Traveling in the Wushan Mountains: Chronology of Female Workers from Qianling to the East China Sea

"When I was eighteen years old, I only knew 627 Chinese characters, but I had to travel across 1,800 kilometers to a place with sea in its name but never seen the sea." On the third day of the third lunar month in 1998, in the hinterland of Leigong Mountain in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, a girl named Li Xiuyun walked down the ninety-nine turns with a floral cloth bag on her back. Her destination is Duqiao Town, Linhai City, Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province - a strange place where "eyeglass lenses are piled up in mountains and banknotes are packed in sacks" in the words of fellow villagers. This is not a fairy tale. There was no prince, no miracle, just a long migration completed by a mountain girl with a fifth grade education in thirty years. From the Miao wooden house to the Zhejiang factory, from the female assembly line worker to the Linhai daughter-in-law, from the marriage siege to the return home alone, from disappointment to acceptance, from brokenness to reconstruction - this is the survival history written by a generation of women with their feet.