The Bride Price

Bride Price tells the story of the difficulties young people born in the 1990s face when seeking marriage in the countryside. Sky-high bride prices and demands for a perfect match have left many rural young people bewildered by marriage. “Three jin, three liang, and three; two moving, two staying put” is a saying widely repeated in the countryside. Some families exhaust the savings of several generations and still can't afford to get one child married.

Li Tianci comes of age at just this time, and his marriage becomes the family's top priority. He's an average student with a second-rate bachelor's degree and no particular skills. By the time he graduates, he's unemployed. Fortunately, his parents can still support him and scrape together the required bride price. But his looks are another matter. As his father puts it, “The bride price isn't a problem, and neither is a car or a house.” Yet none of the girls he meets has ever asked for those things. He's been on enough blind dates to fill a whole battalion, or at least a reinforced company, but not a single girl has taken a liking to him.

He meets a girl online and falls in love with her, even though their relationship exists only in the virtual world. He treasures it and spends all day immersed in it. But what he never expected was that the girl would turn out to be his neighbor, his cousin's wife. Not wanting their online relationship to come to light, she introduces her cousin Liu Yimo to Li Tianci. Thus begins a winding and difficult love story.