At eighteen, Chen Sui was traded to the Li family for a few bags of cornmeal and became a farmer's wife who couldn't read a single character.
Her husband, Li Jianguo, was a crude, illiterate man who regularly beat and kicked her, calling her a useless waste of food.
She thought she would rot in that swamp for the rest of her life, until the man in the white shirt appeared, his collar always buttoned to the top.
Using a twig, he carefully taught her to write the character for "person" in the stove ashes.
"Just keep practicing," he said.
From then on, she learned to read as if possessed. She secretly wrote his name in the ashes, then hurriedly wiped it away whenever she heard footsteps.
She thought that as long as she kept the characters in her mind, no one could take them from her.
But later, her husband discovered everything. In a fit of rage, he scalded her hands with boiling water and locked her in the woodshed.
On the day of his wedding, she hid behind the stove, holding back her tears as she wrote twenty wedding invitations for him with her own hands.
Ink dripped onto the red paper. Heartbroken, she accidentally wrote "livestock feed" instead of "wedding candy."
The whole village laughed at her for being too useless to write properly. But no one knew it was her most desperate confession.
