Summer, 1983. Tianshui, Gansu. Fourteen-year-old Zhao Xiuping ranks eighth in the county on her high school entrance exam, but poverty threatens to keep her from continuing her education. She goes into the mountains alone to gather medicinal herbs. One root of Polygonatum after another pays for her three years of high school, and sets her on a different path: she places twelfth in the national chemistry competition and is admitted to China Pharmaceutical University to study natural medicinal chemistry. At university, she studies pharmaceuticals, art, and fashion design, combining all three skills. After graduation, she returns to her impoverished hometown, opens a clothing store, starts a garment factory, and establishes a traditional Chinese medicine company. She turns wild Polygonatum into standardized Chinese patent medicine and gradually lifts her neighbors out of poverty. Along the way, some people give her a helping hand, while others trip her up. But the Polygonatum she dug from a crack in a cliff at fourteen has always put down roots in her life, growing deeper inch by inch.
