When her son was still too young to start elementary school, Mai Sui divorced her husband after he cheated on her.
In the early twenty-first century, a rural woman who divorced while raising a child became the talk of the neighborhood and the subject of local gossip. Her young children, a pair of burdens to be dragged along, only made people look down on her more. Faced with rumors and rejection from relatives, each slight should have been another straw on the camel's back. But no one expected Mai Sui to burst with vitality amid the chaos and turmoil, and grow against all odds.
A tiny, 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. Since childhood, she had worked among wheat and flour. With nothing but her own two hands and feet, she fought with all her might to break free of the constraints of her past, moving forward one step at a time. She not only raised her children to adulthood, but also carried on an intangible cultural heritage and became a well-known local entrepreneur.
Though honored with many accolades, Mai Sui remained Mai Sui: a woman who had spent her whole life working with wheat and had never left her rural roots.
"An ordinary woman rarely gets to dance through life, and a woman born to hardship seldom has a stage of her own. But she danced to her own rhythm atop the ears of wheat, and lived life on her own terms."
