A Letter from the Frozen Ground: No One Dares Claim It

In 1976, 21-year-old educated youth Lin Yanqiu is trapped in Huaishu Bay. She bears an old burn scar on her shoulder, while her father, Lin Shoucheng, has been branded a criminal over a warehouse fire and a case of stolen supplies. A remittance slip sent by a “dead man” leads her to discover that food rations, work points, disaster-relief cloth, job assignments, and her father's old case are all tied to the same web of connections. She doesn't rely on powerful patrons, seduction, or a stroke of luck to turn her fortunes around. Instead, she uses ledgers, receipts, witness statements, and public procedures to make every perpetrator pay for what they have done. Earthquakes, floods, the return of educated youth to the cities, and the 1977 college entrance exam follow one after another. She grows from an avenger into a journalist capable of establishing rules and helping more ordinary people make their voices heard. Life remains absurd enough to feel like a grim joke, but in the end she clears her father's name, gets into university, builds a career and finds love, and finally gets a reply to the letter no one dared accept.