This is a story rooted deep in the mountains of northwestern Guizhou. The time extends from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and the stage is set among the slopes and ridges of Zhijin County. There are no plains and fertile fields here, only the continuous peaks and mountains are like solidified giant waves, trapping each village in the folds; there is no rushing river, only the Sancha River passing through the gorge, with the color of yellow mud, washing away the stones and people's hearts on both sides year after year.
The people in the story are ordinary farmers, craftsmen, rural teachers, and hawkers in Zhijin County... Their lives are like the corn fields on the hillside. They plant in spring and harvest in autumn. They cannot live without the soil or the sky. When the weather is good, you can look forward to having plenty of food and warmth; in bad times, you have to tighten your belt. They would blush over the boundaries of the land, and would silently hand over a bowl of corn rice when someone's family was in trouble. Love here is not just before flowers and under the moon, but more like a helping hand when fetching water and chopping firewood, and the warmth of sharing a bed of torn cotton wool on a cold night. Struggle is not just rhetoric, it is the backbone that bends like a bow when carrying dung uphill, and the eye of a needle to mend clothes for children under the oil lamp.
Their world is so small that they have never walked out of the mountain valley of the county town in their lives; their world is so big that it contains the hope for better days, the ties of family and friendship, and the ripples in everyone's heart when the wheel of the times rolls over the village. This is not an earth-shattering legend, it is just a group of ordinary people writing their own years on an ordinary land with sweat and tears.
