A Marriage Swap in the Mountain Village

This novel is a reimagining inspired by the stories of two families in the late 1980s, telling of the everyday troubles brought about by a marriage exchange. What is a marriage exchange? In an age of material scarcity, especially when transportation and communication were still underdeveloped, poor rural families struggled to find wives for their children. One common solution was a marriage exchange: since every family had several children, two families would each marry a daughter to the other, ensuring that both families' sons had wives. Their resulting in-law relationship was even closer than usual.