1975, Zhangjia Village, Mei County, eastern Guangdong. In the work-point book, there is always a half circle drawn behind Chen Yiqi's name - women work for six points a day, three points less than men. Production captain Zhang Debiao threw his notebook in front of everyone: "For a daughter-in-law from an overseas Chinese family, even six points is too much!" Her mother-in-law Zhang Xiulan took away her overseas remittances, and her sister-in-law Lin Ximei added chaff into her bowl. Chen Yiqi clutched the hoe, her nails digging into her palms. Until that day, she kicked a piece of mud-covered ceramic tile under the wall of the cowshed. The pupils shrank suddenly - in the pattern of fragments, the golden pupils saw three words: Ming Cheng Hua. She went to the scrapyard in the town overnight and "sold" it to an old man who knew the goods for five yuan. Three days later, the old man rode into the village overnight and gave her a wad of solidarity: "How many more are there? I'll take them all!" From then on, Chen Yiqi's hoe was dedicated to digging into the mud that others hated. The broken bowl in the corner of the ancestral hall, the inkstone used as a footrest for the pig pen, the stone carvings on the old landlord's grave... When Zhang Debiao was still punishing her by kneeling in the grain drying field for two points of work, she had already visited every black market in eastern Guangdong carrying ancient coins in a sack. When the spring breeze blew in 1978, she took out the 3,000 yuan she had saved and put it at the counter of the supply and marketing cooperative in the town. Neighbors laughed at her for "expatriate mother-in-law messing around." Only Chen Yiqi knew that the broken calligraphy and painting under the counter had been read by Jin Tong and was the original work of Zheng Banqiao. Until that spring, the commune secretary walked into Zhangjiacun, pointed at Chen Yiqi and asked: "I heard that you can make stones bloom?" She put down her hoe and smiled: "Secretary, it's not that stones bloom, it's time for some people's eyes to open."
