Poor Zhāodi

[Rural Daily Life]+ [Not a Wish-Fulfillment Novel]+ [Family Feuds]+ [Documentary Fiction]+ [Changing Times]+ [A Woman’s Tragic Ballad] Her name was Zhaodi, and she was born into a poor farming family in the 1970s. Her name foretold her fate: she would spend her life as her family’s human blood bank. During the famine, she swallowed rough tree bark and saved her meager rations for her younger brother. In a blizzard, her own father sold her to a disabled old man in a neighboring village for a hefty bride price, just to pay for her brother’s schooling. She endured one pitch-black night after another in a black-brick kiln. When beaten, she curled up and covered her head, like a silent old ox, saving every cent to build her brother a new house. Later, her husband died, and the times changed. She cleared wasteland, farmed the land, and raised several children, thinking she had finally made it through. But the children she had raised on her blood and tears learned from their clan elders. Their eyes filled with calculation as they bared their bloodsucking fangs at her… There are no golden fingers and no rebirth or comeback, only thirty years in the life of a woman born to suffer, growing fiercely like wild grass. This is Zhaodi’s life, and the silent protest of countless rural women of that era.