In her previous life, she helped feed tens of millions more people across the country. In this life, she was reborn as a sickly young woman in 1970.
Su Mai, the youngest doctoral supervisor at the Agricultural College, had the next forty years of agricultural technology in her head.
When she opened her eyes again, she had become the seventeen-year-old girl from Qingshui Brigade who had been scared to death by lightning. Frail and unable to lift even a bucket of water.
The county said this land could never yield four hundred jin per mu.
She improved the seeds, planting density, and fertilization, and raised the yield to eight hundred jin in a year.
The whole commune thought hearing a tractor start up was a sign their ancestors had blessed them.
She pinpointed the problem, and he took it apart and repaired it. A machine that had been broken down for three days was working in the fields again that very day.
She understood the land. He understood machines.
She brought the ideas; he handled the practical work.
One managed what grew in the fields; the other managed what harvested it.
Three years later, Qingshui Brigade became the province's first mechanized brigade. Yields topped a thousand jin per mu, and grain filled the storehouses up to the rafters.
When officials came to inspect the fields, they stood there speechless for a long time.
Later, the breeding program she led was adopted in more than a dozen provinces. The seeder he designed was put to work in a third of the counties across the country.
She became the youngest senior agronomist on the national agricultural front.
He became the youngest chief engineer at an agricultural machinery factory.
Years later, someone asked them who had made the other's success possible.
Looking at the experimental fields, she said, "He taught me that good technology needs good machines if it's going to be put to use."
He lowered his head and coughed twice. "She taught me that these hands of mine could do something besides what I was used to."
She was seventeen that year, and he was twenty-three.
She stood outside the crowd, wrapped in a padded coat, her hands tucked into her sleeves, and gave him a wink.
He remembered it for the rest of his life.
