Youthful Years: the Catcher in the Rye in the Great Northern Wilderness

In the autumn of 1955, Shanghai female high school student Lin Jingshu and 800 educated youth boarded a train heading north. When the train stopped at the "Beidahuang" platform, what she saw was endless black land and simple adobe houses. The book "How Steel Was Tempered" that she carried with her and the small bag of jasmine tea that her mother secretly stuffed into her pocket became her last connection with urban civilization. In this wasteland where she needs to "fight against the sky and the earth", Jingshu has grown from a city girl who can't tell the difference between wheat seedlings and leeks, to an "iron girl" who can drive a tractor to plow thousands of acres of fertile land. She experienced frostbite when harvesting soybeans at minus 40 degrees Celsius, the thrill of rescuing a granary in a flood, and the life and death moments of encountering wolves during land reclamation. She also witnessed the blooming and withering of love in special times, and the tempering and rebirth of ideals in reality. This book depicts the youth epic of a generation of educated youths in delicate writing, telling the story of their sowing hope and harvesting growth in the black soil. There is the sweat of hard work, the simple and touching interpersonal warmth, and the radiance of ideals that cannot be replicated in that special era. When the tide of educated youth returned to the city twenty years later, Jingshu stood beside the wheat field she had cultivated with her own hands, and finally understood that what this land had given her was far more than what she had given.