Years of Youth: Watching Over the Wheat Fields of Beidahuang

In the autumn of 1955, Shanghai high school student Lin Jingshu boards a northbound train with eight hundred educated youths. When the train stops at the Beidahuang station, all she sees is an endless stretch of black earth and a scattering of crude earthen houses. The copy of How the Steel Was Tempered she brought with her and the small packet of jasmine tea her mother secretly tucked into her luggage are her last links to city life. On this wilderness where people must “struggle against heaven and earth,” Jingshu grows from a city girl who can’t tell wheat seedlings from chives into an “iron girl” capable of driving a tractor to plow a thousand mu of fertile land. She suffers frostbite while racing to harvest soybeans in minus forty-degree weather, risks her life rescuing a granary from floodwaters, and faces a pack of wolves while clearing land. She also witnesses love bloom and wither in a turbulent era, and ideals tempered and reborn by reality. With delicate prose, this novel depicts the epic youth of a generation of educated youths, telling the story of how they sowed hope and reaped growth on the black earth. It captures the sweat of hard work, the simple warmth of human connection, and the irreplicable glow of idealism from that extraordinary era. When the wave of educated youths returning to the cities arrives twenty years later, Jingshu stands beside the wheat field she cultivated with her own hands and finally understands that this land has given her far more than she ever gave it.