Sell It, Girl!

Su Wanqing, an ordinary girl from the mountains of Southwest China, barely made the cutoff for a second-tier university in the provincial capital. The wheels on the suitcase she bought on Pinduoduo jammed outside the dorm, she couldn’t even make a PowerPoint for her first e-commerce class, and she had to budget her living expenses down to every meal. She was the most unremarkable student on campus. When her family called to say their kiwifruit still wouldn’t sell, she tried filming a short video for the school fruit shop and earned 50 yuan. Twelve people watched her first livestream, and half dropped off within two minutes. She practiced her sales pitch in front of a mirror, used her dorm bed curtain as a backdrop, and lit herself with a 39-yuan ring light. Later, she moved her livestream back to the orchard in Qingxi Village, with kiwifruit trellises covering the mountains behind her and Aunt Wang, a left-behind woman who had learned to livestream, by her side. From “Am I not good enough?” to “So I can do this too,” she went from standing alone to helping more than fifty local families. The girl who once dragged around a suitcase with a broken wheel finally stood beneath the spotlight beyond the mountains. “Go sell things online, girl.” Those were the words she said to herself, and to every girl like her.