You think you know Granny Turtle. The eccentric old woman who hoards coins, eats moldy buns, and guards her piggy bank like her life depends on it. But inside that piggy bank is a burden she has carried for almost a century, and her story spans three eras of Chinese history.
[spoiler]Before she turned fifteen, her parents sold her. In the dying days of the Tang Dynasty, starvation and war were constant. Right before she left, her mother pressed two copper coins into her palm. Granny Turtle remembered the heat of tears falling onto her hand for the rest of her life. It was the last time she saw her parents. She made a vow: if she ever had children, she would never leave their side.
Those two Tang coins were part of a monetary revolution, round shapes representing heaven, square holes representing earth, value backed by authority rather than metal weight. To Granny Turtle, though, they were simply scars from childhood.
When the Tang collapsed, a successor regime called Later Tang issued new coins. Granny Turtle worked for years, saved enough to buy a home, then lost everything when wars and taxes destroyed the economy. She moved into the Forsaken Quarter. Her second set of coins marked the end of stability.
Then came the third coins. Her son went to war at Zhongdu Bridge and never returned. She received a bag of coins from the Later Jin Dynasty, the government founded by the traitor who sold Yanyun to the Khitans. These coins barely functioned as real money. Every new dynasty rushed to mint currency as a flag of legitimacy, stamping "heavenly mandate" on coins that bought less and less.
Her husband wanted to spend the worthless coins immediately. She refused. Even worthless coins were better than nothing when you had a daughter to protect. The Khitans invaded and took everything else, but she would rather die than surrender coins paid for her son's life. Her husband died protecting the family. Then the Shimmer flooded Kaifeng with iron coins, and inflation spiraled. Still she worked, dawn to dusk, for money that evaporated in value.
The final blow came during a regime change. Soldiers raided Kaifeng. Her daughter Ying Ying refused to surrender the coins received for her brother's death. She was killed for it.
Granny Turtle's mind froze in the past, retreating to a time when her children still lived. That was when she found the Ember of East, beaten unconscious, looking just like Ying Ying once had. Two broken people held each other up. She hoards money because in her mind she still has a child to protect. She sells turtles while barely able to stand because her promise never expired.
When she recognizes the Tuya coins in the main story, everything crashes back. The first coin was her childhood. The second was her home. The third was the lives of her son, husband, and daughter. She remembers that the Ember of East is not Ying Ying. But she chooses to accept her as family. When she exchanges those coins, she is letting go of nearly a century of grief and taking a leap of faith in the future.
In a recent CN event, a brief text reveals that Granny Turtle now thinks of the protagonist as her youngest child. She is saving less money because she wants to buy you pancakes when you come home.[/spoiler]
*Based on analysis by [WWM Girl (Goose Girl Stories)](https://www.youtube.com/@GooseGirlStories).*
