Chronicles/Country Counterattack
In the autumn of 1961, six-year-old Chen Wanjun clutched a pair of rusty scissors and cut wild chrysanthemums on a millstone.
She exchanged four pounds of wild chrysanthemums for one penny. She wanted to buy a new pencil case for her eldest brother, and even more, she wanted to give this home floating in the wind a beam of light in the mud.
The eldest brother locked the bookcase and went to the brick kiln to carry bricks for the sake of the family; the second brother put down his dignity and picked up rags for the sake of the family; and she, holding the pair of scissors, cut the wild chrysanthemums all winter, and also cut the livelihood of the whole family.
She thought that life would be like a wild chrysanthemum, one after another, and it would always bloom out of suffering.
Until the black smoke from the kiln disaster engulfed the sky; until they fled to an unfamiliar barren slope, and while digging a well, a hoe dug out something they shouldn't have dug out...
This is the story of three generations of the Chen family, about perseverance in suffering, about tenderness in fireworks, and about how to keep a secret and dig roots into the stone of destiny - endless life.
