This is a documentary novel that records the ups and downs of Yanrou, a woman, for most of her life.
Born in a scholarly family in the 1960s, she grew up smoothly under the care of her parents for the first half of her life. Her talents blossomed in college, but she encountered a violent collision between ideal and reality in her marriage. She gave up her stable teaching position and struggled to survive in society.
At the age of 58, she was wrongly imprisoned for being involved in a case of illegally absorbing public deposits, which caused great changes in her family. After three years of hard work defending her rights, she was finally vindicated.
The story uses the experience of the detention center as the entry point, interweaves reality and memories, and connects her childhood, schooling, marriage, and career struggles, showing the growth of an ordinary woman in the changing times, from innocence to tenacity, from idealism to facing reality.
She is like a sunflower, facing many storms but always facing the sun. She sticks to kindness and hope amidst injustice and setbacks, and finally finds stability in her later years. It also reflects the insignificance, helplessness and tenacity of the little people at the bottom in the tide of the times.
