The Woman on the Wheat Stalk

Mai Sui divorced her husband after he cheated on her, before their son had even started primary school.

In the early twenty-first century, a rural woman divorcing with children in tow became the talk of the neighborhood and a source of amusement for the locals. And young children were nothing but dead weight, dragging her down and inviting scorn. The gossip and rejection from relatives should have been one straw after another, enough to break anyone’s back. But no one expected Mai Sui to find a fierce vitality amid all the chaos and turmoil, rising against the odds.

A shabby noodle shop on the outskirts of Yingzhou became the next stop in Mai Sui’s life. Riding the wave of the country’s rapid development, a woman raised on the banks of the Huai River began to change. She had spent her childhood tending to wheat and flour, but with nothing more than her own hands and feet, she fought with all her might to break free from the constraints of her past and took one steady step after another. She not only raised her two children to adulthood, but also carried on an intangible cultural heritage and became a renowned local entrepreneur.

Though showered with honors, Mai Sui was always still Mai Sui, a woman who spent her life working with wheat and never strayed far from her roots.

“Ordinary women rarely get to dance through life, and women born to hardship seldom have a stage of their own. But she danced to her own rhythm atop the wheat, and made a life of her own.”