In 1918, a girl with flecks of light embedded in her palm was born in a grand home in the south. At four, she bit through the white cloth binding her feet. At six, she pressed herself against a window to eavesdrop on lessons at the private school. Later, she placed first in her county and became the only woman in her university physics department, before going on to a top laboratory in Pennsylvania, America. In 1949, she gave up everything and returned to her homeland. In a dilapidated factory freezing in subzero temperatures, she assembled a single-crystal furnace from scrap parts and pulled China’s first silicon single crystal. From foot-binding cloth to the stars and the sea, she spent her life proving that no one else gets to define the limits of what a person can achieve.
