The Five-Year-Old Lucky Charm: She Carries Her Whole Family by Collecting Trash

The Gu Group is on the verge of collapse. Its head, Gu Chengyan, has been unconscious for three years, and his wife, Shen Zhiwei, is holding the crisis at bay alone.

An old transfer that did not add up led her to Qingle Temple on the outskirts of the city. Their biological daughter, Manman, whom her husband had secretly sent there to be raised before his accident, was already five years old.

The little girl was small and quiet. She carried a woven plastic sack and picked things up wherever she went.

No one paid the child any attention, until she fished half of a yellowed old prescription out of a trash can.

Gu Chengyan’s attending physician turned pale after reading it. Several of the herbs in the prescription pointed straight to the cause of the illness that had kept him bedridden for three years, a condition even the hospital had been unable to diagnose.

Only then did Shen Zhiwei realize that every piece of “trash” her daughter brought home was quietly pointing this family toward a way to survive.