With her home reduced to bare walls and her parents hounded by debt collectors, Su Nian had just been reborn in the 1990s when she was told to marry a fool to pay off the family’s debts.
In her despair, she spotted a chipped, coarse porcelain bowl on the table. Suddenly, a faint, desperate sob rang out in her mind: “Don’t throw me away! There’s a land deed hidden inside me!”
Su Nian smashed the bowl without hesitation. Using the land deed, she earned her first fortune and began an incredible journey of turning her life around.
Other people appraised antiques with their eyes. Su Nian did it by “listening.”
A Tang sancai horse shattered into eight pieces wailed, “Please put me back together! My head is in that mud pit over there!”
A dusty bronze cauldron protested, “I’m not a fake! There’s a secret imperial inscription underneath me!”
When the capital’s big shots mocked her as a country girl, Su Nian quietly presented a rare official-kiln porcelain piece, restored to its former glory, and made them eat their words.
But Qin Yu, the aloof, abstinent heir to a powerful capital family who had suffered from chronic illness for years, cornered her by the restoration table. His voice was husky. “Master Su, you can repair anything in this world. I wonder if you can mend my heart, broken into a thousand pieces for you?”
