, and every breath she took was mixed with blood and tears. This is not a legend of unparalleled splendor, but a tragedy written with the lives of millions of women at the bottom, revealing the cruel history with death as the background behind the whitewashed "romance of the Republic of China."
