The Locust Flowers Never Fall

"The Sophora Flowers Never Fall" is a family epic written with suffering and tenacity. On a rainy night in 1930, under a stone bridge in northern Anhui, a baby girl who was scolded as a "loser" was wrapped in blue calico and abandoned in a bamboo basket. Her adoptive parents, Li Laoshuan and his wife, used body temperature to revive her and named her "Xiuyun". However, the short sweet years ended due to illness - her adoptive parents coughed up blood and died one after another. Xiuyun became an orphan, surviving alone in the cold eyes and hunger. She married blacksmith Chen Tiezhu to "no longer be alone", and since then she has stepped into deeper mud. She gave birth to six children, but watched helplessly as her second daughter was drowned in the toilet by the midwife, and her second son froze to death while picking up cinders in the snow. Her husband was suffering from tuberculosis. She was coughing up blood and pulling up a heavy cart. The hemp rope was cut into the old injury on her shoulder, causing the flesh and blood to be blurred. She left every mouthful of thick porridge to her children, and drank rice soup that could see people's faces; she sewed the last twenty yuan into her son's cotton-padded jacket, and secretly wiped the blood she coughed up into the soil. Migration, famine, serious illness, death... Forty-seven years, the pain was as deep as my waist. She was like grass in the crevices of rocks, braving the wind and frost and lifting the five children ashore one by one. Before she died, she passed the medicine box to her third son and stuffed the blue calico bellyband into her youngest daughter: "These are my mother's thoughts... It's like I'm always by your side." On the Qingming Festival in 2008, the children reunited by the Yangtze River. In front of Zhou Yu's tomb, the locust flowers were like snow, and they whispered: "Mom, our family is still together, and the branches are luxuriant." Wherever the wind passed, a hundred years of loneliness turned into the fragrance of thousands of flowers - it turned out that what a woman watered with her blood and tears was not the tomb, but the endless spring.