In 1903, in a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, a family war broke out in the old house of the Li family because of a pair of feet.
When six-year-old Li Jinse was pinned down in front of the foot-binding cloth, she had no idea that this struggle would define her life. As the daughter of a mixed-race Portuguese mother and a down-and-out scholar, she is both familiar with "The Commandments of Women" and secretly learning English; she is not only the "virtuous daughter-in-law" appointed by the Dong family, but also a "feudal legacy" in the eyes of her future husband that urgently needs to be transformed. When her cousin Dong Siqi, who had returned from studying abroad, regretted her marriage in the name of new ideas and accused her of being a shackle of the old era, Li Jinse woke up in humiliation: Why should an obedient woman become a sinner?
She clutched her mother's private banknotes and Western medicine, and went to Shanghai alone to seek an explanation. The strangeness of the ten-mile foreign market tore apart her cognition. Those "new youths" who shouted for free love quickly fell into a new life after abandoning their first wives;
The new women who shouted the slogan of independence lost themselves again in marriage.
She saw through the hypocrisy and chose another dangerous path: using her pen as a blade to contribute to a women's newspaper, using her craftsmanship to establish a women's workshop, and meeting her true comrades in the revolutionary wave.
This is not a fairy tale about Cinderella turning into a phoenix, but a woman's three breakthroughs to regain her body, marriage and ideological autonomy in the changing times. From a deep house to a concession, from a "joy tool" to a women's activist, Li Jinse used her unbound feet to crush the memorial of "good wives and loving mothers", and in the bloody and romantic countercurrent of the Republic of China, she earned a bright future for herself and millions of silent women.
Jinse, who goes upstream, eventually becomes a rogue.
