To be born a girl in wartime is to learn, from the very first moment, that you're the "sin" your family disowns the extra mouth left behind to face annihilation. In 1948, as the Communist forces advance across China, a family flees their home in rural Shandong, taking their sons and daughters-in-law with them but abandoning their teenage daughter, her mother, and her younger sisters, deemed expendable.
Out of this devastating betrayal, defiance erupts: the sisters decide to forge their own fate. Before travel permits, they set off on an epic, thousand-mile escape from war-torn rural Shandong to the shores of Taiwan, enduring hunger and destruction along the way.
