The Medicine Country of the Nineties

1993, Lianqiao, Shaodong.

Li Xiangwan failed the college entrance exam by nine points. The night she returned to town, her father, Li Shouzhuo, stood just inside the threshold until dawn, the cuffs of his sleeves stained with two handfuls of red mountain clay. A month later, a guarantee debt of 38,000 yuan came crashing down. In front of the whole street, her father bent over and collapsed headfirst across his own threshold.

He had been the first person in the southern medicinal herb capital to slice white peony root. His slices had been so thin that a breath could send them flying. Now his hands were ruined, and someone was about to take down the sign above his shop.

Her eighteen-year-old sister picked up the mulberry-wood shoulder pole their father had carried for thirty years and set up a stall by the highway. The basket was kicked over, and the herb slices rolled into the dust. She knelt and picked them up one by one.

"Herbs aren't fragrant until they've passed through Lianqiao." But on this street, people believed in signs, not tears.

She had only two things to her name: the crescent knife her father had passed down and the hillside of daylilies her mother had planted.

From kneeling to pick up herbs, to sending her knife flying, to carrying it into her enemy's apothecary, Li Xiangwan would reclaim the Li family name, one slice at a time.