In 1990, Tang Pingping was born deep in the mountains of southwest Guizhou. She was "left behind" at the age of four and became the only girl in the village whose parents had been working outside for many years. For the next eighteen years, she struggled to grow up amid her grandmother's meanness, her grandfather's silence, and the isolation of the village. The only warmth came from her younger siblings who were also left behind and the herbs that filled the mountains and plains.
In 2008, 18-year-old Pingping got on a train bound for Yiwu, Zhejiang. At a wonton shop in Yongkang, she met Zhang Li, a chef who was eight years older than her. From being squeezed by the wonton shop owner and deceived by passers-by, to falling in love with, getting pregnant, and getting married to Zhang Li, the two started selling rice noodles at a street stall in Jinhua. They went through miscarriage, business failure, father-in-law's addiction to gambling, high debts, and the impact of the epidemic... In the past 25 years, they opened five stores and expanded four times, from a 70-square-meter shop to a 300-square-meter restaurant. From renting to buying a house, from being ridiculed as "Guizhou girls" to becoming leaders in the catering industry.
This is a personal "breakout history": how a girl who was "left behind" in the mountains by her time and family used her hands and resilience to take root in the foreign soil inch by inch and build her own home that would no longer be "left behind".
