The Happy Little Watershed

“You’re both college students. Look at Maomao next door. She’s got a job in the county seat and a boyfriend, the son of a deputy bureau chief. And then there’s you. You came back to work in the village, and people are laughing their heads off. You’ve brought shame on the whole family.”

“You’re such a good-for-nothing! Why can’t you amount to anything?”

The young village secretary was berated by her parents, and that was bad enough. Then her uncle piled on: “Yu Fangfei, when other people become village secretaries, all their relatives benefit. But when you became village secretary, you turned your back on your own family! Are you even human?”

The villagers all said, “Yu Fangfei has a whole belly full of flowers that will never bloom.”

But Yu Fangfei’s flowers really did bloom!

Happiness Village was a nationally designated poor village. But when Yu Fangfei, a fearless young upstart, came along, the whole village turned its fortunes around!

In the revitalization of local industries, there was the winding entrepreneurial journey of Zhao Yuhuan, the women’s director, who grew organic millet, and Yu Cheng, whose rocky love life didn’t stop him from founding a hemp cooperative that grew into a major business. The farmers began developing distinctive local industries and expanding their paths to prosperity. In cultural revitalization, Yu Fangfei worked to advance both material and spiritual development, promoting changes to outdated customs. She tackled the problem of chair-shaped graves scattered across the hills, as well as the extravagant weddings and funerals and other widespread bad habits. In ecological revitalization, Yu Fangfei stopped villagers from excavating ancient fossils, established a paleontology museum, and created a tourist route through the Happiness River Valley...