Scissors and Candy

Period drama / rural rags-to-riches story

In the autumn of 1961, six-year-old Chen Wanjun clutched a rusty pair of scissors as she snipped wild chrysanthemums on a millstone.

Four jin of chrysanthemums earned one fen. She wanted to buy her big brother a new pencil case, and, even more, to cut a ray of light from the dirt for this family adrift in the wind.

For the family, her big brother locked away his books and went to haul bricks at the kiln. Her second brother swallowed his pride and went scavenging. And she, scissors in hand, spent an entire winter cutting wild chrysanthemums, while also carving out a way for the whole family to survive.

She thought life would be like the chrysanthemums: season after season, flowers would always bloom from hardship.

Until the black smoke from the kiln disaster swallowed the daylight. Until they fled to an unfamiliar barren slope, where, while digging a well, one swing of a hoe unearthed something that should never have been found…

This is the story of three generations of the Chen family: of perseverance through hardship, of warmth amid everyday life, and of how they put down roots in the stone of fate, generation after generation, to protect a secret.