In 19217, during the long rainy season deep in Guangxi’s Shiwandashan Mountains, seven-year-old Zhao Qinglan trudged along muddy mountain paths with a crowd of refugees. The hunger in her belly cut deeper than the mountain cold. After a high fever, she was taken in a daze by her grandfather to Songjia’ao, where he traded a sack of life-saving rice to the Song family for their only son, Song Mingzhang, to take her as a child bride.
From then on, Zhao Qinglan’s world shrank to the Song family’s low mud-brick house and its perpetually burning stove. Before dawn, she had to carry a bamboo basket to the stream to beat the laundry clean. She stood on a little stool to cook for the whole family, and at night she twisted hemp thread by oil lamp. The slightest mistake earned her a slap from Mother Song. She watched Song Mingzhang, who was half a head taller than her, and went from being timid around him to getting used to the half a sweet potato he sometimes slipped her in secret.
Life in the deep mountains was like smoke coiling out of the stove, with no end in sight. Yet whenever Zhao Qinglan gazed at the clouds drifting in from beyond the mountains, she quietly hoped that perhaps one day she could follow the mountain path out of the “hearth” that trapped her and reclaim a life that truly belonged to her.
