On the barren permafrost plateau in the west, eight-year-old girl Lin Xiaoman clutches an old dictionary left behind by her father and runs between cinder piles and cracked ice fields. Her world is imprisoned by three shackles: her younger sister Yadan's right leg was disabled due to the cold at birth, her mother Wang Xiulian coughed up blood on her handkerchief, and Li Zhuang's harsh ridicule from the son of a wealthy family in the same village - "You cinder-picking bastard, you will never get out of this mountain in this life!"
However, there are already seeds under the frozen soil. When the volunteer teacher Chen Mo entered the dilapidated village primary school with a yellowed copy of "The Collection of Birds", the dictionary blackened by soot suddenly gained weight. Under the kerosene lamp, Xiaoman deciphered the annotation left by her father: "There is a train outside the mountains, which can carry literate people to distant places." This sentence was like a match striking the frozen soil, igniting the late nights when she copied texts with frozen fingers, and also illuminated the early morning when she sneaked into the town library and was scolded by the administrator.
The cracks in fate were completely torn open on a snowy night when my sister had a high fever. The fifty yuan consultation fee demanded by the barefoot doctor allowed Xiaoman to see clearly the fangs of poverty for the first time - it not only gnaws flesh and blood, but also devours dignity. Holding her father's pension IOU, she rushed into the coal mine owner's office, only to hear in the coal dust a life-changing opportunity: "Girls who are literate can go to the city to work as textile workers."
From carrying his sister across the mountains and selling mountain products, to using money from scavenging scraps to bribe the principal to get a place in the class, Xiaoman blazed a bloody path in the mud. When she finally stood on the top of the mountain with the college admission notice in hand, the look she looked back was no longer about fleeing - those memories sealed by the frozen soil, those planted in the cinder heap.
