In a rural village in the 1970s, Cheng Xiaocao is reborn and returns to the summer after graduating from junior high, just three days before the acceptance letter is due to arrive. In her previous life, she had excellent grades, but her family took away her chance to continue her education. Forced to earn work points and serve her entire family every day, she was eventually treated like a bargaining chip and married off to a butcher from the neighboring village. She suffered domestic abuse, had three miscarriages, and died young. Meanwhile, her cousin Cheng Xue, favored by their grandparents and forcefully protected by her aunt, finished high school and got into college, enjoying a smooth life.
Reborn, Cheng Xiaocao is determined to change her fate. Faced with her grandfather’s authority, her grandmother’s cruelty, her aunt’s domineering oppression, her other aunt’s secret schemes, and her parents’ cowardly silence, she refuses to keep taking things lying down. At the dinner table, she stands up to her family in front of everyone and firmly fights for her right to study. In secret, she prepares for her exams whenever she can between gathering pig feed and earning work points, protecting her acceptance letter.
With intelligence and determination, she repeatedly thwarts her family’s attempts to make things difficult and scheme against her. She withstands the taunts that “there’s no point in educating girls” and ultimately breaks free from the shackles of her family of origin to enter the classrooms of the county high school. From then on, she balances her studies with farm work while steadily building her strength and freeing herself from her family’s control. Through knowledge and hard work, she turns her life around in an impoverished era, not only winning herself a bright future but also striving to protect her mother, who is just as timid yet loves her dearly. In the end, she becomes the light that illuminates her own life.
