The Hard Life of Chun Cao

#1980s #Rural Realism #Family Life #Loveless Childhood #Coming of Age #Not a Power Fantasy

The story begins in the winter of 1986.

Poor Chuncao was unwanted even before she was born. Plans to give her away ran into one complication after another.

Seventeen days after her birth, her adoptive father took her home.

The good days she spent in his household lasted only a year.

The following year, he married her adoptive mother. When the woman suffered a miscarriage, Chuncao became the culprit in her eyes.

Six years later, her adoptive mother died, and her father went on to marry three stepmothers for Chuncao.

Her various stepmothers tormented and bullied the unlucky girl until she gradually became a quiet, withdrawn lamb.

Her childhood was a silent and painful process of growing up.

As an adult, Chuncao, scarred by her unhappy childhood, was desperate to escape her suffocating home and foolishly hoped to find love in a man.

Instead, she learned her lesson again and again, each time in the most brutal way...

Chuncao dreamed she was standing among a crowd of men, every one of them gaping at her with a cavernous maw, eager to devour her life.

So she gritted her teeth and set out to make her own way in the world...