None of Them Want Me

The day Chun Zhi was driven out by her husband's family, she was nineteen, heavily pregnant, and penniless. Her own family was behind one door, her in-laws behind her, and in all the wide world there was not an inch of space where she could belong. An elderly widower at the end of the village took her in. She knelt before his dilapidated mud-brick house and bowed her head three times, then rolled up her sleeves and headed for the barren hillside behind the village, a place no one wanted. It was strewn with rocks and overgrown with weeds, and everyone in the village laughed at her for being foolish. A few years later, the barren mountain had become a series of terraced fields, and her mountain-goods shop had opened in town. She led a group of women crushed by fate, growing camellias, pressing tea oil, and building workshops. They had all once been abandoned by others. Now they had become their own support.