The Fragrance of Broad Bean Blossoms and Fresh Green Shoots

Following in the footsteps of its two protagonists, this book tells the moving story of their love, family bonds, and friendships over more than eighty years, from the mid-1920s to the early twenty-first century.

Zhou Mingsen was born into a Hakka family. Following local custom, his mother brought Lianzi home to raise, and the two grew up side by side, depending on each other. When he was in his teens, his wise mother sent him to school. To pay for Zhou Mingsen's education, Lianzi worked while caring for her mother, who had been paralyzed by a stroke. With her small, slender frame, she also took on strenuous farm work normally done by men, plowing, harrowing, and operating the roller...

In early 1945, during winter break, on the day they were to be married, Japanese soldiers trampled into their peaceful home. While fleeing, his mother froze to death in a mountain hollow amid the bitter wind. This deep-seated hatred shook him to the core. Amid his profound grief, he came to understand what a nation's strength or weakness meant for ordinary people.

The heroine is a hardworking, kind, beautiful, and virtuous Hakka countrywoman. She and her husband were childhood sweethearts, innocent and inseparable. She deeply loved and admired her husband. After his death, she was consumed by grief and even tried several times to join him. But she honored his final wishes, turning her deep love for him into a pillar of strength. With the warmth of friendship, she eventually overcame her sorrow, and with a perseverance few could imagine, worked tirelessly to raise their six daughters on her own. Thus unfolded a bleak, poignant, tender, and heartrending love story.