For Liu Yao's grandfather, a better life meant having enough to eat, the chance to study and a stable job. Growing up generations later, Liu says she had the security to have “more ambition.”

That ambition took her from Xingguo County in east China's Jiangxi Province to Britain, where she studied modern agricultural management. She eventually chose to return home, bringing what she had learned about management and marketing back to the orange groves. Today, her cooperative uses intelligent fruit-sorting equipment and e-commerce, including livestreaming, to sell its produce. In 2025, the cooperative processed and sold more than 5 million kilograms of navel oranges and helped more than 2,000 local people increase their incomes.

Liu is also a fourth-generation descendant of a Red Army soldier. In Xingguo County, where tens of thousands joined the army or fought during the revolutionary years, stories of leaving home reach back generations.

From her grandfather's hopes for a better life to her own journey away and back, Liu's story asks a quieter question: What if going back is also a way of moving forward?