The Bright Moon Shines on the Long River

Chen Fanghua, a 48-year-old senior Chinese teacher at a key middle school in Yangcheng, unexpectedly binds to a villa dimension and learns that in seven days, her soul will travel to 1975. She decisively mortgages her property and spends every last bit of her savings on a frantic shopping spree, creating an invincible trump card all her own.

The entire detached villa, along with its courtyard, becomes a space: the three floors above ground have full utilities and tens of thousands of books, including past college entrance exam papers, all kinds of skill manuals, and electronic materials, making them ideal for daily living and quiet study. Time stands completely still in the two underground floors, where food, medicine, clothes, and tools stay fresh forever. They are stocked to the brim with enough supplies to last half a lifetime.

When the time comes, her soul travels into the body of Gu Mingyue, a 17-year-old girl from the capital. The original owner was the overlooked youngest daughter in her family. Her parents favored sons, and when she came down with a high fever, no one sought treatment for her. She died young, leaving behind a deeply dysfunctional family. Her father was weak and easily manipulated, her mother favored her youngest son, and her older sisters each had their own schemes. The sisters were scattered across the country, sent down to the countryside to fend for themselves.

To make a living, Gu Mingyue travels far away to a rural village in Heilongjiang Province to work as a sent-down youth. In the impoverished countryside, facing tedious farm work, complicated relationships among the educated youths, and the shifting warmth of human nature, she draws on her middle-aged experience to lie low and prepare for the exams in secret. When the college entrance exams are reinstated in 1977, she takes up her pen and breaks through, freeing herself from the shackles of her birth family and weathering the storms of the era. She grows step by step, until at last she hangs high like the bright moon, illuminating the long river of life that belongs to her.