On the way to escape from famine, my father died of hunger and my mother died of illness. Nineteen-year-old Lin Yan walked alone to Luofeng Town on the southwest border and lived in a dilapidated shack on the river beach with air leakage from all sides. All he had left was a cracked rough jade stone and a blank rough paper account book.
The jade business in the town has been monopolized by the Zhao family for more than ten years - the Hetan material yard was occupied, retail craftsmen were squeezed, and outsiders had no place to stand. No one taught her her craft, so she squatted in the scrap pile and dug through it piece by piece; no one gave her materials, so she saved every penny from the leftovers from the Zhao family; no one looked down on her, so she recorded every account, every enemy, and every mistake she made in her notebook.
From washing materials and cutting blanks to polishing bracelets and carving patterns, from being squeezed out from setting up a street stall to having her self-built workshop smashed, from being exploited by second-rate dealers to opening up sales in provincial capitals, she has no golden fingers, no nobles falling from the sky, no system of falling from the sky, and no cheating of rebirth. What she relies on is her relentless study, her memory for re-examining pitfalls, her tenacity for running errands, her brain for accounting and calculation, and her intuition for seeing and recognizing people.
When the Zhao family destroyed her workshop, she rebuilt it; after sealing off her source of materials, she traveled across the mountains to Beishan, Ping'an Town, and Qingxi; when they sent people to threaten her, she collected evidence, including an old account book, a stack of IOUs, and a sandwich bracelet, and nailed the Zhao family's original sins of more than ten years to the provincial government's case files.
The Zhao family fell. She took the lead in establishing the Luofeng Town Jade Industry Mutual Aid Association, and formulated unified grading standards, pricing specifications, and quality inspection procedures, turning the border town that had been monopolized and squeezed into a well-known jade bracelet processing base.
