Youth Takes Root in the Furrows

Winter, 1974. Young intellectual Lin Yuan is dumped in the saline wastelands of Hebei Brigade, Heyuan Commune. The villagers have nothing but a bowl of bitter well water and half a hard grain cake, and village children starve to death before their eyes. Using what he knows about agriculture, he secretly modifies a five-fen plot of private land and grows green vegetables in the dead of winter, stunning the entire brigade. He gambles his life on five mu of barren land. One night, in the cowshed, he meets a true master: Zhou Yanzhi, a seed-breeding expert sent down to the countryside. Political pressure, natural disasters, and man-made calamities close in at every turn, but he is determined to grow an entire spring on this frozen soil. When the tide of people returning to the cities sweeps through, someone tears up his admission letter on the field ridge and chooses instead to be a stalk of wheat, rooted in the earth.