1988: Starting with Selling Silkworm Cocoons

Chen Yuan is reborn in 1988. That year, the price of silk skyrockets both at home and abroad, driving up the price of cocoons, the raw material used to make silk. Faced with his father’s bad leg, his mother working day and night, his second younger sister about to drop out of school, and his five-year-old youngest sister, he looks at their bare-walled home, where the wind whistles through cracks everywhere. He says only, “The timid starve, while the bold feast!” Then he sets out in the dead of night. He starts by reselling cocoons, then makes clothes, opens factories, and builds the nation’s number-one village…