On the day when the wedding invitation was exchanged, Zhang Cuilan lifted her hijab and saw not Li Dazhuang as promised, but Zhao Dahe, a strange man from Liujiagou.
The whole town watched the joke. Matchmaker Liu ran away overnight, the bride price was swallowed up, and the wedding invitation was exchanged - this wrong marriage was a conspiracy from beginning to end. But Zhao Dahe stood in the noisy courtyard and only asked her: "Are you willing to come with me?"
She nodded.
After marrying into Liujiagou, Zhang Cuilan discovered that the title deeds of the wasteland behind her husband's house had been changed, the east slope, the fattest part of the village, was being secretly targeted, and the Guangyuan Trading Company in the county town was collecting land one by one, controlling planting, and cutting off sales. And the seemingly dull husband Zhao Dahe had already explored the roads one by one out of sight of her.
Starting from a pack of stolen pepper seeds, she cultivated seedlings, plowed wasteland slopes, mixed fertilizers and improved soil, wrote a quality control manual, and signed the signature of the whole village - turning a gravel slope into a livelihood for the entire village. Chen Guangyuan, the owner of Guangyuan Commercial Bank, tried every means: monopolizing seed sources, poaching farmers, imposing quotas, driving boundary stakes in the middle of the night, and digging up land deeds from twenty years ago to ruin things. But Zhang Cuilan blocked it every time, not by brute force, but by the things that actually grew in her hands.
This year, the Chaotian peppers in Liujiagou turned red all over the slope. The wrong wedding card hangs on the stove. The edges of the paper are wrinkled and the ink is dark, but the days are getting brighter and brighter.
This is a story about a wrong marriage, a wasteland, chili peppers and a group of people who refuse to accept their fate.
