The Chinaberry Tree Never Blooms for Spring

Orphaned by the deaths of her father and mother on the same day at the age of eight, Liu Lianzi picks up a bowl of thin porridge that had cost her mother her life. In the ancestral hall, she holds a kitchen knife to her own neck to protect the younger siblings sobbing behind her. For ten years, she endures hardship, giving her youth and strength to hold the family together, only to push her younger sister Mianhua into the hell of an exchange marriage with her own hands. Mianhua bites her hand and says, "You owe me for the rest of my life." Her younger brother drives her out with a broom so he can marry his bride. When she helps an animal give birth in the cowshed, people call her cruel and say she brings bad luck to husbands...

Beneath the bitter chinaberry tree, the woman begins to write her own rules for survival in blood and with her life. This is not a domestic tale of sisters turning against each other, but a blood pact and a rebirth forged in desperation by two women exploited both by their era and by their own family.

Editor's Recommendation: If To Live explores the endurance of suffering, Bitter Chinaberry Chronicles lays bare its fangs, and how it is first fed to you by your own family. With the force of an iron plow, the narrative carves an epic of two women into the yellow earth with blood and tears. When an older sister marries off her younger sister to secure a match for her brother, and the younger sister jumps into a pit to save her older sister, what we see is no melodrama, but an era devouring women's flesh and blood with ruthless precision. Lianzi, hard and sharp as bitter chinaberry; Mianhua, resilient and unyielding as cotton. In the grip of fate, they forge a fierce and magnificent act of "filicide" and self-rescue. Read it to give voice to the voiceless, and make the unrecorded struggle to survive ring out like thunder.