Li Xiu’e died in the winter when she was sixty-seven.
She had spent thirty years caring for her parents-in-law, endured twenty years of beatings from her husband, and couldn’t rely on a single one of her three children.
As she lay dying in a hospital corridor, there wasn’t even anyone beside her to bring her a cup of hot water.
When she opened her eyes again, she was back in 1983, at the moment she was about to wed.
She lifted her red bridal veil and smiled in front of the whole village.
“Zhang Baoqiang, pay off your own gambling debts. I’m not marrying you.”
Her stepmother called her unfilial, her future mother-in-law said she had no regard for a woman’s virtue, and the whole village waited to laugh at her.
But Li Xiu’e refused to believe her fate was set.
She set up a stall, opened a shop, and started a factory, building a thriving life with her own two hands. Whoever bullied her got twice as much back.
What she hadn’t expected was
that poorest man in the village, with a scar on his face and hardly a word to say,
would quietly follow behind her and cherish her like a treasure.
