In the late 1970s, in Yuanshang Village on the Loess Plateau, two brothers, Zhao Tieliang and Zhao Tiezhu, struggled to survive in barren days.
The elder brother Zhao Tieliang clung to his hometown, facing the criticism from his neighbors and the pressure of life, secretly burning bricks and subscribing land to grow fruits, trying to find a way to survive in the wave of joint production contracting.
His younger brother Zhao Tiezhu bid farewell to the cave dwelling and crawled into the mine shaft of the state-owned coal mine. He refused to put down his textbooks despite heavy work, and worked his way up from temporary work to the cadre establishment step by step.
The debts when the family was separated, the difficulties from relatives, the fear of tightening and loosening policies, and the love choice between the cave dwelling and the tube house came one after another. Behind the birth of a "household worth ten thousand yuan" and the transformation of a "city man" is the mutual support and bonding between the two brothers in the torrent of the times.
There are no noble people falling from the sky, only ordinary people who grit their teeth. The growth rings on this piece of yellow land are engraved with their lives of unwillingness to be mediocre.
