Mom, Don't Throw Me Away. I'll Earn You White Flour When I Grow Up

[Period Setting] [1980s] [Rural Realism] [Everyday Family Life] [Growing Through Hardship] [Strong Female Lead] [Ensemble Cast] [No Golden Finger] [Women Supporting Women] [Not a Wish-Fulfillment Story] [Unloved Childhood]

Winter, 1986, the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month.

The day Bai Xiaoman was born, a blind fortune-teller sentenced her with a single remark: "This girl has a hard fate. She'll bring ruin to her father and her family."

Her father stuffed her into a bamboo basket in the middle of the night, intending to abandon her by the riverbank.

Three families were asked to take her in, and all three refused. A piglet fell and died at one home that very day; at another, the wife started bleeding that night. They all said the baby brought disaster.

In the end, she was taken in by Qin Guizhi, a widow everyone in the village avoided, a "jinx" who had lost two husbands.

The whole village waited to laugh at them: Could a disaster-bringing child and a jinx survive three winters together?

No one imagined it.

The girl everyone despised would trade her begging bowl for an account book.

The widow everyone blamed would turn her drafty cave dwelling into the village's first workshop.

She had no golden finger, had not been reborn, and could barely recognize a few characters. She believed in only one thing:

Other people may speak of your fate, but your life is in your own hands.

From the work-point ledgers of the 1980s, to the self-employed businesses of the 1990s, to the village-run factory of the new century...

This is a true-to-life story about a girl the whole village looked down on, who spent twenty years turning bitter days into sweet ones.

It's also an ensemble portrait of the lives of dozens of ordinary women in one village.

(A grand ensemble, with a story for everyone) (A slow-burn, realistic tale that gets richer the more you savor it) (Steady daily updates, dive in with confidence)