In the early 1960s, Wang Qiang was born to a farming family in the Yimeng Mountains. Because his family was poor, he dropped out in second grade. Stubborn and strong from a young age, he never lost a fight against the village children. At sixteen, he and Pan Di, a thirteen-year-old girl from the same village, each took twenty yuan from their families and eloped to Shanghai. Strangers in a strange city, they soon learned how harsh life could be. By sixteen, they were parents, scraping by as laborers at the Shanghai docks. In the 1980s, their daughter Lianlian grew up and caught the eye of Old Master Du, a respected local figure in Shanghai. She married Du Changliang, the younger son of the Du family, and the Wang family’s lives were completely transformed. Starting out as dock laborers, they worked their way up to become small business owners in Shanghai. In the end, they used the experience and resources they had accumulated to give back to their hometown, living a life they never would have dared to imagine back then.
It truly reflects the rural life of rural cowherd children and truly reproduces the social background at that time.