Rocks and Weeds

In the cold winter of 1982, Shi Jianjun was born on a snowy night in the northern plains. His childhood was steeped in the most real hardships in rural China: stealing corn when hungry, earth houses collapsing in floods, and his grandfather's instructions to "study hard" before he coughed up blood and died. From a village primary school to a town middle school, Shi Jianjun stepped into the cruel world of urban and rural divisions with the tuition fees raised by his family. The sorting in the canteen, the spiritual refuge in the library, the seventeen dark days and nights deep in the coal mine - every setback left a deep mark on his life. The dream of "making my father no longer bow his head to borrow money" in his high school entrance examination essay was exchanged for an admission notice from the County No. 1 Middle School, and also for his father's heavy price of pledging the homestead. China in the 1990s was undergoing drastic changes. Shi Jianjun witnessed the huge gap in educational resources in County No. 1 Middle School, and struggled with the sea of ​​questions and the sophistication of the world in the college entrance examination factory. When he finally squeezed across the single-plank bridge and thought he had reached the other side, he found that university was just another battlefield: student loans, the urban-rural love gap, the collapse of the graduation allocation system... This is not the story of one person, but the epitome of a generation. From the planned economy to the market economy, from rural China to the mobile era, Shi Jianjun grew like weeds in the cracks of the rocks, and persisted in the waves like a stubborn stone. When he established himself in the city and took his parents out of the countryside, his hometown had become a distant place that he could not return to. "Stubborn Stones and Wild Grasses" depicts the social changes in China over the past forty years with a cold brushstrokes, looking for the glimmer of humanity in the reality of "cannibalism". This is a story about dignity, suffering and unyielding, dedicated to all those who look up at the stars in the mud - the weeds will not burn away, but the stubborn rocks will eventually become peaks.