Lonely Vigil: Pingping, the Left-Behind Girl, Part Two

Tang Pingping was born in 1990, deep in the mountains of Qianxinan, Guizhou. At four, she was left behind, becoming the only girl in her village whose parents had been away working for years. For the next eighteen years, she struggled to grow up amid her grandmother's sharp tongue, her grandfather's silence, and the village's isolation. Her only comfort came from her younger siblings, who had also been left behind, and the medicinal herbs growing across the hills. In 2008, eighteen-year-old Pingping boarded a train bound for Yiwu, Zhejiang. At a wonton shop in Yongkang, she met Zhang Li, a chef eight years her senior. From being exploited by the shop owner and deceived by strangers to falling in love with Zhang Li, getting pregnant, and marrying him, the two began by selling rice noodles from a street stall in Jinhua. Over the years, they endured a miscarriage, failed business ventures, a gambling-addicted father-in-law, mounting debts, and the pandemic. In twenty-five years, they opened five shops and expanded four times, growing from a tiny 70-square-meter shop into a 300-square-meter restaurant. They went from renting to owning a home, and Pingping went from being mocked as a “Guizhou girl” to becoming a leading figure in the food service industry. This is one woman's story of breaking through: how a girl left behind in the mountains by her family and her times used her own hands and perseverance to put down roots, inch by inch, in a foreign land and build a home of her own, where she would never be left behind again.