Wild Grass in Bloom

At twenty, she married to provide her older brother with a bride price.

At twenty-five, her husband threw her out, accusing her of being “unable to bear children.”

She had just twenty-one yuan to her name. She couldn’t go back to her family, and her in-laws wanted nothing to do with her.

She gritted her teeth and borrowed a little over 150 yuan to head south to Guangdong.

From a female worker in a ceramics factory, to a sales clerk at Humen Garment City, then to the queen of wholesale on Kanghua Road.

She had been cheated, swindled, robbed of her money, and burgled.

But every time she fell, she stood back up higher than before.

Thirty years later, she stood on the top floor of the shopping mall she had built, with more than a thousand franchise stores below.

Someone asked her the secret to her success.

She said, “I wasn’t lucky. I just had no way back.”