A six-hundred-year-old family epic buried in the dust of history, and an immigrant memory written and passed down by a woman.
In the third year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty, a piece of edict pierced the sky of Zaoqiang. Han Xiugu sewed a piece of her native land into the lapel of her clothes and followed her husband on the vast journey to Jinan. On the way, her youngest son became critically ill and the family tree was lost. In despair, she relied on her memory and secretly continued to write down the family history with charcoal in the late night of wandering. From then on, she planted the seeds of protecting the family memory with female hands.
This is not just a history of male pioneering. From the early Ming Dynasty to the present day, through the changes of dynasties, the flames of war and the torrent of the times, the fate of six generations of hostesses of the Zhao family is intertwined like tenacious vines in this "Southern Branches and Northern Lands". They were wives who made decisive decisions on the migration journey, widows who supported the family alone during the war, virtuous wives who pushed the family to move from farming to business, and also new women who were willing to study and join the rapid development. A jujube comb brought from Zaoqiang, a handwritten family tree written by Han Xiugu and supplemented by successive hostesses, and a winter solstice earth-sacrifice ceremony that has lasted for six hundred years have become a secret link that runs through the bloodline.
The novel uses a unique chapter-like narrative to delicately describe how they opened up wasteland and built houses in a strange land, integrated the customs of the north and the south, protected their homeland in troubled times, and chose to persevere in changes. Their stories are vivid footnotes outside of history textbooks, demonstrating the indelible wisdom, courage and resilience of women in "starting a family and establishing a career." This is not only a history of the family's roots, but also a profound ode to "hometown" and "inheritance" - when the roots are deeply rooted in the new soil, the flowers that bloom will always remember the northern wind.
